Calibrating social theories of digital technology based onJapanʼs COVID-19 response: surveillance capitalism andcyber civilization
Harald Kümmerle
German Institute for Japanese Studies
Principal Researcher

1.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic signiﬁcantly burdened public health systems across theglobe. Digital technology was expected to greatly reduce this burden and guidecountermeasures. After all, the use of big data had become engrained in all branches ofscience already by the 2010s (van Dijck 2014). However, scientists overestimated theimpact of technological innovation on the progression of the epidemiological situation
and underestimated the eﬀects of virus mutations (Hirschi 2022, 77). This gap between
the anticipated and actual contributions oﬀers a valuable opportunity to reﬁne ourunderstanding of how digital technology is actually utilized in society.1 The initiallyhigh expectations for digital technology's usefulness align with early predictions fromthe critical perspective of surveillance capitalism (Zuboﬀ 2019), which suggested thatthe pandemic would accelerate pre-existing trends toward pervasive surveillance,
regardless of their actual utility (Skelton 2020).
To better understand the overestimation of the usefulness of digital technology andprovide a positive reassessment, this paper examines Japan's trajectory during the
pandemic and how it was shaped by an application of digital technology that has been

1

In the text, references are frequently made "from the perspective of X," where X

represents a speciﬁc theory. This approach helps analyze the phenomena under study
through the lens of that particular theoretical framework, allowing for a nuanced
exploration of how digital technology is understood and critiqued from diﬀerent
theoretical viewpoints.
1

largely overlooked in the literature. Japan is noteworthy not only for its use of digitaltechnology but also for how its perception evolved throughout the pandemic. As
recently as summer 2021, Japan was perceived as underperforming among Asia-Paciﬁccountries based on COVID-related deaths per capita, the primary metric of success inmost public discourse (Tiberghien 2021). However, this perception changed
signiﬁcantly over time. By early February 2023, Japan exhibited a favorable outcome incumulative COVID-related deaths per capita (55 COVID-related deaths per 100,000
people since 2020), similar to countries like South Korea (65) and even countries like
Taiwan (70) and New Zealand (50) that had pursued a zero covid strategy for a longtime (Glanz, Hvistendahl, and Chang 2023). Moreover, Japan excelled in terms ofschool closures, a metric that received little attention in international comparisons
during the pandemic but, in hindsight, also appears as very important. According to the2022 report of the OECDʼs Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),
84,5% of Japanese students answered that their school buildings had been closed forthree months or less. While Taiwan (90.2%) and South Korea (79.2%) achieved similar
rates, all of these countries were clearly above the zero covid country New Zealand(58.1%) and the OECD average (49.5%) (OECD 2023, 28‒29).
The paper proceeds as follows. Part 2 provides the empirical basis concerning how
digital technology featured in the responses in China, South Korea, and Japan. The
focus is on PCR testing and contact tracing, and the reactions when PCR testing andcontact tracing alone became insuﬃcient to limit the spread of the virus, which occurredin all countries sooner or later. In the case of Japan, a central idea of the countryʼs
Society 5.0 strategy proved key in refraining from formally declaring a lockdown. Part 3
identiﬁes two arguments̶epidemiological eﬃcacy and rationality̶used by experts
consulting governments (speciﬁcally in New Zealand and Germany) to advocate for
implementing an elimination strategy not only in their own countries but worldwide.
This is surprising, given that the Chinese government aggressively claimed thateﬃciently implementing this strategy proved the superiority of its political system untillate 2022. Since then, however, China has worked hard to erase from public memorythat it pursued this strategy at all (Peltsch 2024). The paper holds that in the twoarguments of epidemiological eﬃcacy and rationality, a central critique from theperspective of surveillance capitalism can be discerned: the tendency to view society
through the lens of social physics (Pentland 2014). Part 4 explains this in more detail2and simultaneously shows how the Society 5.0 dimension of Japanʼs response canalleviate some of these pessimistic outlooks, by consulting the perspective of cyber
civilization (Kokuryo 2022b).2 Part 5 draws a conclusion and also discusses the elementof “self-restraint” (jishuku) in Japanʼs pandemic response in light of the recent positive
reappraisal of conformity in German sociology (Nassehi, Anderl, and Felixberger 2023).

2. COVID-19 responses of three East Asian countries
The speciﬁcs of the Japanese pandemic response become clear when compared tothat of China and South Korea. Their responses will be investigated ﬁrst.

2.1. China
China's approach, known as the zero covid strategy, was marked by stringent
lockdowns and a comprehensive surveillance system (Li et al. 2020). Introduced after
the major outbreak in Wuhan, this strategy initially appeared to achieve sustainablecontainment of the virus. The implementation of “health code” app solutions enabledboth the tracing of infection chains and, where necessary, the veriﬁcation of recent
negative PCR tests (Liang 2020). However, as time passed, the situation became more
complex, with lockdowns required in several Chinese cities during the winter 2020/2021(Myers 2021). With more infectious variants emerging, rigorous monitoring of infection
chains became increasingly diﬃcult, and lockdowns of several weeks or even months
became more frequent. The lockdown of Shanghai in spring 2022 was particularly
shocking to the international public, including the large foreign community in the city
(Zhu, Xu, and Li 2022). Despite this, some argued that the lockdown of Shanghai“minimized disruptions elsewhere” (Mahoney 2023, 16), predicting that, even as theworld learned to live with the virus, China would move towards a “48-hour or 72-hour
testing regime” (Mahoney 2023, 17), permanently maintaining zero covid. Thisprediction, however, was disproved by developments in late 2022. The continued
adherence to the zero covid strategy led to widespread economic disruptions andeventually to open protests that demanded the abdication of the Chinese Communist2

