QUICK NOTE

I'll be off the blog for a short while, hanging out in Japan. Visiting friends and family, dodging SARS, eating sushi, mangling the hits of the 70s at the local karaoke bar, the usual.

Interesting note about Japan and SARS. All of Japan's neighbors are plagued with the disease, yet Japan is largely unaffected. It has had only two cases that I know of so far, even though a Taiwanese man unknowingly carried the disease through several major Japanese cities a couple of weeks ago. So why aren't the Japanese getting SARS?

I have a theory (of course I do, I'm a blogger--spouting half-baked theories is what we do). Japanese culture is a touch-free thing. You don't hug, you don't shake hands, you don't back-slap or touch or anything. Well, unless you're a dirty ogisan standing next to a pretty girl on the trains, but that's another story and those guys tend to get slapped these days as they should. In general, Japanese just don't touch each other. They bow. They proffer business cards, but they only touch the card when they accept it--no hand contact. They don't share drinking glasses or straws, and they wash their hands pretty much all the time.

SARS is a corona virus. Such virii are generally spread through fluids. I won't get graphic, but you can imagine the various ways that bodily fluids can get on hands, which unwashed can transfer said fluids to anyone and anything touched. China and most of the other Asian countries are more contact-driven societies--they do their share of bowing as far as I know, but they also touch more than Japanese do. Not to sound culturally superior, but they also tend not to wash their hands as often as Japanese do. And they tend not to adhere to the same standards of public cleanliness as Japan. They just don't seem to have the same mania for sterility that the Japanese have. Maybe that's why they have SARS and Japan doesn't. No touching=no SARS? It's possible.

Anyway, Chris will be the lone blogger in these parts for a while. Be nice to him. I'll try to post once or twice from the Far East if possible.