Global Courant 2023-05-15 20:02:40
About six years ago, Keiko Kawano, a radio host, found that her smile began to fade when she stopped doing voice articulation exercises. At one point she had trouble lifting 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 began helping others do the same under the motto, “More smiles, more happiness.”
And since many people in Japan are unmasking their masks after three years and find their facial expressions a bit rusty, she is adapting her work to the post-Covid era.
“People haven’t puffed up their cheeks under a mask or tried to smile much,” Ms Kawano said last week, a few days after Japan downgraded Covid-19 to the same status as common diseases. “Now they’re at their wits’ end.”
Ms. Kawano started teaching laughing in a gym in 2017 while working as a business etiquette trainer.
Despite having no medical training, her curriculum, which is usually taught in hour-long sessions online or in person, is yoga-based 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 muscles create an eyebrow-driven smile, which can make the forehead look wrinkled.
“People train their body muscles, but not their face,” she said.
After her gym gig, she began teaching smiles in nursing homes and corporate offices, as well as to people who hoped a better smile would help them get better jobs or improve marriage prospects. An early client was IBM Japan, where she held a laughing training session for company employees and their families.
Then the pandemic hit, hurting her business by hiding everyone’s smiles behind face masks. Still, Ms. Kawano was occasionally asked for advice to smile through it.
Ms. Kawano told her clients that the key to a masked smile was lifting the eye muscles. A TV presenter demonstrated her method on a national broadcast, she said, and a after 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 official masking recommendations would be eased significantly.
“People started to realize that they hadn’t used their cheek or mouth muscles much,” said Ms Kawano, speaking by phone during a trip to South Korea, where she had an appointment for a facial that she said would be good for her cheekbones. “And you can’t just start using those muscles all of a sudden. You have to work at it.”
Yael Hanein, a facial expression expert, said she was not aware of any academic studies documenting the effects of long-term masking on facial muscles.
“Facial muscles can be trained just like any other muscle, although such training can be challenging due to the large differences between individuals,” says Professor Hanein, who runs a neuro-engineering lab at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
“One potential problem with a practiced or faked smile is that it can be identified as such by other people,” she added.
There have been other smile training courses in modern Japan, mostly for shop assistants. But in a Japanese social context, smiling is much less important than bowing. Some Japanese women are also cultivated to cover their mouths when eating or laughing.
“Laughter classes seem very Western,” said Tomohisa Sumida, a visiting researcher at Keio University who has studied the history of masking in Japan.
But Ms. Kawano’s clients seem to be happy with her work.
Miki Okamoto, a spokeswoman for IBM Japan, said Ms. Kawano’s smile training was “well received”.
In Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, about 40 seniors attended a 90-minute session with Ms. Kawano in October, and many noticed it improved their smiles, said Katsuyo Iwahashi, a city official who works on public health programs. Ms Iwahashi added that the city plans to offer a similar session especially for mothers with young children “in the hopes of helping them smile despite the hardships they are experiencing” during motherhood and after the pandemic.
Ms. Kawano also conducts a one-day certification training for people learning to smile for 80,000 yen, plus consumption tax, about $650.
One of her protégés, Rieko Mae, 61, now tells her own clients that smile exercises are important, even for people who smile a lot by nature.
“Sometimes you have to show a nice, professional smile, and people don’t know much about that,” says Ms. Mae, who lives in Osaka and traveled to Tokyo for the course.
Laughter training can help people improve their facial expressions and even build confidence, says Masami Yamaguchi, a psychologist at Chuo University who studied how babies look at their mother’s facial expressions.
“Intentional muscle movements send signals to your brain and generate positive feelings, even if you don’t feel happy,” she said.
