On Sunday afternoon in the Dai Nagoya Building in Nagoya, Japan’s industrial capital and one of the centers of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the country, Tully’s Coffee is shuttered. A small sign outside the entrance says that, due to Covid-19, the rooftop cafe will be temporarily closed. 

Every single other store in the mall is open — and bustling. 

The mall is a microcosm of the nation’s response to the virus. Some public schools are set to reopen over the next few weeks, just over a month after Prime Minister Abe Shinzo shut them down on February 27.

The spring university semester begins in early April throughout the country and colleges are proceeding with many classes and orientations, despite canceled graduation and induction ceremonies. Some popular tourist attractions, including Universal Studios Japan, are scheduled to reopen before the end of the month.

Yukino Ichikawa, a college student, said that the main impact of the coronavirus on her life so far has been having a tour she’d reserved getting canceled and improved hand-washing diligence. Others I spoke to had similar experiences. “I may lose my company bonus and I can’t travel,” said Erika Imaeda, a company employee. “I’ve also started to wear a mask to work.”

The country’s reserved approach to tackling the coronavirus has faced scrutiny and speculation about under-testing. Despite taking only moderate social-distancing measures (the government recently asked people to “refrain” from getting together in big groups for cherry-blossom viewing parties), Japan has faced a surprisingly linear growth in cases — that is, until cases suddenly started accelerating in Tokyo earlier this week. 

There are nearly 1,400 confirmed cases and over 44 deaths as of March 27. On March 5, 55 new cases were reported. Almost three weeks later, on March 25, just 98 new cases were reported. 

Compare that to the US, where 66 newly confirmed cases on March 5 turned into nearly 14,000 new cases on March 25. While much of the world’s new case graphs look like terrifying exponential growth, Japan’s appears to be mainly linear.

But experts say the true number of cases in the country almost certainly exceeds 1,400. The government has been criticized for its strict testing criteria, which requires patients to have had a fever of greater than 37.5 Celsius (99.5 F) for more than four days, unless the patients are elderly, have other underlying health conditions, or are connected to a previously confirmed case. Some people who meet the criteria have been denied tests.

Even the United States’ badly flawed and belated testing effort eclipses Japan’s minuscule effort — as of March 20, the US had conducted 313 tests per million people compared to Japan’s 118 tests per million people. Japan is using just 15 percent of its supposed testing capacity of 7,500 tests per day. South Korea, widely praised for its drive-through testing measures, is conducting more than 6,000 tests per million people.

The Japanese National Institute of Infectious Diseases has argued that the strict testing criteria are in place to preserve limited medical resources for those in need of urgent care. “Just because you have capacity, it doesn’t mean that we need to use that capacity fully,” health ministry official Yasuyuki Sahara told the press in a briefing last week. “It isn’t necessary to carry out tests on people who are simply worried.”

Abe’s government is going directly against the WHO’s firm recommendation to “test, test, test,” leading many to conclude that the coronavirus may be far more widespread in Japan than the numbers indicate. 

Now, a growing coronavirus outbreak in Tokyo is threatening Japan’s status quo as 40 new cases in Tokyo alone were confirmed on March 25. While the government has been able to identify the infection route of most of the cases, it’s a worrying sign that life was relatively normal in Tokyo, with muted but still considerable cherry-blossom viewing parties, just a few days before this sudden jump. 

Thus far, Japan has managed to escape exponential growth, but the worst may be yet to come. “This may be the tip of the iceberg,” said John Ioannidis, professor of disease prevention at the Stanford School of Medicine. “If you don’t test, you find no cases and even no deaths.”

Timeline of the coronavirus in Japan and the government’s response

Japan’s first case of Covid-19 was a Chinese national who’d traveled to Wuhan — the city in Hubei province, China, where the virus first emerged — and returned to Japan on January 6; the person tested positive for the virus sometime between January 10 and 15.

Two weeks later, Japan confirmed its first case of an individual who had not traveled to Wuhan, a taxi driver in Tokyo who had recently driven a Wuhan tour group.