For an English exposition, see Kokuryo (2022a).
3

Party and President Xi Jinping (CNNʼs Beijing Bureau 2022). After the zero covid
strategy was abandoned and PCR testing was all but stopped, a very large wave hit a
population that was, for a large part, not suﬃciently vaccinated. It is estimated that the
number of COVID-related deaths resulting from this wave ‒ between 68 and 110 deaths
per 100,000 people ‒ exceeded the totals experienced by any of the countries mentioned
above throughout the pandemic (Glanz, Hvistendahl, and Chang 2023). Also, due towidespread lockdowns during the evaluation period, students in China could not evenparticipate in the PISA 2022 examinations.

2.2. South Korea
In the eyes of many, South Korea provided an early example of success without
resorting to lockdowns. The country managed to control an early outbreak in February2020 through extensive PCR testing and digital contact tracing that made intensive useof citizens' private data. When most Western countries went into lockdown in midMarch 2020, American data scientist Thomas Pueyo (2020a), in his article "The
Hammer and the Dance," described South Koreaʼs approach as a universal model that
could help avoid further lockdowns once the ﬁrst wave had waned. Pueyoʼs descriptionof the countryʼs approach resonated well with the WHO Director-Generalʼs call to "test,
test, test" to break the chains of infection (Farge and Revill 2020). From May 2020, datafrom credit card companies and communication companies was automatically integrated
into the contact tracing system, reducing the burden on employees at these companies
and health system personnel (E.-S. Kim 2023, 15).
However, by the end of 2020 the outcome was not as good as many expected.
Following a resurgence in cases in late 2020, some regions had to take “unprecedented
restrictions for weeks, including banning private gatherings of more than four people”(Reuters 2021). Beginning in 2021, scanning a QR code was made mandatory forentering buildings in many settings (E.-S. Kim 2023, 15); after the emergence of theOmicron variant in November 2021, providing a valid vaccine passport was mademandatory for taking part in much of public life (J. Kim 2021).

4

2.3. Japan
Early on, Japan faced a great challenge due to its limited PCR testing capacity.
Because of this, Japan adopted a more selective approach to tracing, focusing on clusters
rather than attempting to detect every possible chain of infection. In late March 2020,
amid a rise in cases, two pillars were laid out in ﬁghting the pandemic: (1) lessening theburden of public health centers, which were central for contact tracing, and (2)behavioral change among the population (Oshitani 2020, 55). If the number of
infections in a region was rising, there should be calls for “self-restraint” (jishuku),
particularly for not leaving the house unless necessary, and the “core” (shutai) of thecluster countermeasures should be moved towards the health system and care facilities(Oshitani 2020, 29). Persons with a higher a priori risk were supposed to be prioritized
concerning PCR testing. This was complemented with monitoring stations where tests
were easier accessible without a focus on a priori risk beginning in early 2021, buttracing and reducing the formation of clusters remained a central point of justifying thestrategy (Nishimura 2022, 66‒69).
The hope that public health centers could cope well with tracing was justiﬁed basedon a tradition of managing tuberculosis outbreaks and their experience with bothforward and backward contact tracing (Jindai, Furuse, and Oshitani 2020; Sena et al.
2023, 246). Although the contact tracing was carried out by phone, digital tools were
expected to help in this. Prominently, the digital system HER-SYS (Health Center Realtime Information-sharing System on COVID-19) was introduced in May 2020 to speed
up the processing of infection chain data and allow for better cooperation between
health centers. Moreover, the contact tracing app COCOA (COVID-19 Contact
Conﬁrming Application), which applied the privacy-aware iOS/Android Bluetooth
framework used in many Western countries, was introduced in June 2020. However,according to most observers, these solutions performed worse than expected. This
contributed to the broader discourse that, especially in comparison with other East
Asian countries, Japan had suﬀered a “digital defeat” (Kinai 2021).
However, it is with regards to behavioral change that Japan used digital technology ina very innovative way. In February 2020, members of the Novel Coronavirus Expert
Meeting, based on tracing data gathered by ﬁeld epidemiologists, concluded that
focusing on clusters and their formation might not merely be a makeshift solution due to5limited PCR testing capacity, but could actually be a viable priority instead ofcomprehensively tracing all chains of infection (Nishiura and Kawabata 2020, 60‒62,
65‒71). This was because an analysis of the obtained tracing data provided the insightthat virus clusters particularly emerged in humid environments. Reﬂecting this, thenational pandemic strategy devised in late March 2020 by virologist Oshitani Hitoshi
explicitly stated that neither the epidemiological model for SARS nor that for inﬂuenza
viruses was applicable during this pandemic. This led to the widely communicated callto avoid the “3Cs”: closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings, which
would help reduce the emergence of infections in the ﬁrst place. Thomas Pueyo, in an
update to his “The Hammer and The Dance” article in November 2020, called thisapproach “contrafection,” i.e., reducing the (eﬀective) contagiousness of the virus whenpeople meet (Pueyo 2020b).3 Aerosol and droplet simulations of a variety of settings on
the supercomputer Fugaku were carried out since April 2020, and helped in reducing
infection risk when environments and the behavior of people in them were adapted
accordingly. The results were communicated through mass media and propagatedthrough institutional channels, such as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science and Technology (MEXT) did towards schools (Monbu Kagakushō 2021). The
aerosol and droplet simulations as well as their rollout closely aligned with the techniqueof data assimilation into spatial models according to Japanʼs Society 5.0 strategy, which
has been articulated as a cyber-physical system spanning all of society with Fugaku as its
computational core (Kümmerle 2023). The simulations won the Gordon Bell Special
Prize for High Performance ComputingBased COVID-19 Research 2021 (RIKEN
2021).
Unlike China and South Korea, Japan never introduced mandatory QR codes or
vaccine passports to enter buildings on a larger scale.

