The Rodney Dangerfield Of the Global Order: Why Japan deserves more respect.

• Author: Blustein, Paul

One evening in late February, when fear of coronavirus was in the nascent stage, I was on a commuter train heading to my home in Kamakura, Japan, and observed that practically everyone besides me was wearing a face mask--the only other exception being a forty-something fellow sitting across from me in a dark suit typical of Japanese "salarymen." Next to him was a woman wearing one of those black, firm masks that completely cover the mouth and nose, and I couldn't help but imagine the smugness she felt in comparing her protective gear with the flimsy dimestore masks worn by most other passengers.

At one point, the mask-less man coughed--just a couple of brief throat spasms, suggestive of nothing more than a dry throat. Although he covered his mouth with his hand, the lady shot him a sideways dirty look. About a minute later, he coughed a couple of more times--again, barely a throat-clearing, definitely not a violent hack indicative of illness--and this time she looked downright alarmed. When he did it again a short while later, she got up, grimaced as if she had just been exposed to Typhoid Mary, and moved to the nearest vacant seat. Everyone else remained impassive, in accord with custom on Japanese public transportation, although the man shifted to a slightly more relaxed posture given the extra space he could occupy.

Pretty funny, I thought, and upon arriving home I wrote a snarky Facebook post about it, musing that Mr. Salaryman must have been inwardly rejoicing at having devised a clever scheme for manspreading. But looking back at the episode, I wonder whether my maskless-ness should have been the proper object of deprecation, and my fellow passengers lauded as unsung heroes of their nation's triumph over the virus. For Japan is an indisputable success story in minimizing the pandemic's impact, with only about 900 deaths at this writing compared with America's 100,000-plus--an outcome attributed by many experts in large part to the fact that maskwearing, already common among Japanese in past years, became even more ubiquitous in the crowded public spaces of the nation's cities in early 2020.

So unexpected was Japan's favorable result that for a long while, the country got no credit in the world's media. After all, the authorities conducted relatively few tests (on the grounds that sick people would spread infection more readily if they rushed to clinics for testing), and aside from closing schools in early March, the government...