<![CDATA[Japanese urged to stay home for Golden Week as Abe aims to ease emergency rules by early May]>

In the run-up to Japan's annual Golden Week holiday, which this year begins on May 4, the Niseko Adventure Centre in central Hokkaido should have had at least 1,000 bookings from Japanese and foreign travellers for activities ranging from white water rafting to mountain biking. This year, the centre's managing director Ross Findlay has no bookings and expects no income, for what is traditionally his busiest time of the year.

In accordance with government recommendations, NAC will be shut until May 6 and, Findlay admits, almost certainly beyond that date.

Japan is three weeks into a quasi-lockdown, with people being urged to stay home and non-critical businesses asked to close to prevent a further spread of the coronavirus, which has so far infected over 12,300 people in Japan, including over 700 aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and has left 341 dead. One of the latest deaths, of TV host Kumiko Okae, 63, has shocked the nation.

People observe social distancing in front of a supermarket in Tokyo. Photo: Kyodo

"It's hard, but I'm not going to whine because absolutely everyone is in the same boat and all we can do is hope that they can get this thing under control," Findlay said.

Tokyo's goal is to lift the state of emergency in early May and authorities are exhorting people not to venture out during next week's holiday, which is one of the busiest travel periods in Japan, with workers traditionally taking trips abroad or returning to their hometowns.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the goal of reducing person to person interactions by 80 per cent had not yet been met. "This is an extremely critical time in order to end the state of emergency as early as possible," he said during a meeting of a government advisory panel on Wednesday.

"This Golden Week, instead of going home in person, go home online using a video call," Abe urged.

Authorities fear the virus will spread further if people let their desire for some fresh air overcome their concerns about contracting the illness, which is what they suspect happened during a warm and sunny long weekend in March.

With this in mind, the mayors of 11 coastal towns in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, on Thursday submitted a joint request to the governor demanding that roads to their towns be blockaded.

Fujisawa, Yokosuka, Kamakura and other popular seaside towns have already seen the number of daytrippers soar by as much as 60 per cent despite the soft lockdown, while pleas for visitors to stay away have fallen on deaf ears.

"In reality, not everything can be controlled by a request to exercise self-restraint," said Kamakura Mayor Matuso Takashi. "Unless we implement concrete measures to stop people's activities, we cannot protect the lives and health of local residents."

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike on Thursday proposed that large companies add vacation days to the annual Golden Week holiday to turn it into a 12-day break that would start as soon as Saturday. Calling it "Stay at Home Weeks", the mayor asked families to remain in the capital and in their homes, urging them to limit grocery shopping to every three days in response to concerns that supermarkets and local shopping districts were too crowded.

While fears of a surge in cases " Abe raised an "explosive growth" scenario of 10,000 infections in Tokyo by late April " have not come to pass, authorities are still trying to determine the origins of most new cases. Testing is also still limited, with only 130,000 tests done so far in a population of 126.5 million, compared to South Korea, which has carried out more than 583,000 tests on its 51.6 million citizens.

Kenji Shibuya, a professor at King's College London and former chief of health policy at the World Health Organisation, told reporters on Thursday that Japan needed to "massively" expand its testing capacity to 100,000 tests a day to get the pandemic under control. That's slightly less than the total amount of tests it has carried out so far.

Shibuya said there is evidence to suggest the true number of infections in Japan is 10 times or more the official count of around 11,500 people.

"There's already a community-wide transmission," Shibuya said. "A huge number of people are infected already."

Abe pledged last week to expand testing, opening centres where citizens could get examined directly. Tokyo opened the first "drive-through" testing centre in the capital on Thursday.

Still, Shibuya and other analysts do not believe the state of emergency can be lifted in early May, even as countries like New Zealand and Australia look to slowly ease their lockdowns.

Makoto Watanabe, a professor of communications at Hokkaido Bunkyo University, said economic concerns were weighing heavily on government officials and this could result in them prematurely lifting the restrictions.

"My worry is that the governments are making decisions that are not entirely based on scientific facts and concern over people's health," he said. "They do not want to be responsible for a large number of deaths, of course, but equally they do not want to be blamed for the economy collapsing."

A masked family takes a selfie in front of a lion cage at Sapporo Maruyama Zoo in Hokkaido, on April 11. Photo: Kyodo

Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost prefecture, experienced the fallout from lifting emergency regulations too soon. It saw a spike in coronavirus cases from the Sapporo Snow Festival in early February, which drew over 2 million people, including a Chinese tourist from Wuhan who tested positive for Covid-19 after arriving in Japan.

By March 12, the illness had spread to 118 individuals and made Hokkaido the worst-hit of all Japan's prefectures. The local government declared a state of emergency on February 29, closing schools, cancelling large-scale gatherings and officially "encouraging" people to stay at home, while also introducing aggressive measures to trace and isolate anyone who had been in contact with victims.

The approach was effective and by mid-March, the number of new cases had fallen to one or two a day.

With the lifting of the state of emergency, schools and businesses reopened. Just 26 days later, after 135 new infections were reported in the space of a week, it was again put into effect. As of Friday, the prefecture had 540 cases and 25 fatalities.

"All around the world, nobody knows enough about this virus, including when it is safe to lift a state of emergency," said Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido who specialises in infection control for nurses.

"At the time the regulations were relaxed, things seemed to be under control and it was the right thing to do at the time as there were serious concerns about local businesses. But what has happened now just shows us how little we do know," Tsukamoto said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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