Japan often continues to use tech beyond the point other developed countries consider it obsolete (their government only recently transitioned away from floppy discs). It wouldn’t surprise me if Sony was manufacturing the Mini- formats in small quantities for the Japanese market only.
There’s a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.
Missing from the article: actual amounts of PFAS found in the bands, what percentage of it can be absorbed through skin contact, how that compares to other sources the average person might run into, and how much you have to absorb before biological damage emerges out of the statistical noise. The information may be in the original paper, but I’m disinclined to search for it there. Without those numbers, this is meaningless.
Per the “ancient” “Chinese” curse, “May you live in interesting times,” I suspect.
(The phrase is actually the brainchild of a British diplomat who was posted to China for a while sometime around 1900, if I recall correctly.)