Yasuko Watanabe starts her day by devouring news and other reports about the new coronavirus pandemic ravaging the world.

Specifically, the 87-year-old resident of Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward is eager to learn how Japan is faring in comparison with other countries in efforts to bring this once-in-a-lifetime health crisis under control.

She is particularly concerned about the situation in Singapore, Britain, Canada and Switzerland where her daughter and grandchildren reside.

Watanabe occasionally even makes video calls to her family members and friends overseas to get their take on what's happening.

She asks about the scientific basis behind the response to the pandemic and whether the news reports were impartial or somewhat incendiary.

“I am always training myself to make a sound judgment,” Watanabe said.

Her level-headed approach to the health crisis is born out of her experience growing up in wartime Japan, where information was strictly controlled by the authorities.

The only information available to the Japanese public about the course of World War II was what the Imperial Headquarters, an organ under the emperor, announced.

Even as Japan kept losing battles on many fronts, the announcements were invariably the same from the outbreak of war in 1941: “The Imperial Japanese Army is unstoppable.”

Watanabe recalls that she and her classmates put pins on a world map on a blackboard of her elementary school to show sites that Japanese forces had overwhelmed in battle or conquered.

But all the announcements from the wartime leaders were false. The public only learned of this deception after Japan’s surrender in 1945.

After she and her family took refuge in an air raid shelter late one night, a niggling question formed in young Watanabe's mind: “Are New Yorkers also terrified in a shelter like we are?” 

But Watanabe did not dare ask such a question outright. She had no clue about what was true in those days, such was the authoritarian grip on the population.

After Japan’s defeat in the war, Watanabe, like all Japanese, was introduced to the radical concept of democracy by U.S. occupation forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. She learned about core principles of respecting the dignity of themselves and of those who embrace different views as well.

Out of the blue, democracy became a byword or Japanese children growing up in the aftermath of the disastrous conflict.

In 1948, three years after Japan’s defeat, the education ministry published a textbook titled “Democracy,” for use in social studies classes in junior and senior high schools.

The textbook explained the history and development of  democracy. It also repeatedly emphasized that “democracy is not simply a form of political system, but a mental attitude of an individual that they will build their lives based on their own will and judgment.”

“You should choose an authentic jewel from a pool of glass beads during an election,” is among the many new ways of thinking put down in the book, whose overall theme was to inspire young minds to be wiser.

The textbook also warned “against a dictator in his best clothes touting the national honor” and encouraged people to “adopt a habit of trying to discover truth from a deluge of conflicting information.”

For people like Kikuko Mizoi, now 86 years old and who learned about the principles of democracy when she was in junior high school, those teachings are concepts she holds dear all these decades later.

“Teachers had us to think hard about such principles as sovereignty rests with the people, basic human rights and individualism,” said Mizoi, a resident of Higashi-Matsuyama in Saitama Prefecture.

At the elementary school she attended during the war, she was taught how to fight an enemy soldier with a long-handled sword. She also worked on a farm to help shore up Japan’s war effort. Her parents were forced to extract oil from the roots of pine trees to provide fuel for wartime aircraft.

A central question finally took hold in her head as a result of all the new teachings about democracy: Why were adults unable to stop the war?

“I cannot live a life that is easily swayed by politicians,” she said. “We can break from such an existence only by developing our own judgment. That is what democracy is all about.”

The democracy textbook was used until 1953.

But the aspirations for democracy stirred in young minds all those decades ago seem to have taken quite a battering as Japan moved into the Western orbit with the onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Now it is summer, 75 years after the end of the war.

Mizoi, who lives alone, begins her day by tweeting about 50 messages a day. They are often about what she had for breakfast that morning, war, politics, her late husband and so on.

She has 89,000 followers.

Mizoi said she learned all sorts of new things through exchanges on Twitter, which she said makes it possible for her to bond with people she has never met.

“It is wonderful that people can say what they think,” she said.

But she had a baffling experience in May after she posted a tweet questioning the merits of the government distributing cloth face masks to deal with a serious market shortage due to the new coronavirus epidemic.

“The government is spending too much taxpayer money,” her tweet read. “I think that it will be less effective and wasteful as the government seems to be acting on a whim.”

She quickly found herself facing a barrage of comments of protest and criticism from people who were not among those who regularly respond to her postings.

The comments appeared almost identical, as if those posting were following a command.

Mizoi felt despondent about the reaction, given the fact that people today can connect with each other freely with access to reams of information.

The notions of democracy instilled in her when she was young still serve her well, though.

But she is no longer sure that others feel the same way in today’s Japan.