3. Elimination strategy and the Asia-PaciﬁcCorrectly referring to the mortality numbers at that time, Shibuya Kenji and two

3

Providing an information-theoretic foundation, Pueyo reformulated the Japanese

governmentʼs call to avoid the 3Cs as follows: “Avoid crowded, conﬁned, close,clamorous communication” (2020b).
6other Japanese health experts at Kingʼs College in London in early February 2021
highlighted that Japan had the “second worst record in the Western Paciﬁc region”.
However, in stark contrast with how the situation would actually develop, they judgedthat Japan was a “threat to the health security of the entire region”. They suggested thatJapan should adopt a “ʻzero covidʼ strategy that eliminates community transmission,”
which “would also contribute to regional elimination of COVID-19 in the years ahead”(Shimizu, Tokuda, and Shibuya 2021, 1‒2). While this suggestion may seem absurd inhindsight, Shibuya and his colleagues merely suggested the same as the “Asia-Paciﬁc
Zero COVID Coalition” that was formed in late January 2021. Its founding members
being Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, the initiative
advocated that “Asian-Paciﬁc countries should lead the world on zero covid”(EndCoronavirus.org 2021). Its mere existence, as well as its resonance withsuggestions of well-recognized experts like Shibuya, serves as a case in point that there
was a strong discursive connection between an elimination strategy and the Asia-Paciﬁcregion.
The two sections of this part follow two experts who held formal positions in advising
the governments of New Zealand and Germany, respectively, and argued for the
adoption of an elimination strategy not only in their country, but worldwide. The
former, epidemiologist Michael Baker, made the argument on the grounds of
epidemiological eﬃcacy, the latter, global technology diplomacy expert Maximilian
Mayer, made the argument on the grounds of rationality.

3.1. Epidemiological eﬃcacy
In an interview for an article from early 2023, Michael Baker remembered that “It wasquite a revelation that China was able to stop transmission in 2020 in Wuhan,” and that
this “was the proof of concept” for him (Cortez 2023). Although New Zealand went into
lockdown as most Western countries in early 2020, Baker helped draft the strategy toeliminate all community transmission by early summer (M. G. Baker, Wilson, andAnglemyer 2020). For many, New Zealand became a positive point of reference in order
to argue for the viability of an elimination strategy.
Building on this success and international acclaim, Baker in the British newspaper

7

The Guardian in late January 2021 argued that “All countries should pursue a Covid-19
elimination strategy”. Although vaccination had already begun in most countries, heconsidered it merely an addition: “The rollout of eﬀective vaccines will make Covid-19
elimination easier to achieve. Eﬀective vaccines working in combination with otherpublic health measures have been crucial to the successful elimination of diseases suchas polio and measles in many countries. […] It also still works if vaccines provide only
limited long-term protection. For example, if vaccines are poorly eﬀective at preventing
onward transmission then elimination methods could supplement that limitation.” (M.
Baker and McKee 2021). Although Baker called elimination “a good interim strategy
while we identify an optimal long-term approach”, he emphasized that “It issustainable”, and that “If the virus mutates, elimination still works. The major methods
used for Covid-19 elimination (border management, physical distancing, mask wearing,
testing and contact tracing) are relatively unaﬀected by virus mutations (though testing
could theoretically be less eﬀective if the virus changed markedly, and outbreak control
would become more diﬃcult with more infectious variants).” (M. Baker and McKee2021) The possibility that outbreak control for more infectious variants could requiremeasures that were unacceptably harsh in democracies, but not in autocracies, thus also
requiring diﬀerent “interim solutions”, was not considered. Moreover, the idea that alegal system can prohibit sanctions on individuals that appeared necessary forelimination ‒ a position held by many politicians in Japan and health experts like
Oshitani ‒ was implicitly delegitimized.
Moving forward to September 2021, when zero covid was still in place in New
Zealand but protests were spreading in the face of prolonged lockdowns, Baker judgedthat “One of the main beneﬁts of the elimination strategy is that it keeps […] options
open” (Normile 2021); less than one month later, the country ﬁnally moved away fromit (Wiles 2021). A statement by Baker in an article on lessons from the pandemic fromJanuary 2023, after zero covid had disastrously failed even in China, hints at just how
much he ‒ and most likely many other health experts arguing for elimination ‒ musthave been aware of basic epidemiological diﬃculties for elimination even as they
advocated for it: “I think we had a reasonable chance of doing it. But the opportunity isvery early on in a pandemic. Once thereʼs global distribution, youʼve got a hugechallenge” (Cortez 2023).

