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Japan

How To Keep Okinawa's Centenarians Safe From COVID-19

The Japanese archipelago Okinawa is both a popular travel destination and home to the highest ratio of very old people. That makes it particularly vulnerable to coronavirus.

Young and old in Japan
Young and old in Japan

The Japanese island of Okinawa is both a popular tourist destination, and home to one of the world's oldest populations. Add to that the upcoming holiday season known as Golden Week, from April 29 to May 9, and it's a potential "perfect storm" of trouble for a location that until now has been largely spared from coronavirus.

For this reason, island authorities are literally begging would-be travelers not to come to Okinawa, reports Taiwanese Central News Agency. "I heard that more than 60,000 people have reserved flights for this year's Golden Week and plan to come to Okinawa," the Governor Denny Tamaki wrote April 26 on his Twitter account. "I beg everyone to cancel their travel plans. Please!"

Japan's fifth largest island, and still home to a significant U.S. military presence, Okinawa is particularly vulnerable to the pandemic because of its demographics, with the world's highest proportions of centenarians, 76 for every 100,000 inhabitants. The situation is putting local health and social-care infrastructures under enormous stress, although fortunately, the prefecture has so far not recorded any seriously ill coronavirus patients out of a total of 137 confirmed cases.

Other top destinations in Japan are trying to warn off visitors as well. In the Greater Tokyo Area, authorities — and even some tourism operators themselves — are urging people to stay away from the Shonan Coast, a stretch of shoreline popular for swimming and surfing.

In the northern city of Hirosaki, famous for its late-April cherry and apple blossoms, the mayor went so far as ask inhabitants not to post photos of the flowers on social media, which might tempt people to visit the city, which normally holds its Hanami Festival at this time.

Under Japanese law, the government has no authority to enforce citywide lockdowns. It has issued social-distancing recommendations but cannot restrict a citizen's free movement, and is thus relying on the public to cooperate voluntarily.

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Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines. A German

Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes

No one flinches when we refer to dogs, horses or cows as purebreds, and if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we see no problem in calling it a mongrel or crossbreed.

Wieland Freund

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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