I didn’t read every word of it but got the sense there were political and/or Japanese cultural sensitivities why he didn’t initially feel comfortable with a full public, attributed release.
At the same time, yeah, it seems very plausible that a white guy in Japan announcing the Japanese pandemic response is run by fools would face blowback for it.
Haha, yeah pretty much that. And any blowback may also have been directed at his employer, Stripe. So there was certainly cause for caution.
That said, I don't think recognizing in late March that this virus spreads faster and is harder to control than previous similar ones was much of a leap of insight, and the article does seem a little too self-congratulatory over that.
Having that realization back in January is evidence of foresight, but late March not so much. But maybe the situation was different in Japan and merits it, dunno.
If this had been obvious to the Japanese authorities in late March they would have declared a nationwide state of emergency in late March, not late April. They would have issued stay at home orders for almost everyone 25 days ago, not five days ago. Being right when the government is wrong, it being wrong will cost lives and trying to get them to save those lives is not trivial.
The doubling time of this virus is well under ten days. If lockdown had begun on the date this memo was published there would be under a quarter as many cases as there are now.
He made it amply clear to me that it wasn't much of a leap of insight, and the point of his original essay was to create proof that he knew that at the time.
The fact that taking the action that he did resulted in a group of people who put together a compelling enough argument with good enough connections to get the New York Times to write about it DOES seem like it is worthwhile.
As it turned out, having the New York Times asking whether the emperor had clothes caused lots of people in Japan to ask the right question which in turn caused the government to switch courses. The fact that this happened again underscores the point that, on publicly available data at that time, it didn't take an amazing leap of insight to understand that the Japanese story didn't add up.
>The fact that this happened again
What do you mean by "again" in this sentence? What was the first time?
The point being that this was foreseeable at the time. Which was indicated the first time when he said that he assumed that the authorities in charge with access to more data than he had already had come to same conclusions that he did.
I left Japan in early March, by personal anecdote masks seemed pretty ubiquitious (and all public facing employees were wearing them), hotels were screening guest temperatures, warning signs everywhere, etc.. Time will tell, but I still think I'd have been better of staying there than returning to the US.
Well it was pointing out that the current plan was B.S. and had already failed, and that the testing plan in place resisted falsification by preventing testing of unconnected / asymptomatic people. no biggie.
The point of the memo was to gather and surface disparate information already public separately un-worrisome but that together might be able to be paid enough attention to for a (positive) governmental reaction.
It was to force agencies to connect dots that the authors believe were not being connected. (Maybe it just wasn’t anybody’s job to connect them)
If you read between the lines to what he is really saying, I would think you would revise your opinion substantially.
Japan has a conviction rate of over 99%. If a prosecutor decides you're guilty of something, it's basically a done deal. You don't want to get on the wrong side of authorities in a country like that.
I thought that was because the prosecutors are very conservative about choosing what cases to prosecute in the first place, only going after effective slam dunks.
Also, tons of people have been saying that for months, both native and foreign.
There is a difference between someone with a big internet presence and someone without one saying something.
Assuming someone at immigration would take the time to look into his background (not just his paperwork), find out that he wrote a Covid-19 white paper with higher projections than the government at the time and then blacklist him for it is such a mischaracterization of Japanese process, I don't know where to start. It's not like there's a source I can reference, but I also have a lot of knowledge of Japanese immigration through knowing plenty of foreigners on different visas in Japan and have never heard of anyone getting rejected if they meet the conditions.
I can share one interesting anecdotal counter-example to show how easygoing Japanese immigration is. Someone I knew was on a fraudulent work visa "working" for a friend. He was actually creating a startup. By the time immigration found out, he had the necessary scale to sponsor his own work visa, so he wrote an apology letter and then switched to his own work visa even though the foundation of the company was built on a fraudulent visa.
I don't know anything in particular about his concerns about his own status. I have, on the other hand, known many LPRs in the US who were extraordinarily careful about their engagement in public matters out of concern about their status.
If your argument is that protection for PRs in Japan is stronger than that of US LPRs, I'm going to go ahead and call that an extraordinary claim. At some point, though, probably rapidly approaching, litigating this point becomes ghoulish. I haven't heard Patrick say he's specifically concerned about his own status, but he's clearly concerned about some of the people he worked with.
That has to be a function of knowing a particular variety of (however reasonably) paranoid LPR's, though, no? I can't imagine it being a core concern for the vast majority of LPRs.
Please enlighten us. How does public defamation work in Japan then? I don't know much but I did just google it right now[0] and to my layman eyes it looks bad:
> “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.”