• Overview of this repository
• Overview of State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease in Japan
• Description of files
• Description of columns in covid-19_emergency_statement_japan.csv
• Description of columns in covid-19_emergency_statement_japan_prefectural.csv
• Example of long-format data generated by make_long_covid19_emergency_statement_japan.R
  • Example of code filtering the long-format data for Tokyo from January 1, 2021 (on January 26, 2021)
  • Example of code depicting the emergency declaration date-coverage for Hokkaido, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Fukuoka around 1st emergency declaration in 2020
• Data source of covid-19_emergency_statement_japan.csv
• Citation
• Reference
• Acknowledgement

Date-range data of the COVID-19 emergency declaration (緊急事態宣言; Kinkyujitaisengen, in Japanese) for the prefectures in Japan. The emergency declarations in this dataset are those issued by the government of Japan and prefectural governments of Japan.

The declaration of a state of emergency (緊急事態宣言; Kinkyujitaisengen, in Japanese) regarding a new coronavirus infection in Japan issued by the government of Japan is a declaration to invoke special authority for an emergency situation or to alert the public, as defined in Chapter 4 of the "Act on Special Measures for Pandemic Influenza and New Infectious Diseases Preparedness and Response", a law in Japan (e-Gov, Japan, 2020; Cabinet Secretariat, Japan, 2020a). The purpose of this law is to protect the lives and health of the people and to minimize the impact on the lives of the people and the national economy (Cabinet Secretariat, Japan, 2020b). The state of emergency in Japan is not accompanied by a mandatory lockdown with penalties as in other countries, but is basically based on a request to the public. Specifically, it asks for the following measures (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, Japan, 2020; Cabinet Secretariat, Japan, 2021):

• Request to refrain from going out or traveling unnecessarily
• Request to refrain from holding events where an unspecified number of people gather
• Request to refrain from opening restaurants, amusement facilities, and large-scale stores, and to shorten their opening hours
• Request for work-from-home with the aim of reducing the number of employees at work by 70%
• Expansion of the medical care provision system and inspection system
• Permission to use urgent and temporary medical facilities

The declaration of a state of emergency based on this law is issued by the government, which can restrict the areas covered by this declaration, and therefore, the implementation of the declaration varies from region to region, especially at the prefectural level to date. This repository consists of data constructed for the purpose of capturing the heterogeneity of such emergency declarations at the prefectural level and conducting data-based analysis, as well as R codes to assist in the analysis using the data.

In addition, this repository also covers emergency declarations by prefectural governments of Japan, which include the purpose of the emergency declaration and the uniqueness of each prefecture in terms of measures and requests.

• covid-19_emergency_statement_japan.csv: data file of the state of emergency issued by the government of Japan.
• covid-19_emergency_statement_japan_prefectural.csv: data file of the state of emergency issued by prefectural governments of Japan.
• make_long_covid19_emergency_statement_japan.R: An R script of function which converts the above file into a long format data frame represented by a binary variable that indicates under which emergency declaration was issued, and times of declarations. This also supports multiple declarations of emergency.
• bib_covid-19_emergency_statement_japan.bib: .bib file for citing this repository in BibTeX.

• id: ID assigned to prefectures in Japan in accordance with the JIS code (JIS X 0401).
• prefecture_en: Names of prefectures in Japan, in English.
• emergency_start: The date on which the Government of Japan declared a state of emergency for COVID-19 infection.
• emergency_end: The date on which the Government of Japan declared that the state of emergency is over because it has recognized that it is no longer necessary to implement emergency measures.
• times: Integer data indicating the number of times the declaration was issued in the region.

• id: ID assigned to prefectures in Japan in accordance with the JIS code (JIS X 0401).
• prefecture_en: Names of prefectures in Japan, in English.
• emergency_start: The date on which the Government of Japan declared a state of emergency for COVID-19 infection.
• emergency_end: The date on which the Government of Japan declared that the state of emergency is over because it has recognized that it is no longer necessary to implement emergency measures.
• times: Integer data indicating the number of times the declaration was issued in the region.
• source: URL of the website of the prefectural government that provided the source of the data

The R function make_long_covid-19_emergency_statement_japan.R converts the date range data for prefecture-level emergency declarations provided by covid-19_emergency_statement_japan.csv into long-format data where the prefecture and date pair is a single record. As an example, the following shows the long-format data for Tokyo from January 1, 2021. Note that df_date_range_long is a long-format dataframe generated by this R script.

