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The mask is a courtesy
Japan wore masks long before the rest of the world took them up, and the reasoning inverts the Western instinct: you wear one when you are ill, to protect other people, rather than when you are well to protect yourself. Hay fever season fills the trains with them too. The same logic sits under a great deal of Japanese public behavior — the organizing idea is 迷惑をかけない, not causing trouble for others, which runs from masks to keeping a phone silent on a train.