text for INFECTION

In Japan you occasionally see people wearing white masks in public. Not Noh-masks or other kinds of theatrical masks but white cotton masks that cover the nose and the mouth and look somewhat similar to the masks that surgeons wear during operations. From travellers I had heard accounts that in Japan you can inhale pure oxygen from vending machines and I immediately pictured the environment in Japanese cities to be so polluted that it was necessary to wear masks outdoors.

I was soon proved to be wrong. When visiting Japan a couple of years later, somebody informed me that people wear these masks when infected by a virus. I chose to interpret this as a sign of Japanese consideration - people wore masks in order not to infect the surroundings. But again my stereotyped preconceptions of the Japanese were proved wrong. "In fact", an elderly woman told me, "we wear masks in order not to catch any more viruses when already infected by one."

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