8

3.2. Rationality
Another way to argue for zero covid was to make the point that it was purely rational,
or, equivalently, to argue that opposition to it was irrational. While this may appear as
having no argument at all, the argument can be constructed indirectly as the claim that
other countries who pursued elimination had, supposedly in a purely rational manner,learned from the experience with the SARS epidemic. It is worth noting that (1) thispositive framing is the exact inversion of Western discourses on East Asians as bearersof disease during the SARS epidemic from 2002 to 2003 (Kong 2019; 2024) and that (2)this involves an interpretation of strategies where even the experts who designed thesestrategies may not reach a clear consensus of what they were aiming at concretely.4
Still, the argument for rationality by referring to responses of countries in the AsiaPaciﬁc was, in a theoretically rather reﬁned way, made by Maximilian Mayer, a German
scholar of global technology diplomacy. According to an interview, Mayer had been
contacted by the German Ministry of the Interior in February 2020 as an “Asia scholar”(Asien-Wissenschaftler) (Brauns 2020). It is notable that already before the pandemic,
he had developed the argument “that the responses to Chinese digital innovations tend
to fall in a self-referential trap. Drawing on Edward Saidʼs problematization of how
Western discourses portray other cultures and societies as diﬀerent and problematic(Said 1985; Palat 2000)”, he argued that “todayʼs intellectual reﬂex is akin to ʻdigitalorientalismʼ.” (Mayer 2020, 177) It is worth noting that this should be clearly
distinguished from the case of Baker, who saw Chinaʼs reaction as the “proof ofconcept” for a strategy he designed based on his own epidemiological expertise. Mayer
did not claim epidemiological expertise, but rather, as an “Asia scholar”, claimed
expertise on how to make sense of strategies adopted by countries in the Asia-Paciﬁc.5

4

Two texts co-authored by Michael Baker use diﬀerent categorizations. M. G. Baker,

Nick Wilson, and Blakely (2020) distinguish between an exclusion strategy, anelimination strategy, a suppression strategy, a mitigation strategy, and having no
substantive strategy. Meanwhile, Oliu-Barton et al. (2022) contrast elimination with
mitigation but call to “overcome the dichotomy between elimination and mitigation.” As
this paper proceeds genealogically, it reproduces the categories of the actors themselves,speciﬁcally Maximilian Mayer and his co-authors.
5This raises questions concerning the cooperation of experts in interdisciplinary9In an unpublished report uploaded to researchmap (dated March 4 2020) with thetitle “Learning from Wuhan ̶ there is no Alternative to the Containment of COVID19” (Kolbl and Mayer 2020)6, he and his co-author focused on China, arguing that mostother East Asian countries that appeared successful were taking similar measures.
However, they grouped Japan together with the US and Iran and stated that “it becomes
obvious that [these three countries] have all given up on containing the virus and areheading for the most horrendous scenario, many times worse than what we could see at
any time in Wuhan, this time not in one city, but possibly throughout the entire
territory.” (Kolbl and Mayer 2020, 22) Concerning elimination, they were hesitant: “it isunlikely that we are able to eradicate the virus once and for all. Many experts, includingfrom WHO, have said this, and all data coming in conﬁrms it.” (Kolbl and Mayer 2020,14) More optimistically, and in complete accordance with the perspective of “digitalorientalism” that Mayer had already developed, they wrote that “The good news is that,
if we are willing to shed our orientalist attitude with regards to China, we can focus on
their experience, beneﬁt from it and use the tools they developed.” (Kolbl and Mayer
2020, 14) It is with this stance that Mayer and the co-author of the report became partof the oﬃcial Covid Task Force of the German Ministry of the Interior in mid-March
2020, where he provided the expertise on testing and tracing strategies. According toanother member, there were no virologists in the group at the beginning (Bude 2022,
247).
Neither the report of the Task Force (Bundesinnenministerium 2020), nor an article
by Mayer and another Task Force member in April (Feldner and Mayer 2020), explicitly
argued for virus elimination. Rather, both highlighted the successes of East Asian
democracies, in the former case the PCR testing infrastructure of South Korea, in thelatter case the digital tracing application in Taiwan.
This stance had substantially changed by November 2020. Mayer now clearly judged
settings, which are beyond the scope of this paper but have been prominently captured
by Collins and Evans (2007) in their book Rethinking Expertise using the concept of“interactional expertise.”6

