Staying vigilant during times of crisis: What shapes COVID-19 pandemic sensitivities?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan recorded comparatively favourable public-health outcomes while relying largely on voluntary citizen behaviour. Existing scholarship traces this pattern to communitarian norms and discipline, the prevalence of exclusionary and coercive social practices, and bottom-up enforcement of public-health recommendations driven by perceived undersecuritization. We approach the puzzle through the concept of vigilance, meaning the configurations of attention that operate alongside formal surveillance and function simultaneously as social control and community care, enabling responses to complex crises beyond the reach of state mandate. Drawing on twenty-two in-depth interviews, three years of (auto-)ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, and complementary analysis of policy and media texts (2020–2023), we trace how pandemic sensitivities were shaped by the everyday texture of urban life. Four interacting factors emerge as drivers of sensitisation and desensitisation: practical knowledge about risk, the rhythm of disruptions to daily routines, the diversification of pandemic narratives, and the materiality of risk in the environment. Each factor can intensify attention to threat or absorb it into the mundane. As an unusually rich empirical case, COVID-19 reveals how vigilance regimes are produced and dissolved through urban daily life. These insights can sharpen the governance of latent, protracted, and complex public emergencies.