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Not Just Coronavirus: Why Asians Have Worn Face Masks for Decades

Ralph Jennings

   TAIPEI - Face mask use has exploded in Asia this year to help stop the
   spread of the novel coronavirus that started in China, yet the tiny
   surgical aids are less common in Western countries despite growing
   outbreaks in Europe and the United States.

   That's because Asians, especially in Japan, China and Taiwan, have worn
   masks for a host of cultural and environmental reasons, including
   non-medical ones, since at least the 1950s.

   Japanese wear masks when feeling sick as a courtesy to stop any sneezes
   from landing on other people. Japanese women mask their faces on days
   when they don't have time to put on makeup. Philippine motorcycle
   riders wear masks to deflect vehicular exhausts in heavy traffic. In
   Taiwan, citizens say masks keep their faces warm in the winter and
   offer a sense of protection from air pollution, including any airborne
   germs.

   Masks have become so popular that some manufacturers make them purely
   for fashionable use, with no protective function.

   "In Asia it's a bigger thing to be wearing the mask in Asia because
   it's already ingrained in their culture to do it under other
   circumstances a lot more than here in the United States," said Bradley
   Sutton, an American who once lived in Japan.

   Sutton is watching e-commerce mask orders surge now in his role as
   training director with Helium 10, a California company that provides
   software to Amazon sellers.

   Masks became a regular part of the street scene in parts of Asia after
   the deadly severe outbreak of acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that
   started in China in 2002 before spreading to Singapore and Taiwan over
   the following year. Today manufacturers in East Asia are pumping out 10
   to 20 million units per month.

   The SARS outbreak was a "turning point," for Asia, said Chen Yih-chun,
   director of the National Taiwan University Hospital Center for
   Infection Control in Taipei. Before that, she said, Taiwanese saw masks
   as a stigma marking them as severely ill.

   "Why we always mention the SARS matter is because during SARS and
   before that to wear a mask was impossible and patients didn't want to
   cooperate," Chen said.

   But Japanese had worn them even in the 1950s as a safeguard against
   rising air pollution, a byproduct of industrialization. Now people who
   feel just "under the weather" in Japan wear them to be polite, Sutton
   said.

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