COVID-19 and the restaurant business in Japan: The social and economic dimensions of public health self-governance

In this paper, we examine the diverging incentives for cooperation within Japan’s “self-restraint” (jishuku)-based infection control regime by focusing on restaurants’ economic burdens, their role as social infrastructure, and their interactions with the legally non-binding governance framework. We ask: What shaped local neighborhood restaurants’ patterns of cooperation with the infection control regime? To answer this question, we draw on a dataset of original interviews, observational data, and a qualitative content analysis of economic and regulatory documents by governmental agencies and business entities to elucidate the dynamics in neighborhood restaurant communities. In contrast to previous discussions of cooperation with “self-restraint,” we find that restaurateurs’ decisions were not primarily motivated by peer pressure. The system of very generous economic subsidies alleviated economic burdens and allowed regulators to exert micro-level control through so-called third-party verification systems, which tied access to funds to compliance with infection control measures on a contractual, opt-in basis. Moreover, communities were often highly supportive of struggling businesses and played an active role in protecting restaurants as places for conviviality, complicating accounts of community social pressure as fostering “self-restraint”, and highlighting the positive role of restaurants as social infrastructure within urban communities.