Originally Posted by
strife
This does not match the reality at all as anyone who has ever been to Taiwan knows. I spent almost half of 2019 in Taiwan and mask wearing was rare. One of the cultural shocks for me was that usually the only people who wore masks were people who were sick which is in itself something entirely foreign to a lot of Westerners who typically would stay home.
Same thing in Japan. What has always really bugged me about mask-wearing in Taiwan/Japan is how many people I encountered who have been perfectly fine going out for purely leisure purposes even when they knew they were sick, but just put a mask on and culturally felt that made it OK. (I suppose not much better to do the same thing for work purposes, but I guess I have more empathy when the employers in those countries tend to treat their workers like garbage.)