The comedian Ken Shimura died of COVID-19 at the end of March 2020. Haruka, a student in her twenties living in Tokyo, had no personal connection to him. But she knew his face from watching TV with her grandmother, and the death of someone that familiar shook her in a way the news reporting and rising case counts hadn鈥檛. From then on, she started anxiously checking that the seats next to her on the train were empty, highlighting how pandemic sensitivities were shaped early on. Three years later, by May 2023, when the Japanese government officially pronounced the end of the pandemic, the virus hadn鈥檛 gone away, but the feeling of a pandemic certainly had.
Our study, based on 22 interviews and 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, asks how that shift in perception occurred. How does an invisible, persistent threat come to feel first urgent, then tedious, then unremarkable? We approach this question through the lens of vigilance, the study of how human attention is socially and culturally shaped and linked to societal goals. We ask how the very texture of daily urban life in Tokyo shaped pandemic sensitivities.
While almost all readers will have had similar experiences, Japan is particularly interesting for finding answers to these questions. There were no legal lockdowns, no mask mandates, only recommendations and repeated calls for jishuku (self-restraint). Compliance was nonetheless high, for reasons variously attributed to communitarian discipline, social pressure, or a sense among citizens that the state wasn鈥檛 doing enough on its own. Thus, resilience against the pandemic depended heavily on citizens鈥� vigilance in daily life.
Tracing experiences: From fear to indifference
In the early months of 2020, our research participants became concerned about the medical risks of COVID-19, as illustrated by Haruka鈥檚 story. The virus was new, its infection pathways unclear, and the symptoms reported in the news were alarming. Part of what made this phase frightening was that nobody quite knew how scared to be or what to even look out for.
After the first state of emergency was lifted in late May 2020 and public spaces reopened, a different kind of risk began to emerge: the social risk of being seen as the person who caught it, or, worse, as the one who behaves carelessly. As one participant noted, the scary part wasn鈥檛 the illness. It was the prospect of standing before an after-school club and having to explain yourself for getting the club鈥檚 activities cancelled because everyone had become a 鈥渃lose contact鈥� because of you.
In 2021, Tokyo spent 196 of 272 days under a state of emergency. This had worn down participants鈥� mental resistance, and the psychological risks of the pandemic became apparent to them. To cope, they began pulling their masks off when they got off the train, walking the empty stretch home unmasked even though that still seemed shameful, because constant precautions were grinding them down. Most pandemic precautionary practices were still in place due to perceived social or medical risks, but exceptions were quietly carved out to address psychological stress.
Starting in 2022, participants frequently heard from friends who had been infected and recovered quickly. At that point, the virus had mutated into something more transmissible but less severe, and vaccines were further reducing the severity. Through this experience, COVID-19 became just another everyday risk, on par with catching a cold for most participants. The medical risk was still there, as was part of the social and psychological risk, but alertness towards them had waned, marking the practical end of the pandemic for most people.
Four factors influencing pandemic sensitivities
Governments everywhere called for constant vigilance during the pandemic. But staying alert to a threat you cannot see, day after day, for years, is not something humans do well on their own. We depend on social and technical support systems鈥�cultures of vigilance鈥攖hat govern how best to distribute human attention, e.g. by assigning guard duties. With this analytical framework, we can see four factors that influenced attention to the pandemic.
Practical knowledge: Hearing about a disease on the news kept it abstract. Catching it or experiencing someone close to you catching it and recovering made it concrete. As one participant put it plainly, it was the experience of people around her getting sick that finally changed how she perceived the illness. In the beginning, the anxiety directed all attention towards the invisible threat, and when practical pandemic literacy increased through direct exposure, alertness waned.
Rhythm: Pandemic life had a beat, formed by infection waves, states of emergency, and the accompanying news coverage. So did the school year, the fiscal year, Obon, and the New Year holiday. People learned to read the cadence of these events and the infections that followed, adjusting attention accordingly. Some participants used the word kugiri (junctions) for these breakpoints, the natural seams of life in Japan that gave shape and predictability to rising and falling case numbers. Once they got used to the pandemic鈥檚 ostinato鈥攊ts endlessly repeating pattern of waxing and waning waves鈥攖hey were lulled into a sense of safety, requiring less attention over time.
Narrative diversification: Early on, all the messages lined up: Stay home. Restrain yourself. Avoid the 3Cs. Later, the decision not to declare any further states of emergency, despite record case numbers in late 2021 and 2022, said the quiet part out loud: get used to it鈥攕omething that was only reluctantly accepted at the time by the general public. However, one participant returned from a trip abroad and found himself genuinely puzzled as to why everyone in Tokyo was still masking. Once other pandemic realities became more visible, the necessity of constant vigilance came into question.
Materiality: The pandemic had a material impact on daily life: partitions in cafes, alcohol pumps at every entrance, floor markers showing where to stand, signage everywhere. When all of this was new, it easily grabbed attention. As it aged, sun-bleached and dog-eared, it instead literally marked the fading of importance. Their disappearance highlights how even these small things have a marked influence on how attention to abstract risks is embedded in only subconsciously perceived elements of daily life.
Vigilance? Why it matters beyond the pandemic
What our participants鈥� stories show is that pandemic sensitivities were shaped less by factual knowledge of the virus than by what people practically experienced, perceived, and felt in their daily lives.
The mechanisms the study describes through the framework of the cultures of vigilance aren鈥檛 specific to pandemics. They are immediately relevant to understanding how we perceive, respond to, and remain resilient to different types of hazards. Using these mechanisms, we can ask more precise questions about why鈥攐r why not鈥攚e are able to pay attention to certain kinds of risks. This may help improve the governance of vigilance to build resilience.
As a closing thought, consider climate change. Summers have grown hotter each year, yet the response follows a familiar pattern: alarm during record-breaking heat waves, followed by a return to routine once the season passes. The risks are invisible most days, persistent, dramatised only by sporadic acute events, surrounded by a fractured set of narratives鈥攜et deeply embedded in the very texture of daily life. If a pandemic can teach us anything about how attention fades, perhaps it can also help us understand how to modulate our attention鈥攁nd how the very texture of daily life affects this process鈥攖o stay resilient in the face of slow crises that are still unfolding.
This post is based on Kramer, Paul J., and Christoph Schimkowsky. 2026. 鈥淪taying Vigilant during Times of Crisis: What Shapes COVID-19 Pandemic Sensitivities?鈥澨�Japan Forum, June, 1鈥�27.
