People in Japan have forgotten how to smile and they need a refresher course. After three years of wearing masks thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, they’ve lost their confidence in their ability to deliver their biggest and brightest smile. Now a radio host is coaching them on how to bring it back in all its glory.
“People have not been raising their cheeks under a mask or trying to smile much,” Ms. Kawano said last week, a few days after Japan downgraded Covid-19 to the same status as common illnesses. “Now, they’re at a loss.”
About six years ago, Keiko Kawano, a radio host, found that her smile began to fade. At a certain point, she struggled to lift the corners of her mouth.
So Ms. Kawano, then 43, decided to learn how facial muscles work. After using the knowledge to reanimate her smile, she started helping others do the same under the motto, “More smile, more happiness.”
Ms. Kawano began teaching smiling at a gym in 2017 while working as a business etiquette trainer.
Despite having no medical training, her curriculum, typically taught in one-hour sessions online or in person, draws on yoga and emphasizes strengthening the zygomatic muscles, which pull the corners of the mouth. She also believes that the muscles just below the eyes are key and that weak ones create eyebrow-driven smiles, which can make the forehead look wrinkly.
Models like Tyra Banks know all about the importance of smiling with every part of your face. Smize is a “Tyraism,” an expression she coined to mean to “smile with your eyes,” blending the word smile with the sound of the word eyes, hence the spelling smize.
Kawano says, “People train their body muscles, but not their faces,” she said.
Before Covid, Kawano began teaching smiling at nursing homes and corporate offices, as well as to individuals hoping that a better smile might help to land better jobs or improve marriage prospects. One early client was IBM Japan, where she held a smiling-training session for company employees and their families.
Then the pandemic hit, hurting her business by hiding everyone’s smiles behind face masks. Who needed to smile during the pandemic when relationships came to a screeching halt?
Ms. Kawano told her clients that the key to a masked smile was lifting the eye muscles; in other words, “smizing”. A TV presenter demonstrated her method on a national broadcast, she said, and a post about it online helped to raise her profile.
But the biggest spike in demand for her services came in February, she said, when the government announced that official masking recommendations would be significantly loosened.
“People started realizing that they hadn’t used their cheek or mouth muscles very much, and you can’t just suddenly start using these muscles. You need to work on them.”
Not everyone agrees with Ms. Kawano that smiling needs to be coached. Yael Hanein, an expert on facial expressions, said she was not aware of any academic studies documenting the effects of long-term masking on facial muscles.
“Facial muscles can be trained like other muscles, although such training could be challenging, owing to large variability between individuals,” said Professor Hanein, who runs a neuro-engineering lab at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Tomohisa Sumida, a visiting researcher at Keio University who has studied the history of masking in Japan, is also skeptical. “Smiling lessons seem very Western”, he said.
Ms. Kawano also holds a one-day certification training for people who want to teach smiling for 80,000 yen, plus consumption tax, about $650.
