ABSTRACT
Japan and Vietnam have exhibited two contrasting approaches to containing the coronavirus—Vietnam has a monolithic, top-down style and Japan is more moderate, leaving citizens greater freedom to devise their choices. The chapter is an interpretative foray into the people’s narratives to capture the pandemic in these countries’ vernacular language, uncovering also how they see the public. The sense of public is that of others in Japan, dictating the people’s life through sets of manners, rules, and etiquette in a public space. The absence of a national crisis since 1945 has freed them from the demand of acting in the name of a unified Japan. The sense of the public in Vietnam surges whenever the people think of their country being only recently unified. The surge readily sweeps away people’s individual or communal inclinations under any perceived national threat. The government readily resorts to wartime rhetoric animating this sense.