The report is now classiﬁed as an “academic text” and has been uploaded in thesame form onto the homepage of the University of Bonn, Mayerʼs current institution(cassis_de 2020).
10

that East Asian countries had, building on the experience with SARS, actually pursued
the principle of eradication all along, and with the success that they could now live
without lockdowns ‒ at least without prolonged ones. Mayer co-authored two texts
aimed at a general public together with Chinese studies scholar Marina Rudyak, andsociologist Marius Meinhof who was conducting research on China (Rudyak, Mayer,and Meinhof 2020a; Mayer, Rudyak, and Meinhof 2020).7 One of the articles co writtenby Mayer, Rudyak and Meinhof, titled “Containment instead of eradication ‒ why theEuropeans still ﬁnd it hard to learn from East Asia in matters of COVID”, posited that“[f]rom the outset, experts in Europe and East Asia adopted diﬀerent strategies. Afterthe experience with SARS in 2003, East Asian countries pursued the 'principle oferadication.' [...] [In Europe], epidemiologists presented the familiar ʻinﬂuenza modelʼ[...] The fact that these two radically diﬀerent models to the pandemic exist is hardly
ever mentioned in Euro-American discourse. Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, China andMongolia are seldom mentioned, or their success in combating the pandemic
is dismissed with general references to insularity or autocracy.” (Rudyak, Mayer, andMeinhof 2020b, 24) They also stated that Australia and New Zealand were now also
pursuing such a strategy, highlighting the viability in culturally Western countries. It is
worth noting that since SARS did not have any signiﬁcant impact on Japan, the authors
could leave it out of the discussion while maintain consistency of their narrative.
The other article was titled “Corona and the epidemic orientalism ‒ why we still do
not want to learn from Asia” and made an attempt at explaining the causal and temporal
dynamics of pandemic responses in East Asia in more detail. The article asserts withcertainty that “After the experience of the Sars epidemic in 2003, the threat posed by
the virus was hardly doubted by the population in East Asia. No one questioned
epidemiological expertise on how to deal with Sars-Cov-2. Eradicating it, not simply
slowing down its spread, was declared the top strategic goal.” (Mayer, Rudyak, andMeinhof 2020) This text mentions Japan twice. The ﬁrst mention positively likens
Japanʼs outcome to South Korea and Taiwan: “In both countries, similar to Japan, there7

For direct quotations from Rudyak, Mayer, and Meinhof (2020a), this paper refers

to the translation of one of these articles that appeared in CATSarena, the newsletter of
the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies of Heidelberg University (Rudyak,
Mayer, and Meinhof 2020b).
11

was no lockdown at all.” The second mention is more critical, both towards Japan andSouth Korea, not concerning their outcome, but concerning the explanations of theseoutcomes. Mayer and the other authors contend that “[t]he ʻpandemic nationalismʼ thatis emerging in China and, to a lesser extent, also in Japan and South Korea, explains
national success against Corona with the superiority of the political system or cultural
attitudes.” (2020)8 What is implied here is the idea that medical and technological basisof the elimination strategy could well be deployed worldwide, and that not doing so ‒ orat least not trying to do so ‒ would amount to overemphasizing the relevance of politics
and culture in pandemic responses. Mayer and his co-authors make references to the(supposed) self-referential trap of orientalism in some variations,9 peaking in the claimthat “There are no rational arguments for ignoring the elimination strategy”. This
stance leaves no room for Oshitani Hitoshiʼs position that SARS-CoV-2 required an
approach distinct from SARS, who built on his own experience in ﬁghting the SARS
epidemic as a regional advisor to the World Health Organization (Staﬀord 2005).
References to Australia and New Zealand again served to highlight that elimination
strategy was viable even in culturally Western countries.
Consistent with these positions, Maximilian Mayer, two other members of the former
Covid Task Force of the Ministry of the Interior (Bude 2022, 252), and ten otherexperts founded the interdisciplinary initiative NOCOVID. Announced on January 18

8In the case of Japan, Mayer and his co-authors most likely referred to statements

similar to that of then-Vice Prime Minister Asō Tarō on the (supposedly) "high culturallevel of the people" (mindo ga takai) in Japan. This had also been reported in German
media, sometimes critically (Blaschke 2020).
9"From the very beginning, pandemic policy in Europe was characterized by such amechanism of exclusion ‒ an epidemic orientalism. East Asia, especially China, wasdescribed as the antithesis of us; the outbreak of infection seemed distant to us, themeasures there strange. And backward anyway. This created a dichotomy: our liberal
self versus the authoritarian other, our love of freedom versus their spirit of collectivity."‒ “From a philosophical point of view, we are taking a step back from our self-image as
an enlightened society that allows for diverse positions and brings them into dialogue
with one another. Europe's idealized self-image as a place for the rational exchange ofwell-founded opinions is shattered by Orientalism” (Mayer, Rudyak, and Meinhof2020).
12

2021, its position paper stated that "we learn from other countries that consequentelimination as the strategic goal leads to the lowest damage for the society” (NOCOVID 2021, 2). The primary partners for cooperation were “leading experts from
Australia and New Zealand”; the only other countries mentioned explicitly were Finlandand Taiwan (NO-COVID 2021). This shows that the scientiﬁc justiﬁcation was, in apositive sense, removed from all cultural or political assumptions, and the elimination
strategy appeared as universally applicable.

4. Calibrating social theories of digital technology
Building on the three outcomes of China, South Korea, and Japan (part 2), and on thefundamental mispredictions of these outcomes from the viewpoints of epidemiologicaleﬃcacy and rationality by inﬂuential experts (part 3), a ﬁne-tuning of social theories ofdigital technology becomes possible. This allows for a better understanding of how
digital technology can be used in the short- to mid-term in a manner that is both
eﬃcient and ethical.

