On Jan. 15, 2020, a male resident of Kanagawa Prefecture in his 30s who had returned from a trip to the city of Wuhan, China, was found to be infected with the coronavirus, becoming the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Japan.
This marked the beginning of Japan’s four-year battle with the viral disease, which had killed over 95,000 people in the country as of last summer and is confirmed to have infected at least 33 million, though given the number of untested cases, the actual figures are very likely to be much higher.
Four years later, the nation has returned to its pre-COVID norm on most levels. Businesses have bounced back, international tourism has returned and people are enjoying life without masks in most situations, with hand sanitizers at storefronts being one of the few remnants of the pandemic habits the nation adopted.