One arm of Japan’s coronavirus policy has been to build a firewall against the influx of cases from overseas. On February 3, the government moved to bar the entry of people who had a history of traveling to Hubei province, or Chinese nationals with a Hubei province-issued passport.

A month later, those entry restrictions were expanded to include people from certain regions devastated by the coronavirus in South Korea, Italy, and Iran as well as two-week quarantines for all visitors coming from China and South Korea. 

Throughout the month of February, most of Japan’s cases were individuals connected to Wuhan, and the majority of cases were isolated and traced. A government-appointed panel reported on March 9 that 80 percent of the cases identified had not passed on the infection to anyone.

But when case numbers failed to abate through February (232 confirmed cases as of February 28), Abe moved to close all schools and request that community gatherings be suspended. Japan was hit by a wave of closures to tourist attractions, sporting events, concerts, and festivals.

The governor of Hokkaido proclaimed a state of emergency beginning on February 28 and asked the population to stay indoors. For comparison, lockdowns began in Northern Italy on March 8, when more than 7,000 coronavirus cases had already been confirmed.

Based on the recommendation of a panel of bureaucrats and infectious disease experts, the central policy has been to focus on providing medical attention to those who are severely ill in order to prevent the nation’s health care infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed, and to do extensive contact tracing to identify infection clusters. The health ministry and doctors are asking individuals with mild symptoms to stay at home so that they do not pass on the disease.

But as cases have steadily increased, not much has changed in terms of the government’s policy response since late February. The prime minister’s office announced on March 20 that according to the expert panel’s latest recommendation, they would continue to focus on infection cluster countermeasures and preparing the health care infrastructure to be able to treat the seriously ill in the event of a leap in infections. 

While Japan has a strong national health care system and more than four times the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people than the US, a shortage of medical supplies is an ongoing concern. More than 90 percent of medical institutions in Nagasaki prefecture have said they are facing shortages of masks and disinfectant, and hospitals in Hokkaido are providing just one mask per hospital visitor per day to protect their supply.

Rather than enacting widespread private or public closures, as has been prevalent throughout Europe and the US, the government’s panel of experts simply asked people to “continue to avoid environments that simultaneously meet the following three conditions: poor ventilation, dense crowds, and dense conversation.”

Many in Japan did not comply with this request. Just this past Sunday, more than 6,500 people gathered for a martial arts event in Saitama, a city just north of Tokyo, despite the Saitama governor’s pleas that the event be shut down. One attendee later came down with a fever and is currently awaiting the results of a coronavirus test. 

Better hand-washing, a government conspiracy, or both? 

There has been plenty of speculation about the reasons behind Japan’s lack of exponential case growth. Suggestions, both optimistic and pessimistic, have covered everything from the fact that people in Japan don’t typically shake each others’ hands in greeting to the possibility that the government is failing to test tens of thousands of pneumonia patients for the coronavirus.

Here’s an overview of the major factors at play — and what the numbers and experts say about their impact on “flattening the curve” in Japan.

Moderate social distancing was effective because it happened early

Social distancing in Japan is currently a mixed bag. Rush-hour traffic on Tokyo subways is down just 10 percent compared to mid-January. Street traffic in Tokyo has barely budged from its historical average. 

A survey conducted by the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry on March 12 showed that 55 percent of large corporations have implemented remote working procedures, but a strict working culture has kept even white-collar workers in the office. Movie theater revenue for March is down around 50 percent across the country. 

But even this modest social distancing seems to have had an impact. Sato Akihiro, a data analysis expert and professor of neuroscience at Yokohama City University, calculated that Japan’s nationwide event cancellations and social distancing measures beginning at the end of February have cut the infection rate to 50 percent of what it would’ve been otherwise. 

He said that in order to stop the virus completely, the country needs to increase its testing capacity by sixfold to adequately identify and track cases. “We saw event cancellations in Japan from a very early stage,” Sato told me. “I think that cases in Japan are not growing at an exponential rate as a result of these early interventions to reduce human contact.”

