From what I seen and heard online, Japan is still pretty masked up even into mid 2023. Yeah Matt had a very solid point about mistranslated and misinterpreted articles about Japan reaching the west so i’m not too surprised to hear about niche smile coach stories. And besides i’ve seen a lot weird rural america stuff firsthand over the years (heck I was in one town I haven’t been in years a few days ago because I wanted to avoid the real life SCPs that live there) so I would be hypocritical to think that Japan is weirder than us lmao.
