Building Back Better to Overcome the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Great East Japan Earthquake

Japan is now facing the new disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic in the midst of the recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake. We identified the following unique characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic. (A) Unlike many past infectious diseases, the epicenters of the most severe outbreaks until the first half of 2020 were the wealthiest metropolises in the USA and Europe. (B) The virus of COVID-19 is mostly transmitted through face-to-face (F2F) communication. Thus, despite the great advancement of ICT today, the pandemic has been causing grave negative socioeconomic effects throughout the world. (C) The propagation of virus transmission occurs in 3C-environments (i.e., crowded places, close-contact settings, and confined and closed spaces) in big cities. Thus, large cities that have grown in the past with intensive agglomeration of socioeconomic activities in 3C environments now face the paradox of relying less on such 3C environments to avoid the risk of infection diseases in the future. The propagation of virus transmission in 3C environments also yields the scale-effect of population concentration in large cities. (D) Given that the functioning of metropolises in the USA and Europe is supported by a large mass of so-called essential workers, their working and living conditions in 3C-environments triggered the COVID-19 explosions there. The spread of COVID-19 infections in Japan has proceeded under the strong influence of the Tokyo monopolar land system. In particular, we identified a strong population-scale effect in infection growth in Tokyo. In the USA and Europe, in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the epicenters of the outbreaks were around respective economic centers called “the parallelogram” in the North-West USA and around the area called the “Blue Banana” in Western Europe. The explosion of the pandemic in the USA was largely caused by the fierce presidential campaign, suggesting that in emergency situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, decisive political leadership at the national level based on scientific evidence is indispensable for controlling the situation. We examined the possible impact of the pandemic on the spatial structure of cities and regions in the future, focusing on the practice of working from home (WFH), which became rapidly popular in many countries for mitigating the 3C-environments in large cities. By using an analytical model, we have shown why the WFH productivity relative to working with commuting (WWC) is much lower in Japan in comparison with other major countries and how to improve the WFH productivity in Japan. To build back better large cities in Japan after the pandemic, each firm needs to transform its traditional working system centered around the HQ office in Central Business District (CBD) to an Activity Based Working system (ABW system) by fully utilizing ICT. With the prolonged pandemic in Japan, we witness that a weakening of the Tokyo monopolar system both in migration pattern and firm location choice.