Cluster identification and contact tracing

As Sato points out, the key to Japan’s linear rate of infections may stem not from acting more aggressively, but simply earlier, before sustained community spread took root. 

Japan began testing individuals with coronavirus symptoms — and not only those with a history of travel to Hubei province — at the discretion of local governments around February 12. The government then created a specialized team of public health and medical experts to identify and isolate infection clusters. 

Whenever a hospital confirms a new case, the government dispatches teams of medical and data experts to cooperate with local governments to locate and test anyone who has been in contact with the infected individual. Oftentimes as a result, the corresponding local facilities are closed down, such as a senior care facility in Aichi prefecture that was associated with an infection cluster.

A lack of large case explosions, such as what happened with South Korea’s “Patient 31,”  who singlehandedly spread the disease to thousands, suggests that these cluster countermeasures have been mostly effective thus far. 

Sanitation and mask-wearing are real factors

While it’s more likely that Japan’s early cluster tracking and social distancing measures are the main factors in limiting an explosive spread of the virus, famously clean Japan does have difficult conditions for a virus to thrive in. 

While good hygiene is far from universal in Japan, many people practice frequent hand-washing, gargling, and disinfection. Japanese people rarely shake hands, hug, or kiss when greeting — a key chance for the virus to spread.

For reference, a 2015 survey found that 15 percent of Japanese did not wash their hands after using the toilet, compared to 40 percent of Americans. Hand-washing reduces the risk of respiratory infection by 16 percent, according to the CDC.

In terms of surgical and N95 masks, a Weather News survey from January 2018 revealed that 53 percent of Japanese people wore masks regularly — a number that has almost certainly increased this year with the alarm bells about coronavirus. A 2017 scientific study found that mask-wearing reduced risk of influenza among Japanese schoolchildren by 8 percent.

“Personal hygiene and social responsibilities are main pillars for disease prevention practice,” HyunJung Kim, a PhD student in biodefense at George Mason University, told me. “However, it is [irresponsible] to assume that 100 percent of the population of a country will have the highest level of hygiene and social responsibility. Outliers always exist.”

Other theories

Japan may have other factors on its side, as well. Mitsuyoshi Urashima, a practicing pediatrician and professor of medicine at Jikei University, suggested that the coronavirus was spreading in Japan in mid-January, at the height of the flu season, whereas the virus did not spread in the US and Europe until after the flu season’s peak.

“[My view is that] the outbreaks were ‘batting’ against each other in Japan, reducing the prevalence of both diseases,” Urashima said.

Japan also has an accessible, inexpensive, and widespread national health system that is excellent at treating pneumonia, the main way that coronavirus kills. Edo Saito, owner of a Japanese/multinational executive consulting agency, points out that from the age of 65, all citizens are enrolled in senior care services programs, which include home pickup to senior day care centers and having doctors and nurses call in on homes. 

These expansive and accessible health care options may be providing an additional safety net for Japan’s large elderly population. Japan’s elderly population is also uniquely (and tragically) isolated, which may reduce contact with asymptomatic virus-carriers.

Some speculation around Japan’s low coronavirus numbers suggested that the government was repressing the extent of the infection to ensure that the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games would be held on schedule. With the recent announcement that the games will in fact be postponed, that should be off the table.

When asked about the possibility that large numbers of coronavirus-related deaths are being ignored or written off as pneumonia, Matsumoto Tetsuya, a professor of public health at the International University of Health and Welfare Graduate School in Otawara, said that it was possible but not likely. “While we can’t rule out the possibility, deaths by pneumonia of unclear origins are rigorously investigated,” Matsumoto said.

Concern moving into spring

It nevertheless remains clear that under-testing is masking the extent of the infection in Japan. 

A leap of cases in Tokyo may prove that the virus has been spreading throughout Japan via mild and asymptomatic spreaders, and just as people begin to let their guard down, a newfound explosion of cases will emerge.

