Pandemics and citizenship: from a Kyoto hospital to the Diamond Princess

Abstract

Abstract Legally, administratively and socially, citizenship adapts to the challenges of not only shifting geopolitics but to new infectious diseases that do not readily submit to the rule of nation-states. This essay looks at citizenship in Japan among other countries against the backdrop of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic and the newer COVID-19, from the abject figure of the stigmatized homosexual in the former to quarantined foreigners aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess in the latter. I conclude with the role of passports in Japanese writers, such as Tawada Yōko (1960-), who do not so much remap citizenship as question its utility.