The Curious Case of Japan In The COVID Times: Where It All Went Wrong For The Abe Administration

This article answers two seemingly paradoxical questions.
First, how did Japan control COVID-19 for so long while defying WHO protocols? Second, given that success, why have they recently lost control of the virus?

On the 25th of March, Japan announced that the Olympics would be postponed till 2021. The next day, 40 new cases of COVID-19 were found in Tokyo, a record increase in infections.

For many people, this confirmed their worst suspicions about the Japanese government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic. For months, the country’s experience with COVID-19 had defied expectation. Japan, similar to South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, had experienced a far slower spread of coronavirus than its western counterparts.

Yet where most east Asian nations stilled the spread of coronavirus with various combinations of early border closures, intense testing regimes, aggressive contact tracing and significant social distancing, the response of the Japanese government has been to do… not much.