“This is why I feel it is so important to test random, representative samples of the population, to see where we stand,” said Ioannidis. “Otherwise, it may be like trying to pick molecules of air with our fingers, given that so many cases are asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic and go undetected. If the virus is shown to be already widely spread, [the] focus should be on preparing the health system as well as one can, plus fiercely protecting high-risk individuals.”

“From last week, we’ve also started to see a lot of cases in people returning from overseas,” Sato said. “I’m concerned that when the number of cases reaches 3,000 to 5,000, the health care infrastructure will start to become overwhelmed.”

There is also concern about the government’s border-control approach. Kim points out that a pillar of the Japanese response has been to limit the entry of foreigners from affected regions into the country. 

“However, there are many loopholes,” Kim said. “Foreigners are not a sole risk factor of incoming diseases. South Korea cases reveal that the majority of cases are introduced by Korean citizens returning from travel and business trips abroad.”

Japan recently extended self-quarantine regulations to apply to visitors from Europe and the US, but these quarantines are self-enforced, unlike in China and Taiwan.

Based on the latest round of recommendations from the expert panel, the Japanese government is seeking “thorough behavioral changes” to improve citizens’ response to the coronavirus and ensure that people avoid places that meet the three conditions of poor ventilation, dense crowds, and dense conversation.  

Faced with skyrocketing infections, much of Europe and the US have moved toward lockdowns. Japan hasn’t. The government insists that it doesn’t need to, citing that in some areas, almost all of the local coronavirus patients have been identified via contact tracing.

But Sato warns that as long as cases continue to rise, no one can afford to take their foot off the gas: “Even if we continue with the measures already in place, the spread will not end.”

It’s a worrying sign for a country that’s clearly ready to take off the masks and enjoy the cherry blossoms. 

Pikachu’s thunderbolt struck America in 1998 and changed the lives of a generation. 

The US anime craze started at the turn of the century with Sailor Moon’s middle-school magical girls out to save faraway planets; One Piece’s pirates, cyborgs, and fish people seeking a legendary treasure; and Pokémon’s Ash Ketchum on a noble quest to “catch ’em all.” 

These classic shows and many others led the charge; between 2002 and 2017, the Japanese animation industry doubled in size to more than $19 billion annually. One of the most influential and renowned anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, finally debuted on Netflix this month, marking the end of years of anticipation and a new pinnacle in anime’s global reach.

But anime’s outward success conceals a disturbing underlying economic reality: Many of the animators behind the onscreen magic are broke and face working conditions that can lead to burnout and even suicide. 

The tension between a ruthless industry structure and anime’s artistic idealism forces animators to suffer exploitation for the sake of art, with no solution in sight.

Anime’s slave labor problem

Anime is almost entirely drawn by hand. It takes skill to create hand-drawn animation and experience to do it quickly. 

Shingo Adachi, an animator and character designer for Sword Art Online, a popular anime TV series, said the talent shortage is a serious ongoing problem — with nearly 200 animated TV series alone made in Japan each year, there aren’t enough skilled animators to go around. Instead, studios rely on a large pool of essentially unpaid freelancers who are passionate about anime.

At the entry level are “in-between animators,” who are usually freelancers. They’re the ones who make all the individual drawings after the top-level directors come up with the storyboards and the middle-tier “key animators” draw the important frames in each scene.

In-between animators earn around 200 yen per drawing — less than $2. That wouldn’t be so bad if each artist could crank out 200 drawings a day, but a single drawing can take more than an hour. That’s not to mention anime’s meticulous attention to details that are by and large ignored by animation in the West, like food, architecture, and landscape, which can take four or five times longer than average to draw. 

“Even if you move up the ladder and become a key-frame animator, you won’t earn much,” Adachi said. “And even if your title is a huge hit, like Attack on Titan, you won’t make any of it. … It’s a structural problem in the anime industry. There’s no dream [job as an animator].”

Working conditions are grim. Animators often fall asleep at their desks. Henry Thurlow, an American animator living and working in Japan, told BuzzFeed News he has been hospitalized multiple times due to illness brought on by exhaustion. 