4.1. Surveillance capitalism
In her inﬂuential book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human

Future at the New Frontier of Power, economist Shoshana Zuboﬀ (2019) critiques thepromise of modeling and optimizing human behavior ever more closely as “social
physics,” a concept framed as a “new science” by MIT data scientist Alex Pentland(2014). As sociologists of knowledge have critically pointed out, both the term and theidea can be traced back to French statistician Adolphe Quetelet; even in its new form,
the approach does not overcome the positivistic assumptions connected to naturalscience at that time (Adolf and Stehr 2018). However, as Zuboﬀ has highlighted,
Pentlandʼs approach to modeling behavior holds signiﬁcant appeal among surveillance
capitalists, creating an “instrumentarian collective” (Zuboﬀ 2019, 416‒44). Since big
data usage had already become ingrained in all branches of science by then (van Dijck2014), it is hardly surprising that not only data scientist Thomas Pueyo, but the World
Health Organization as an institution supported the idea of modeling and optimizing
the behavior of all individuals in a society. Contributing to data collection by undergoing13

a PCR test at the right time became a new ethical norm for being a good citizen, as
government interventions were legitimized based on data-driven projections (Greenand Fazi 2023, 118‒19). From this, it is also understandable why COVID-related deaths
per capita became the main metric for a successful response, and why Japan was initiallyconsidered heavily underperforming.
Social physics helped advance the “epidemiological gaze” on individuals (Fuller 2022,232), and the positive connotation of having a situation that can be modeled clariﬁes
why Michael Baker considered the imposition of lockdowns as something that kept
“options open” (Normile 2021) even in the face of opposition. From Zuboﬀʼsperspective, it makes sense that he did not account for possible constraints imposed bydemocratic political systems, as she describes Chinese surveillance capitalists asessentially using the same mechanisms as Western ones (2019, 388‒397). Clearly
distinguishing surveillance capitalists such as Alibaba from the state itself, Zuboﬀ
argued that only with the social credit score system in China will “the state assume therole of the behaviorist god” (2019, 394).
Maximilian Mayer, an expert of global technology diplomacy, most likely understoodthese distinctions well. In an article in the South China Morning Post in January 2020,
he argued that “surveillance capitalism works similarly everywhere” (Mahoney andMayer 2020) in an article in the Southern China Morning Post in January 2020, andeven linked this article in the document from March 4, 2020 on the response in China(Kolbl and Mayer 2020, 14). Using his own notion of “digital orientalism”, he could
build on the general theory of Zuboﬀ while maintaining that her special judgment of theChinese social credit score system is irrational.10 Already before the pandemic, Mayer
had made the case that digital authoritarian practices (Michaelsen and Glasius 2018)
were spreading globally (2020, 185); during the pandemic, this allowed him toconsistently make the case that Asia-Paciﬁc had merely “learned” from the SARS

10

It was through explicit reference to Mayerʼs notion of “digital orientalism” that

Josef Gregory Mahoney ‒ who, together with Mayer, served as co-editor for the special
issue on “Chinaʼs Cyberpower and its Impact” in the Journal of Chinese Political

Science ‒ in June 2022 justiﬁed the multi-month lockdown of Shanghai that had justended and judged that the zero covid strategy may well be continued indeﬁnitely, atleast in China (2023, 17).
14

epidemic and were rolling out the surveillance technology necessary for elimination on apurely rational basis. His argument resonated well with the broader notion that AsiaPaciﬁc countries should be the avant-garde for countermeasures worldwide, as
evidenced by his membership in the German NOCOVID initiative and further
interviews in the press (Brauns 2020; Husmann 2021).
The ﬁnancial aspects of Zuboﬀʼs theory of surveillance capitalism were also highly
important, as evidenced by the high appreciation of South Koreaʼs response. Using theformula “2019 = 1919 + 1929,” the report from the Task Force of the German Ministryof the Interior emphasized that the pandemic had the potential to be not only a healthcatastrophe (like the Spanish Flu) but also an economic catastrophe (like the Great
Depression) if control was lost (Bundesinnenministerium 2020, 13‒14). Referring tothis ﬁnancial dimension of the pandemic, it has been argued that the South Korean
governmentʼs call for personal sacriﬁce for the good of the country, by providing
personal data, resembled the widely remembered gold-collecting campaign after the
Asian ﬁnancial crisis in 1997 and the tradition this practice drew on (Kusakabe et al.
2022, 131). While domestically calling for sacriﬁces, the government actively promoted“How Korea responded to a pandemic using ICT” (The Government of Korea 2020) to
an international audience, which was interpreted as a sign of competence. A KoreanStudies scholar in Germany explained that Koreans merely traded oﬀ a certain degree ofprivacy for an eﬃcient public health response (Lee 2021). Possibly unknown to thisscholar, this echoed Pentlandʼs call for a “New Deal on Data,” whose key would be to“treat personal data as an asset; individuals would have ownership rights in data that areabout them” (2013, 83). During the pandemic, Zuboﬀʼs suspicion that thisempowerment narrative of the “instrumentarian collective” provided little protection
against the excesses of surveillance capitalism proved to be true.
Examining how the epidemiological situation in South Korea developed and how it
was received by the domestic public raises questions about the actual usefulness of thedata donation. Not only was South Koreaʼs ﬁnal outcome concerning the metrics
inspected in this paper similar to that of Japan, but the approval rating of the South
Korean public concerning the countryʼs COVID response dropped signiﬁcantly from
86% in the spring of 2020 to 66% in the spring of 2022, only slightly above the levels invarious countries like the US (57%), Japan (58%), and the UK (59%) (Alliance of
Democracies Foundation 2020; 2022). On the other hand, only 35% of the Japanese15

public, in hindsight, judged that their “government has done too much to limit peopleʼsfreedoms during the coronavirus crisis,” whereas for South Korea, it was 52%, the sameratio as in the US (Alliance of Democracies Foundation 2023, 59). While surveillance
capitalists have little interest in highlighting the questionable usefulness of the data
donation by the South Korean people, judging what actually constituted a good response
in a democracy requires critical research that does not simply call for the use of “more”
data.

