Ann comments

This guy couldn't be any wronger. The virus is still the same as it was and more, since it's gone thru the large populations and changed. 

People kept living life like nothing, went to temples to pray coz apparently that was more important than the pandemic, kept their everyday overtime with cup noodles for dinner, now they're crying victim. 

Besides, SoE is not lockdown. No penalties for not obeying.

It’s called adaptation. You cannot expect people to to freeze all their activities and wait until this is over. Everyone has to continue with their life and thus they need to find new ways of doing things. Since last spring of course people understood more about the disease and came to develop their own practices to continue living under the pandemic. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Why are so many people here demanding that the parents should be arrested and are so sure that they were not doing parenting or neglecting their child? I wonder if you actually live in Japan and understand the environment here enough to make such firm judgements. It is very common for kids to play outside in Japan without parents accompanying, even though it is true that this child was too small, but someone mentioned that his mother was with him. And the article said it’s an intersection without traffic lights in the residential neighborhood. This is very common in Japan, as these roads don’t have much traffic, probably few cars every hour, but the rule is that the driver has to stop in front of it even when it is obvious that there is no one crossing in front. Small roads in Japan don’t have traffic lights all the time, but cars still need to stop when there is an intersection. And roads in Japan cuts through each other a lot so I have seen a lot of drivers actually skipping that step. So before blaming the victim and the parents for letting kids play outside you should consider that there’s a possibility the driver was not careful too. Keeping your kids home protected all the time doesn’t mean accidents would never happen.