A Cross-Cultural Study of Mask-Wearing During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Comparing China, Japan and the USA

Abstract

During the Covid-19 epidemic, Japanese and Chinese have overwhelmingly tended to wear face masks, while Americans have not.  Why?  In this paper, based on ethnographic interviews with members of these three societies as well as examination of mass media and scholarly reports, I provide a preliminary interpretation of this question.

       I first consider social psychologists’ large-scale analyses of collectivism versus individualism; China and Japan are both considered to be collectivistic societies, whereas the United States is considered to be individualistic. I also consider ethnic belonging to one’s nation in China and Japan, as opposed to civic belonging to one’s nation in the United States. These explications have value in understanding Covid-19 policies but seem of limited use in explaining mask-wearing. For such understanding, I turn to ethnographic interviews—some twenty in each society—as well as participant-observation in public sites.

       My findings are these: While in Japan social pressure is paramount in leading to mask wearing, with the state mostly absent, in China state pressure is paramount, with social pressure largely absent.  In the United States, with social pressure absent beyond one’s sub-group and state pressure hotly contested, mask-wearing becomes a matter of politically-based individual choice.  In these three societies, there have thus been different axes as to why mask-wearing is accepted or contested.  This research is of too small a scale to fully explicate these factors; but it does show how anthropological analysis is essential in combining with the findings of other disciplines such as social psychology to arrive at a fuller understanding of contemporary social phenomena.