The EconomistApril 4th 2020 Asia 472
Banyan The drifters
B
arely two weeks ago, the notion that
Tokyo’s summer Olympic games
should be postponed on account of the
coronavirus pandemic was taboo among
Japan’s ruling elites and the deferential
national broadcaster, nhk. So, too, was
any suggestion that covid-19 was not
under control. But as soon as the prime
minister, Abe Shinzo, admitted on March
24th that the games could not go ahead
as planned, it was if a dam had burst.
Growing alarm at the spread of the virus,
notably in the capital, is now at the cen-
tre of the political discourse. For ordin-
ary Japanese a turning-point came on
March 29th, with the death from covid-19
of a comedian and beloved household
name, Shimura Ken.
The alarm is appropriate. Japanese
habits of hygiene and removing shoes
inside, strong messaging about washing
hands, and Mr Abe’s urging in February
that schools temporarily close had ap-
peared to be containing the virus. In
comparison with Europe and America,
Japan’s record is still impressive: just
2,419 confirmed infections and 66 deaths
since the first case in January. But in just
a few days, the daily number of new
infections in Tokyo rose sharply, from
40-odd last week to 66 cases on April 1st.
The government’s policy has been to
go after infection clusters and snuff
them out. With the number of new cases
accelerating, and transmission routes
hard to divine, Japanese now worry that
they could follow European and Ameri-
can trajectories after all. The government
has been accused of concealing new
cases to put on a good Olympic face. That
seems implausible, but clinging on to the
games was a distraction. And this week
the government was still balking at the
cost to business of stricter measures. Yet
even Mr Abe has inferred that isolatingclusters is not working. At his Saturday
press conference, he admitted that in the
event of an explosive rise in new cases “our
strategy...will immediately collapse.” He
offered no Plan B.
That has fallen to Tokyo’s governor,
Koike Yuriko. Blunt and forceful, she
warns that a lockdown of the world’s big-
gest megalopolis is coming. Her direct
style has upstaged the prime minister. Her
pleas to break the chain of infection have
even shut Tokyo’s red-light districts,
surely a first since America’s firebombing
of the city in 1945. Yet her powers of per-
suasion have limits. Her call for Tokyoites
to remain at home this past weekend was
honoured more in the breach—until snow
on the Sunday helped her cause.
Much more is needed. Government
guidance is too vague. It urges “self-re-
straint”, with the implication that people
face being shamed if they do not conform.
It says people should avoid crowded
places, or where there is poor ventilation,
or where conversation takes place at close
quarters. Yet it says nothing about com-
muter trains that flagrantly breach suchconditions. Corporate priorities trump
everything else, with barely a sixth of
office staff working from home. In much
of Japan, pachinko—pinball—parlours
are still full. “Social distancing”, even as
an imported phrase, does not exist.
Murakami Hiromi, a health policy
expert at the National Graduate Institute
for Policy Studies in Tokyo, says a full
lockdown for Tokyo and surrounding
prefectures may now be needed. At last
Mr Abe has put someone in charge of the
coronavirus response: the minister for
economic and fiscal policy, Nishimura
Yasutoshi. Others want Mr Abe to go
further and declare a national state of
emergency. New legislation gives him
the power to do so.
It is here that Japan’s old ideological
faultlines are playing out over the
coronavirus. Conservative allies say the
prime minister is dealt a poor hand in
comparison with other democracies’
leaders fighting the pandemic. The stig-
ma of Japan’s wartime militarism has
rendered state power weak, with Mr Abe
able only to exhort, not command. Even
the new emergency law delegates powers
to prefectures and municipalities—and
these may only “request” that citizens
follow heavily freighted instructions,
with no enforcement mechanisms.
Liberal critics worry that Mr Abe,
whose government over the years has
harassed the press and chipped away at
constitutional constraints on its au-
thority, could use an emergency to widen
his powers alarmingly. That is always a
risk, given a weak civil society in Japan
and given that his Liberal Democratic
Party wants a revised constitution. Mr
Abe’s inner autocrat might yet be un-
leashed. But it is striking that so far this
year he has shown a paucity of leader-
ship, not an oppressive streak.Abe Shinzo draws closer to declaring a state of emergencyparliament this year is a “family resilience”
bill which requires women to “take care of
household affairs”. It has been roundly
mocked by the urban elite, who point out
that it was drafted by female mps who can-
not often be at home. But behind the ridi-
cule lies fear. “The feminist space at the na-
tional level is shrinking,” says Mutiara Ika
Pratiwi of Perempuan Mahardhika, an In-
donesian women’s organisation.
It has long been under attack at the local
level. A study from 2008 showed that 52
districts, out of a total of 470, enacted 45
sharia-inspired laws between 1999-2008.Aceh, a special administrative region gov-
erned by Islamic law, prohibits women
from straddling motorcycles, playing foot-
ball and leaving their homes at night. In
2015 officials in Purwakarta, a county in
West Java, announced that unmarried cou-
ples caught together after 9pm would be re-
quired to marry or break up. Mr Ode would
surely approve.
His organisation, which encourages
women to defer to their male relatives and
refrain from arousing male lust, has come
under heavy criticism from feminists.
They would do well to point out that, for ev-ery Mr Natta and Ms Wardah, there is a Sal-
mafina Khairunnisa and Taqy Malik. In
September 2017 Ms Salmafina, then an 18-
year-old Instagram personality, married
Mr Taqy, a 22-year-old heart-throb, even
though they had met only two weeks be-
fore. Ms Salmafina soon learned that he
was thinking about getting a second wife;
polygamy in Indonesia is legal and encour-
aged by radical campaigners like Mr Ode.
Mr Taqy soon discovered that his beloved
was not the “submissive wife” he had ex-
pected. Within three months the couple
had divorced. 7