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Garlands of bright lights sparkled as if to remind everyone the pandemic soon would disappear as vaccines stop the disease in its tracks. Certain evidence that the country was experiencing a medical crisis, however, was that restaurants and coffee shops were offering only take-out, the ubiquitous pubs that should be doing a roaring business over the holidays were closed and shoppers were looking for holiday bargains in reduced numbers.
News reports of the pandemic and the strange new version of the virus were all over TV and the papers, but many were in denial about a disease that you couldn't see or feel. There was even a sense among some people that authorities were spreading misinformation, bearing bad news, frightening everyone for no reason when really COVID-19 was sort of like the flu, a passing phenomenon that soon would vanish, nothing to worry about and quickly forgotten.
As for why people in Korea and Japan seemed to take it more seriously, I was told that Koreans were living under a quasi-dictatorship and Japanese tended to do what everyone else was doing whether they needed to or not. It was useless to argue that the relatively low incidence of the disease in these countries testified to the need to follow the rules. If the numbers were up in both Korea and Japan, they still were far less than those reported here. No one, however, seemed inclined to make discomfiting comparisons.
The British had something else to worry about. The country had not only gone through Brexit, the exit from the European Union, but had then managed on Christmas Eve to work out a deal for carrying on trade with the EU on terms that might not be so bad as everyone feared. Judging from what people were saying, though, they would pay the price for their determination to carry on alone from the rest of Europe.
The English Channel stands as a barrier as it has for the ages despite the tunnel that should have formed an unbreakable bond. The sight of thousands of trucks backed up on the British side while France stopped cross-channel traffic for two days and then demanded that all drivers take COVID-19 tests showed the historic chasm between Britain and "the continent," to which Britain has never quite belonged. Well, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, proud of the deal with the EU on trade, did say Britain was part of Europe, but talk is cheap. A lot of people don't really think that way.
If Britain can compete effectively with the EU as a totally independent entity, you still wonder about the effect of Brexit on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). How will the British get along with their European allies, and will they be able to stand fast against Russia's renascent power instincts under Vladimir Putin? Having nipped off portions of Ukraine, people are asking, might he be thirsting for more of previous Soviet satellite countries?
It would probably be fallacious to compare British attitudes toward some of their European allies as akin to the animosity between Koreans and Japanese, but memories never die. The media resurrects memories of historic moments from two world wars against the Germans, and resentment against Germany as the strongest power in Europe, at least militarily, is never far below the surface. The year 2020 was full of memorials marking the 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, whose leader, Adolf Hitler, had thought he could quell the British in a blitzkrieg of bombing remembered as "the Battle of Britain," lasting for three and a half months 80 years ago.
Now the Brits are fighting a different kind of battle. Except in vastly overcrowded hospitals, it's easy not to notice the thousands suffering often in forced silence and isolation. It's another kind of "Battle of Britain" that people can't quite believe is happening but are sure they'll conquer in the end, as they've been doing for centuries.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, writes from Seoul as well as Washington.
