I am extremely confused as to what you intended to prove with those two links. Masks were not mentioned by either, the second link barely discussed Covid and seemed to focus on foreign relations, and both agreed Japan’s response was a success, which contradicts your implication that it somehow wasn’t. And the first guy says he was supportive of the government’s guidelines, which included masks. So unless there’s something else against masks that he said, I’m gonna extrapolate that he is not anti-mask.
Ok, I’m gonna just skip over the whole blaming overweight people part and ask you - do you believe overweight people are more likely to spread Covid? Because we’re discussing spread, do masks work to combat spread. Japan had lower deaths but they also had lower cases. Was it also due to overweight people that Covid cases, not deaths, were higher in the usa. And maybe a lower case load has something to do with the lower deaths in Japan, more than overweight people. Japan’s mask usage was always extremely high, even without a mandate, and remains so.
And if you want to continue the Cochrane stuff-it’s not a study. It’s a meta analysis of a bunch of studies, all of which were pretty well-known prior to the Cochrane study, and the problems with them were already recognized by those studies’ authors. So the Cochrane study just lumps a bunch of poor quality studies into one poor quality meta analysis that even the Cochrane study authors write is inconclusive and probably would not have made the splash it has if it was not done by a bunch of brownstone institute anti-maskers who decided to go on a press tour saying their study said something that it didn’t.
Not to mention we have mechanical filtration studies proving the physics of mask wearing, so unless there’s something mystical about Covid, these studies still apply.