“We’re going to take a break for 15 minutes and ventilate the place,” says Natsuki Kido, guitarist for virtuosic prog-rock trio Korekyojinn. It’s a Wednesday evening in mid-April, and the band is playing to an empty room — and an online audience of a few hundred — at Club Goodman in Tokyo’s Akihabara district.
A well-trafficked stop on the underground rock circuit, Club Goodman was one of the first venues in the city to shut down in response to the current coronavirus outbreak. Like many small businesses that have seen their main source of income evaporate, it has been trying to adapt.
In the early days of the outbreak, clubs and live music venues were quickly singled out as places to avoid. Often cramped and poorly ventilated — which is to say nothing of the state of the toilets — they are ideal environments for viral transmission, as was demonstrated when a cluster of infections was traced to some venues in Osaka.