4.2. Cyber civilization
One important dimension of how to use data that cannot be straightforwardlyconnected to individuals can be found in the Japanese pandemic strategy. To make senseof this, Jiro Kokuryoʼs On Cyber Civilization: Governing the Potluck Economy isparticularly useful because it emphasizes the relevance of altruism (2022b, 9‒10). As thecall to avoid the 3Cs (closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings) was
based on the speciﬁcs of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the mechanism that Thomas Pueyo
called contrafection (Pueyo 2020b) could work “at scale” in reducing clusters during
this pandemic if people adapted their behavior. The classiﬁcation of settings whereclusters formed easily, the simulation of aerosol and droplet dynamics in various
conﬁgurations of these settings on the supercomputer Fugaku, and the dissemination of
improvements to these settings through mass media and institutional channels utilized
personal data only after it was highly aggregated. For the “data assimilation” operationin the Society 5.0 cyber-physical system to become eﬀective (Kümmerle 2023), it wasnecessary to assume that members of the public were surveilling each other to ensure
they followed the suggestions derived from the simulations. This delegation from healthauthorities to the public was a matter of trust ‒ and it is precisely trust, not money, thatthe theory of cyber civilization considers the primary measure of wealth (Kokuryo
2022b, 41).11 Mutual, but non-totalitarian, surveillance and homogenization of behavior
11

More speciﬁcally, Kokuryo holds that there is a transition from modern industrial

civilization, where the central technology is energy, wealth is represented primarily bymoney, and the governance structure is that of the market, towards cyber civilization,
where the central technology is digital technology, wealth is primarily represented bytrust, and the governance structure is that of the platform (2022b, 36, 41).
16

can be understood as the generalization of “self-restraint” (jishuku) in leaving oneʼshome unless necessary, which had been stipulated as a central part of behavioral change
in Oshitaniʼs strategy if infections were rising in a region (Oshitani 2020, 29).12 In
terms of the potluck economy envisioned by Kokuryo, the willingness to engage in selfrestraint when necessary was something that members of the Japanese public were
expected to provide in order to obtain trust during the pandemic.13
Appreciating the relevance of self-restraint in Japanʼs pandemic response from theperspective of cyber civilization requires two considerations. The ﬁrst concerns
ontology. The concept of self-restraint in Japan inherently blurs the deﬁnition of the“self,” i.e., the subject that should restrain itself (Kariya 2022, 131‒65). However,philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton has pointed out that “individuation itself”(Bratton 2021, 66) can place too much of a burden on society in times of crisis,
highlighting that an appropriate “sensing layer” of society should not focus solely on
individuals (Bratton 2021, 41‒46). Accommodating this decentering of agents awayfrom individuals in the theory of cyber civilization should not be a fundamental
problem, since a ﬂexible deﬁnition of capitalism has to include companies and various
institutions as agents (Kocka 2024, 20).14 The second consideration concerns
traceability, one of the main structural changes in the transition towards cyber
civilization.15 For Kokuryo, greatly increased traceability would help in “freeing
business models from their spatio-temporal limitations” (2022b, 79). However, the12

In the ideal form, this would have made all people consistently adapt their behavior

to their environments in order to reduce “infection events” to a minimum ‒ it was such
infection events that Pueyoʼs “Swiss Cheese Strategy” aimed to minimize (2020b).
13

On potluck and trust, see (Kokuryo 2022b, 180‒81). The fact that somerestaurants refused to comply with municipal requests but were not shut down
demonstrates that trust is contextual and usually not lost entirely.
14

This judgment is made by social historian Jürgen Kocka in his work Capitalism: A

Short History (2024, 20). It concerns what Kokuryo calls the modern industrial
civilization.
15

The four main structural factors in the transition towards cyber civilization are

network externalities, zero marginal cost, traceability, and behavior as a complex systemwith outcomes that are hard to predict (Kokuryo 2022b, 12‒13).
17

