107 SMILE COACH

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JAPANESE HIRE INSTRUCTORS TO LEARN HOW TO SMILE AGAIN

After wearing masks in public for three long years, many Japanese are signing up for smiling classes to learn how to smile again without looking awkward.

Smiling used to be a natural response, but, three years of hiding behind a mask have left many Japanese unable to smile naturally. Some of them are now paying smile educators to teach them how to display their pearly whites without looking awkward.

They participate in specialized classes where they are taught how to stretch and flex various parts of their faces and even their neck muscles to smile properly, actually looking happy and not weird.

“A smile is only a smile if it is conveyed naturally,” Keiko Kawano, a radio personality-turned-smile instructor, said. “Even when you are happy, if you have no expression, your mood will not reach the audience.”

Kawano said that she has taught smiling classes to around 4,000 people so far and has also helped train around 700 certified “smile specialists” since she started her work in 2017. However, demand for her services has skyrocketed recently after people started giving up the medical masks that they had been wearing for the last three years.

“I have heard from people who say that, even though they are able to remove their masks now, they don’t want to show the bottom half of their faces because they do not know how to smile anymore,” smile trainer Miho Kitano said. “Some say that they see more wrinkles around their eyes after using them so much to smile, or they feel like their face is drooping because they have not been using it as much as before.”

Smile instructors like Kitano claim that exercising one’s smile is just like training other parts of the body. It is all about the muscles, so exercising the expressive facial muscles is the most important thing.

A standard smiling education class begins with a stretching session. After that, participants are asked to pick up small hand-held mirrors to observe themselves as they follow the instructions of a trainer who teaches them how to flex their facial muscles to convey the warmest and brightest expression of happiness possible.

Interestingly, smile classes have been a part of Japanese culture for several decades, because of some Japanese people’s notorious difficulty to convey their feelings through facial expressions. However, the classes have really risen in popularity after Covid restrictions were lifted.