Hi, I am a Wisconsinite who has lived in Yokohama since I married a Japanese woman in 2000. I come here to-day because I would like to talk about what has surprised me.

Yesternight, my brother-in-law (my wife's brother) suddenly telephoned me and his speaking manner taught me that he was bloody angry at something.
According to him, his sixteen-year-old daughter went to school wearing a mask embroidered with slogans that mean "no war" and "down with Suga" in Japanese. Amazingly enough, the school, on looking at her mask, ordered her to take it off by saying "stop a ‘political’ action".

Never have I expected that someone tells another to take off a mask in the current situation of the epidemic of corona virus.
What mystifies me more is that that school seems to regard the act of wearing a mask as ‘political’. For I have long thought that a man wears a mask to protect the lives both of himself and of his surroundings.

My brother-in-law continued to tell me that he and his family made a decision never to give up and to tackle the tyranny of the school henceforth.
Such an attitude of the school, I fancy, has much to do with the reason why most of the Japanese schools compel students to wear a uniform (while those in the West generally allow students to wear plain clothes)，