aerosol and droplet simulations using spatial digital models on the supercomputer
Fugaku were based on the assumption that complete traceability was not necessary.
While Fugaku at the center of Society 5.0 had only limited computational resources, theteam was pleased in hindsight that they managed to “provide the appropriate
information with the appropriate timing” for optimizing settings and behavioral
adaptation (rikenchannel 2023). An appreciation of space is necessary for capturing therelevance of culture for human behavior (Dünne et al. 2006). Taking into account thelimitations of traceability would also make cyber civilization compatible with discussionsof the “Internet of Places” (Takagi 2023).16
An instructive example of why limited traceability can be beneﬁcial is seen in how
Japan handled school closures. While the Ministry of Education provided guidelines on
improving hygiene, the ﬁnal decision on whether to close a school (or a class where
there had been an infection) was made at the municipal level. This allowed for betterrisk tradeoﬀs to avoid cluster formations rather than focusing solely on preventing all
infections. On the other hand, the much better traceability of infected individuals in the
Chinese pandemic response actually became a fundamental problem for decisionmaking, leading to harmful inﬂexibility in adjusting countermeasures in 2022. Thissituation provides an interesting parallel to what Fukuzawa Yukichi, whom Kokuryo has
drawn upon, wrote in 1875 in his Outline of a Theory of Civilization. Fukuzawa
explained that both Japan and China were only half-civilized by Western standards but
made an important distinction concerning the distribution of power. While the centersof worldly and spiritual power were divided between the shogunate and the emperor inJapan, the emperor remained the center of both worldly and spiritual power in China(Fukuzawa 2010, 32‒37). While Kokuryo contrasts Western individualism with Eastern
altruism (2022b, 9), reﬁnements of the theory should pay close attention to the very
diﬀerent trajectories of Japan and China through the pandemic, particularly to the
distribution of power inside and between platforms. Considerations for privacy, which
greatly distinguished the responses of Japan and China from each other, may be
addressed from the perspective of contextual integrity (Nissenbaum 2011).

16

If companies and other institutions could provide semantically rich digitalmodels/twins, this would greatly increase traceability of behavior in spatial
arrangements.
18

5. Conclusion
After describing the trajectories of China, South Korea, and Japan throughout the
pandemic, this paper has shown how their outcomes deﬁed the prediction that theelimination strategy was superior. This insight adds depth to understanding the
trajectories of zero covid countries Taiwan and New Zealand, whose strategies are often
rationalized as follows: aiming for elimination was preferable until pharmaceuticalinterventions, such as vaccines, became available, after which moving away from
elimination became a viable alternative. In this narrative, China supposedly made themistake of not pursuing vaccination earnestly enough and sticking to zero covid for too
long due to political reasons (Cortez 2023). However, this narrative is overly simplistic.
Inﬂuential experts in late 2020 and early 2021 justiﬁed elimination from the viewpointof epidemiological eﬃcacy and rationality and considered the countries in the AsiaPaciﬁc as the avant-garde for achieving elimination worldwide. They did not see
vaccination as a gamechanger. That the arguments of Michael Baker and Maximilian
Mayer appeared as consistent and convincing demonstrates that the response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, despite many regional variations, was signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced by
the dominance of social physics as described and feared by Shoshana Zuboﬀ. Building a
global infrastructure for epidemic surveillance that is reliable will prove diﬃcult until it
is better understood how the above-mentioned misjudgments during the COVID-19
pandemic were made.
Such a judgment may appear overly critical. Yet, it aligns well with the perspective of
virologist Oshitani Hitoshi, the architect of Japanʼs pandemic strategy. Two years into
the pandemic, in an interview in March 2022, he felt validated in his opposition to mass
testing: “early on, the West and the WHO emphasized the need to ʻtest, test, test,ʼ which
would, supposedly, allow containment (fūjikome) of the virus.” However, he had
considered this to be “absolutely mistaken” from the beginning and suspected that
Western specialists had too much faith (shinpō shisugiteiru) in science (Sena et al.
2023, 262). As can be ascertained from documents and interviews from 2020, Oshitani
justiﬁed the focus on clusters as a conscious decision to avoid seeking a formal modeland instead utilize what was at hand, describing it as a “bricolage” following
ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) (Kawai 2021, 136‒39). That the perspective

19

of cyber civilization appears to ﬁt well to the strategy is likely because Jiro Kokuryo̶
also referencing Lévi-Strauss̶calls for modularizing processes and providing interfaces
in a way that can easily become part of a bricolage (Kokuryo 2022b, 105). Because ofthis, the Japanese pandemic response may be an early yet paradigmatic case study forfurther developing the theory of cyber civilization.
While scholars of Chinese and Korean studies in the West could easily refer toepidemiological eﬃcacy and rationality to understand their countries' pandemic
responses well into 2021, appreciating the importance of self-restraint in Japanʼs
pandemic response has proved much more diﬃcult for Japanese studies scholars. The
ethnographically grounded study by Borovoy (2022) explains how self-restraint worked
mostly constructively without hiding speciﬁc ethical problems it brought about, such as
the emergence of vigilante “self-restraint police.” Other studies, like Wright's, haveargued that the Japanese response relied on “peer pressure, stigma, and social coercion,”and on “government appeals to ethno-nationalist identity” (2021, 453, 466). According
to Wright, appeals to self-restraint enabled “an eﬀective lockdown that was impossible
to implement by legal means,” particularly due to low trust in the government (2021,
458, 465). Such research on the Japanese response, primarily conducted early in the
pandemic, helped normalize formal lockdowns in the rest of the world, including bygovernments who relied on experts whose advice, as it turned out, proved to be
untrustworthy.
However, when considering recent trends in sociology, at least in Germany, the ideaof self-restraint should not be considered merely a substitute for formal regulation, even
if there are side eﬀects that have hitherto appeared as problematic. When thinking
about how to cope with limited resources and the consequences of climate change,
conformity should receive a positive re-evaluation (Nassehi 2023, 3). The question ofindividuation arises similarly to how it did in the Japanese pandemic response. The
theory of cyber civilization may help analyze how to think about trust concerning theseissues.

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