“Yes, we need to listen to the government,” Sato said. “But we all have our own situations, we can not always swallow what the government says. We can not survive without working, we can not stop going out.”
This growing sense of dissatisfaction with the government’s response to the virus comes as Japan appears to be on the verge of another major Covid-19 outbreak. For the past 12 days, the Ministry of Public Health has recorded more than 900 daily infections and Friday marked a new daily high of 1,601 new cases nationwide.
To date, the country has confirmed more than 46,000 cases since the pandemic began, more than half of which have been identified since July. At least 1,062 people have died.
Many of these cases are in Tokyo, the most populous city in the world, where fears continue that an untraceable outbreak could quickly spiral out of control. For most of May and June, Tokyo managed to contain the number of new cases to less than 100 every day. However, cases have steadily increased since then, reaching a full day of 472 new infections on August 1. To date, more than 15,000 cases of Covid-19 have been identified in the Japanese capital.
No new state of emergency
Authorities in Tokyo are convinced that many of the city’s infections occur when people go out at night, so they have applied to restaurants and bars that serve alcohol at 10 a.m. to reduce the risk of contamination of the virus inside. .
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Thursday that he would not call for a state of emergency, despite the fact that more infections are now being identified than during the first state of emergency in April, which lasted for almost seven weeks.
“The situation is very different from that time,” he said. “We are not in a situation where an emergency statement should be issued immediately, but we will keep it awake with a high sense of urgency.”
But critics like 21-year-old university student Soma IIzuka accuse Abe of deterring leadership at a time when it is most needed.
“He should not only think about depressing the economy,” Ilzuka said. “If he (Abe) wants to keep the infection low and the economy starts, it needs to provide compensation (for people sitting at home).”
People like Sato and Ilzuka say that leaders need to do more to concentrate on the existence of people and personal happiness – or leave the stopping measures and just go on a lockdown.
Many also claim that the government is incredibly out of touch, pointing to a plan to spend $ 16 billion on travel subsidies to revitalize the tourism sector – at a time when cities across the country are struggling with a growing number of infections.
Business owners under pressure
Those in the audience are now facing a difficult choice: buy the government’s 10-hour closure request to stay alive – a potential health risk for customers and staff – or follow the official advice and eat the loss in sales, even if it proves fatal to the company.
Tokuharu Hirayama has kept its restaurant open due to the huge pandemic. But the losses are devastating. Sales fell 95% in April compared to March, and although things just jumped back, the company was down again in July. Hiryama was forced to furlough most of his employees, and some days he works the store alone, making deliveries on the side to cover costs.
Hirayama will comply with the 10-hour request, he said, essentially because of peer pressure: neighboring restaurants and bars do so.
“Around here, people are very sensitive to what others think of them,” he said. “I did not think it would be worth it to set up a fight.”
Kozo Hasegawa, however, does not stay.
Hasegawa is the founder and CEO of Global-Dining, which owns about 40 restaurants and shops in Japan. He is known in the sector as a restaurateur who takes risks and is widely admired for giving his employees a lot of freedom and autonomy – and then encouraging them to go independent when they have experience at his company.
Hasegawa said the pandemic was a “disaster” for his company, which survived only because it was in good enough shape to receive a government loan to stay afloat.
Like many other business owners, Hasegawa said he has applied to various lending programs affiliated by state and private financial institutions offered as part of the government’s economic relief package.
He does not think the new government regulations closing at 10am are fair. The virus is no longer infected from 10 a.m. to midnight, when the bar would be closed, Hasegawa said, so why not customers decide?
“Fortunately or unfortunately I was born a rebel,” he said. “I do not like that in Japanese culture, they expect you to follow … we have a brain to think (for ourselves),” said Hasegawa, who plans to keep his restaurant open until midnight.
Living with the virus
Hasegawa’s remarks on obedience refer to a Japanese cultural norm known as jishuku, which translates to self-control. It is believed that demonstrable behavior is in bad taste in a time of national crisis, and it is a mantra that was used several times after the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
While Japanese culture may have a reputation for being sequential to the point of being inflexible, it is important not to paint the whole of society with such a broad brush, according to Kyle Cleveland, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies. and Temple University in Tokyo.
“We need to be careful about overgeneralizing this, and kind of defining culture in an orientalist kind of way that we think there is something really qualitatively different about Japan compared to other Asian countries,” he said.
“If you look at countries like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, they also have relatively low business rates, like Japan. The common characteristic that these different societies have is that they follow the rules. The rules govern societies. ”
Cleveland does not believe that this apparent resistance and anger with the government proves that jishuku is suddenly losing its place in Japanese culture. After all, he says it may just be that humans are evolving to live with the virus and are willing to accept the risks it poses.
“It’s not like jishuku existed a month ago, now it does not,” he said. “(People) still practice social distance and they wear masks and things like this, but they realize that they have to have a balance between financial obligations and also just liveability and so as a result they start going out into society.”
CNN’s Joshua Berlinger contributed to this report.
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