One studio, Madhouse, was recently accused of violating labor code: Employees were working nearly 400 hours per month and went 37 consecutive days without a single day off. A male animator’s 2014 suicide was classified as a work-related incident after investigators found he had worked more than 600 hours in the month leading up to his death. 

Part of the reason studios use freelancers is so they don’t need to worry about the labor code. Since freelancers are independent contractors, companies can enforce grueling deadlines while saving money by not providing benefits.

“The problem with anime is that it just takes way too long to make,” Zakoani, an animator at Studio Yuraki and Douga Kobo, said. “It’s extremely meticulous. One cut — one scene — would have three to four animators working on it. I make the rough drawings, and then two other people would check it, a more senior animator and the director. Then it gets sent back to me and I clean it up. Then it gets sent to another person, the in-betweener, and they make the final drawings.” 

According to the Japanese Animation Creators Association, an animator in Japan earns on average ¥1.1 million (~$10,000) per year in their 20s, ¥2.1 million (~$19,000) in their 30s, and a livable but still meager ¥3.5 million (~$31,000) in their 40s and 50s. The poverty line is Japan is ¥2.2 million. 

Animators make ends meet any way they can. Terumi Nishii, a freelance animator and game designer, earns most of her income from video game animation because she has to take care of her parents. On an animator’s salary, she would have little chance of feeding herself. 

“When I was young, I honestly suffered,” said C.K., an animator and character designer who didn’t wish to be named. “Luckily, my family is from Tokyo, so I could live with my parents and somehow get by. As an in-between animator, I was making ¥70,000 yen (~$650) a month.”

Anime’s structural iniquities stem back to Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and the “god of manga.” Tezuka was responsible for an endless catalog of innovations and precedents in manga, Japanese comics, and anime, onscreen animation. In the early 1960s, with networks unwilling to take the risk on an animated series, Tezuka massively undersold his show to get it on air. 

“Basically, Tezuka and his company were going to take a loss for the actual show,” said Michael Crandol, an assistant professor of Japanese studies at Leiden University. “They planned to make up for the loss with Astro Boy toys and figures and merchandise, branded candy. … But because that particular scenario worked for Tezuka and the broadcasters, it became the status quo.”

Tezuka’s company made up the deficit and the show was a success, but he unknowingly set a dangerous precedent: making it impossible for those who followed in his footsteps to earn a living wage. Diane Wei Lewis points out in a recent study that women, who often worked on animation from home, were especially vulnerable to exploitation and paid even less.

Nowadays, when production committees set the budget for shows, there is a long-established precedent to keep costs low. The revenue is divided up among the television networks, manga publishers, and toy companies. “The parent companies make money from the merchandising tie-ins,” Crandol said, “but the budget for the rank-and-file animators is separate.”

“These prices are so ridiculous because they’re still based on what Tezuka came up with,” said Thurlow. “And back then, the drawings were very simple … you had a circle head and dot eyes, and maybe you can draw an in-between in 10 minutes. I could earn some money at that pace … but Japanese anime, [now] one drawing is so detailed. You’ve worked for an hour for two bucks.”

Thurlow added that there is an expectation that you quit when you get married. “Because if you’re married, you need to spend some time with your spouse. You can’t work all the time and earn nothing.”

The price of art

The artistic results do not disappoint. The 2016 anime film Your Name, a charming body-swap romance that became anime’s biggest box office success, features a catalog of gorgeously rendered landscapes worthy of an art gallery. 

The depictions of the food alone are worthy of a “Top Ten Foods in Tokyo” listicle: oily ramen with pork and boiled egg; fluffy pancakes drizzled with syrup and generously topped with pineapple and peach; a handmade bento box full of neatly rolled sweet Japanese omelette, sausages, ripe cherry tomatoes, and pickled plum. 

Crandol pointed out that you can identify every background in Your Name as an actual building or place in Tokyo.

