Selective neglect of viral risk: Tokyo’s commuter trains during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article asks why Tokyo’s crowded trains were largely absent from official discourses of viral risk in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. While public transport environments were often framed as spaces of contagion in other countries, Japanese public health discourses instead tended to emphasize the viral safety of urban railway transport. Drawing on an analysis of media and expert discourse, auto-ethnographic fieldwork, and repeat interviews with commuters, this article examines the processes through which Tokyo’s urban railway network was extracted from discourses of viral risk. It identifies four factors that contributed to this: (1) dominant definitions of risk spaces in public health messaging, (2) trains’ integral role in the operation of socio-economic life, (3) elusiveness of public transport in the epidemiological data, and (4) a focus on “unruly” passenger conduct. This analysis of the selective treatment of viral risks is tied to a critical engagement with theoretical distinctions between “essential” and “existential” mobilities developed in prior anthropological scholarship on the pandemic. Exploring the discursive framing of pandemic mobility practices on one of the world’s most extensive urban railway networks, the article thus contributes to the anthropological study of mobilities and transport in Japan and beyond.