07 June 2022, Tuesday– Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers

Day 771 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01

Japan covid-related topics in NHK’s 7am news bulletin today:

Nothing directly related. I will look at their Special Report on teaching Mindfulness in schools to reduce stress though.

The numbers are taken from the NHK website.

The first five minutes of today’s bulletin were actually about the Boris Johnson no-confidence vote.

Photo 2a

[Taken from the NHK website]

9106 new cases confirmed

[vs. 12207 for the same day last week. 18510 the same day two weeks ago.]

[Tuesday a.m. (i.e. Monday) figures are traditionally the lowest of the week.]

47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.

Probably no new daily case records (highly unlikely, but not possible to tell from the presentation of numbers on the website).

Nowhere with five digits

Quadruple figures in TOKYO only.

24 prefectures in triple figures

22 prefectures in double figures

Tokyo on 1013 [vs. 1344 same day last week]

Osaka on 461 [vs. 548 same day last week]

[Tokyo has been down vs. same day previous week for 24 straight days now]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 13.

[Border testing was relaxed even as double the number of people are being allowed into the country from June 01.]

Photo 02b

As far as I can see, this is the first time under 10,000 since Jan 11, the foot of the curve for the Delta .

Photo 02c

[Taken from the NHK website]

The total of current active serious cases stands at 75, down 2 from the previous day.

24 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30790

Total recorded cases at 8959017

Recovered cases at 8711948 (around 24,000 recovered cases from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 216,279 (down around 15000 vs the previous day).

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 2.41%.

Photo 03

So, there was a report on teaching and practicing Mindfulness in schools as a way to reduce stress [which (tenuous link) has increased during covid].

Throughout the segment, the anchors put the stress on the middle syllable, mind-FUL-ness, which was pretty distracting for me, but hey, maybe I’ve been saying it wrong all this time.

Photo 04

Here is a video playing on the TV in the classroom: Close your eyes, start by taking a deep breath and focusing on the sound.

Photo 05

Ommm

Photo 06

The company that is carrying out this practical experiment involving 279 elementary school students from 7 schools has found that it is effective in reducing stress in around 70% of the students (the findings are supervised by a couple of proper uni profs…).

Photo 07

Stress, you say, what stress?

Photo 08

Covid-related stress. Like these sucky mealtimes.

Photo 09

This school is implementing education to help students learn how to control their emotions and convey their feelings to others.

Photo 10

“Social and emotional learning (SEL)”

Photo 11

Example on the screen for a pair work exercise.

“You took my ________ and I am mad. It is very dear to me so I would like you to give it back.”

Photo 12

[Before they implemented SEL, and during covid] they were getting around 25 people a day reporting to the nurse’s office [often with stress-related problems].

Photo 13

[With SEL,] they have halved the number of children reporting to the nurse’s office.

Photo 14

This prof says that emotional [control] and sociability are “fundamental abilities.”

Amid covid, this has been a period where people’s activities were limited, and the negative effects of that may manifest later on, and there will be children who find this a stumbling block.

Emotional education like Mindfulness is effective.

Photo 15

[I will just throw one screenshot in from last night’s 9pm bulletin with one particular regular reader in mind, but perhaps affecting more. They looked at Japanese mothers’ reaction to the book, “Regretting Motherhood” (Oma Donath) which is available in Japanese translation.]

Here are the results of a Japanese survey with the question:

Have you ever thought “If only I hadn’t had children…”?

Clockwise from left: Never (59.6%), just one time (6.8%), a few times (26.6%), more times than I can count (7%)