Artistry is one appeal of anime. Ian Condry identifies several others in his book The Soul of Anime: adult themes, graphic content, innovative genreless fusion such as Samurai Champloo’s samurai-hip-hop remix, and anime’s democratic spirit, where fans participate in making art through fan subtitles, fan art, and fanfiction.  

Historically, merchandising created more revenue than TV or movies, but as the popularity of anime has skyrocketed overseas, anime itself makes up a much larger portion of the revenue. Overseas video alone accounted for about half of global revenue in 2017. Yet the stingy budgets and unlivable wages remain. 

When Western companies like Netflix enter the market, they get to pay the dirt-cheap, long-established Japanese prices. TV stations, merchandise companies, and foreign streaming services walk away with the profits, leaving not only individual animators struggling but entire studios scraping by on shoestring budgets. 

The solution is not as simple as animators demanding higher salaries. A 2016 Teikoku Databank report revealed that revenue is down 40 percent over 10 years for 230 mainstay Japanese animation studios. “In order to achieve further development of the animation industry, there is an urgent need to improve the economic base of animators and radically reform the profit structure of the entire industry,” the report stated.

As the founder of a small studio, D’art Shtajio, Thurlow explained that mandating higher salaries without a greater change in industry structure would cause his and most other studios to go bankrupt due to budgetary constraints. The industry would consolidate into “Big Anime,” a world where a few mega-studios produce Hollywood-style hits, with mass marketing and generic content tailored to the lowest common denominator. 

With low-level animators pushed out of work, the creative, passionate spirit of anime would rot away. After all, there is no reason to become an animator other than because you love it.

“It’s a passion,” Zakoani said. “Because there’s not any returns [from] working. It’s only because I really enjoy doing it. I just feel like I need to do it. Because when you see your show being broadcast, and you know you worked on it, it’s the greatest feeling ever.”

Thurlow dropped everything to come to Japan to draw the shows he loved. The experience proved a far cry from his life as an American animator, where he had worked on shows that lacked the same complexity in art, story, and themes: Dora the Explorer and Beavis and Butt-Head if he was lucky. “Artists are busting their ass for the dream,” he said. 

Nishii spoke out on Twitter with a firm recommendation:

Adachi agreed. “Honestly, I would not recommend it … it’s a pyramid structure, where many at the bottom work to support a few at the top. I don’t see a bright future.”

The debate over the industry’s economics rages on, often on Twitter. A partial solution could be for international studios to buck the established cultural norm and provide anime studios the same budgets as Western studios. Another model could be allowing animators to retain the rights to their drawings and earn royalties. 

One organization, New Anime Making System Project, raises money to provide a safety net and reduce burnout for up-and-coming animators. The project has provided affordable housing for animators who have gone on to direct parts of Naruto, Attack on Titan, and other top-of-the-line anime. 

Jun Sugawara, the founder of the project, said he started the project as a graphic designer who wanted to support fellow artists. “It takes genius to create beautiful hand-drawn animation, and animators’ skills are not valued,” he said. The organization is expanding with the “Anime Grand Prix,” a contest for crowdfunded short anime films and music videos commissioned on a living wage.

Animators are bearing a nearly intolerable burden for the sake of beautifully hand-drawn television. For the sake of fluffy pancakes, lush sunset landscapes, and adventures across time, space, genre, and culture. For everything you watch and love, animators pay the price. 

Yet they draw on. 

C.K. spent a few years growing up in England due to his father’s job. With no English to speak of, he spent his days drawing manga, flipping the pages in his notebook between his forefinger and thumb, watching the drawings come alive.

“I could never forget that feeling,” he said. “When you animate a still character on a page, you can see them move, laugh, cry, get angry … that’s the charm of animation. When I see my hand-drawn work shared and seen not just in my country but around the world, I feel happiness.”

Eric Margolis is a freelance writer and translator from Japanese based in New York. You can follow his work on Twitter @EricMargolis1. And check out the animators who participated in this story and support their work: Shingo Adachi, Henry Thurlow, Terumi Nishii, and Zakoani.