The COVID-19 Pandemic and Japan’s Anxiety-Suppression Society: Anxiety, Self-Restraint, and Solidarity in a Disaster Community

In this article, I analyze the Japanese government’s response and public discourse during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period covering the onset of the pandemic, the declaration of a state of emergency, and the decline in the second wave of infections by mid-October 2020. Assessing that the virus was highly contagious but not particularly fatal, the Japanese government adopted a policy focusing on the prevention of large-scale clusters of infections and treatment of severe cases, calling for the public to practice of “self-restraint” in avoiding the “three C’s” of closed spaces, concentrations of people, and close contact. The goal of this measure was to minimize the pandemic’s socioeconomic impact and sustain the health care system. It was successful in terms of infection and fatality rates. Particularly after the state of emergency was lifted on April 7, Japan began to garner global attention as a model for containing the pandemic without coercion. Behind Prime Minister Abe’s resignation, however, lay the “failure” of Japan’s COVID-19 response. The Japanese people lost faith in the government’s response owing to its perceived harm to publicness, as symbolized in the “Abe-no-mask” incident. Japanese society is a “disaster community,” sharing in the anxiety over the experiences and memories of disasters occurring over the past twenty-five years, including the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 and Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Japan has thus experienced COVID-19 as a part of a greater, more complex chain of disasters. The response to COVID-19 in the form of the request for self-restraint was also rooted in such communal solidarity. Controversy over PCR testing policies or “optimistic” government perceptions pertaining to COVID-19 evince the present state of the disaster-nation that is Japan as it endeavors to suppress anxiety and maintain daily life as usual. I conceptualize Japanese society in this situation as an “anxiety-suppression society.