Code:

library(tidyverse)
library(lubridate)

df_date_range_long %>%
  filter(prefecture_en == "Tokyo") %>%
  filter(date >= ymd("2021-01-01"))

Output:

Code:

library(tidyverse)
library(lubridate)

df_date_range_long_subset <- df_date_range_long %>%
  filter(prefecture_en %in% c("Hokkaido", "Tokyo", "Kyoto", "Fukuoka")) %>%
  filter((date >= ymd("2020-04-01")) & (date <= ymd("2020-06-01"))) %>%
  mutate(prefecture_en = fct_reorder(factor(prefecture_en), id))

df_date_range_long_subset %>%
  ggplot() +
  geom_line(aes(x = date, y = emergency), alpha = 0) +
  geom_rect(aes(xmin = min_date, xmax = max_date,
                ymin = -Inf, ymax = Inf),
            data = df_date_range_long_subset %>%
              filter(emergency == 1) %>%
              group_by(prefecture_en) %>%
              summarize(min_date = min(date), max_date = max(date)),
            alpha = 0.4) +
  theme(axis.text.y = element_blank(), axis.ticks.y = element_blank()) +
  scale_x_date(date_labels = "%x") +
  facet_wrap(~ prefecture_en, ncol = 1)

Output:

• Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Report on the Implementation of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2020/06/04. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku0604.pdf. (Accessed on February 9, 2021).

• 1st Declaration in 2021: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/01/07. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210107.pdf. (Accessed on February 9, 2021).
  • 1st Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/01/13. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210113.pdf. (Accessed on February 9, 2021).
  • 2nd Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/02/02. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210202.pdf. (Accessed on February 9, 2021).
  • 3rd Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/02/26. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210226.pdf. (Accessed on February 28, 2020).
  • 4th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. End of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/03/18. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_shuryo_20210319.pdf. (Accessed on March 19, 2020).
• 2nd Declaration in 2021: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/04/23. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_20210423.pdf. (Accessed on April 23, 2021).
  • 1st Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/05/07. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210507.pdf. (Accessed on May 7, 2021).
  • 2nd Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/05/14. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210514.pdf. (Accessed on May 15, 2021).
  • 3rd Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/05/21. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210521.pdf. (Accessed on May 21, 2021).
  • 4th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/05/28. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210528.pdf. (Accessed on May 28, 2021).
  • 5th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/06/17. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210617.pdf. (Accessed on June 17, 2021).
  • 6th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/07/08. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210708.pdf. (Accessed on July 8, 2021).
  • 7th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/07/30. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210730.pdf. (Accessed on July 30, 2021).
  • 8th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/08/17. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210817.pdf. (Accessed on August 17, 2021).
  • 9th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/08/25. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210825.pdf. (Accessed on August 25, 2021).
  • 10th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Change in Areas and Extention of the Period of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/09/09. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210909.pdf. (Accessed on September 9, 2021).
  • 11th Amendment: Office for Novel Coronavirus Disease Control, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. End of Declaration of a State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. 2021/09/09. URL: https://corona.go.jp/news/pdf/kinkyujitaisengen_houkoku_20210928.pdf. (Accessed on September 28, 2021).

Katafuchi, Y. (2020). covid-19_emergency_statement_japan. URL: https://github.com/yuya-katafuchi/covid-19_emergency_statement_japan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4552924.

.bib file for BibTeX

• e-Gov, Japan. (2020). Act on Special Measures for Pandemic Influenza and New Infectious Diseases Preparedness and Response. in Japanese. URL: https://elaws.e-gov.go.jp/document?lawid=424AC0000000031. (Accessed on February 9, 2021).
• Cabinet Secretariat, Japan. (2020a). State of Emergency in response to the Novel Coronavirus Disease. in Japanese. URL: https://corona.go.jp/emergency/. (Accessed on February 9, 2021)
• Cabinet Secretariat, Japan. (2020b). Act on Special Measures for Pandemic Influenza and New Infectious Diseases Preparedness and Response. in Japanese. URL: https://corona.go.jp/emergency/#influenza. (Accessed on February 9, 2021)
• Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, Japan. (2020). Overview of the Act on Special Measures for Pandemic Influenza and New Infectious Diseases Preparedness and Response. URL: https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/10900000/000606693.pdf. (Accessed on February 9, 2021)
• Cabinet Secretariat, Japan. (2021). Revision of the Basic Policy on Countermeasures against Novel Coronavirus Disease (Summary). in Japanese. URL: https://corona.go.jp/emergency/pdf/kihonhoushin_kaitei_20210202.pdf. (Accessed on February 9, 2021)

Development of this repository is supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K22142.