As COVID-19 cases rise in Japan and the world favors cleanliness over sustainability, the budding environmental movement is being forced to adapt.
While activists are coming up with innovative ways to continue spreading their message, they worry about how the nation will be shaped by the pandemic — and fear the movement will become a distant memory when the outbreak subsides.
Just a year and a half after the local branch of Fridays For Future opened in Japan, and only eight months after a municipality in the nation declared a climate emergency for the first time, environmental activism is facing an existential crisis. COVID-19 is preventing public gatherings and events from taking place. It has also forced some companies to increase their usage of single-use plastics in order to protect products from contamination. And it is uprooting university students, who are at the heart of climate activism all over the world.