The 44th Southeast Asia Seminar

“The Covid-19 Pandemic in Japanese and Southeast Asian Perspective:
Histories, States, Markets, Societies”

As of October 28, 2020, according to the World Health Organization, there are nearly 43.77 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 infections and more than 1.16 million deaths worldwide. On January 13, 2020, the first recorded case outside China was confirmed in Thailand. By January 30, the World Health Organization’s situation report indicated that more than half of the first eighteen countries that had confirmed cases were from the closely connected Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Australia (Taiwan, which registered its first case on January 21, was excluded because it was not a member of the WHO).

Since then, the countries in this region have had varying degrees of success in adopting variegated policies and other responses to the pandemic and its devastating effects on people’s lives and livelihoods. Mortality rates from Covid-19 are highest in the Philippines (6.61 deaths per 100,000 population, as of October 28, 2020; updated statistics here) and Indonesia (5.05), and lowest in Thailand (0.08) and Vietnam (0.04). Japan, despite not undertaking large-scale PCR testing and imposing tight lockdown, has a lower-than-average mortality rate (1.36) among developed countries. This suggests a heterogeneity of thinking, policies, practices, and behavior on the part of states, markets, and societies as they cope with, find ways of surviving and living with, the coronavirus.

The Covid-19 pandemic provides a touchstone as well as a window from which to view, analyze, and understand the evolving dynamics that are (re)shaping the histories, politics, economies, landscapes, ecologies, cultures, and daily life of this region. How have Japanese and Southeast Asian states, markets, and societies responded to the pandemic crisis? What constraints and opportunities for transformative change does the pandemic afford? What would a post-Covid-19 Japan and Southeast Asia look like?

The 44th Southeast Asia Seminar seeks to provide grounds for reflection and comparison by presenting a selection of “case studies” through which prominent experts based in the region adopt a variety of perspectives—historical, epidemiological, political, economic, and socio-cultural—to critically examine the connectivity, impact, and implications of the pandemic, the challenges and lessons it poses, and the policy, market, and quotidian responses adopted by different actors in and across nations and regions.