‘NEW LIFESTYLE’ visualized as Japan ends lockdown.

TOKYO — Somewhere in this crowded, sprawling city of 37 million people, the coronavirus is still lurking. But life must go on.

On Monday, Japan lifted the state of emergency over the greater Tokyo area, effectively ending the country’s soft lockdown. New infections have slowed to a trickle and hospital beds have been freed up. There is, finally, light at the end of the tunnel.

Now Japan’s getting ready for what it’s calling a “new lifestyle,” an idiosyncratic attempt to restart daily life without provoking another jump in infections.

It is a uniquely Japanese approach to containing the virus based on request, consensus and social pressure rather than government edicts and legal sanctions, but it’s one that has had some success so far despite some initial blunders and botched communication from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“The Japanese way of dealing with the epidemic has been quite superior,” Abe said Monday. “Now, we are going to venture into a new arena. Therefore, we need to create a new lifestyle from now on. We need to change our way of thinking.”

Japan has recorded more than 16,000 infections and 800 deaths. Although low rates of testing means many cases were missed, the country has had a fraction of the numbers seen in the West.

In the past week, the nation of 126 million people added only about 200 fresh covid-19 cases, and the number of people hospitalized fell below 2,000.

More than 100 industries have already drawn up guidelines on how they intend to reopen while minimizing the risks of spreading the virus.

The rules vary from ensuring adequate ventilation, providing hand sanitizer, wearing face masks and spacing customers out to the slightly unusual.

Customers in restaurants, for example, are encouraged to sit side-by-side rather than face-to-face, to refrain from talking as much as possible, and consider listening to the background music a little more. A society never inclined to shouting, overt displays of emotion or constant physical contact might just become a little quieter and more distant — but also safer.

First to reopen in Tokyo will be schools, museums and libraries. Bars and restaurants, which had been asked to close by 8 p.m., will now be allowed to stay open until 10. Movie theaters will open at a later date, followed eventually by amusement parks, pachinko gambling parlors and manga comic cafes, provided all goes well.

Professional baseball will restart next month, initially without spectators, Abe announced.

“Obviously we can’t eradicate this virus,” said Hitoshi Oshitani, head of the government’s infection control team. “We have to live together with this virus for a certain period of time, probably for some years. So then, we can’t stop all social activities.”

There is currently no plan to reopen gyms and karaoke bars in Tokyo, identified as high-risk venues, although the karaoke industry has already drawn up its own set of guidelines, which involve singing with face masks on, disinfecting microphones between users, and keeping listeners at least 6 feet away from the singers.

Oshitani, a virology professor at Tohoku University School of Medicine, says reopening shops and extending restaurant opening hours will mean more infections, and he predicts controls will have to be tightened again at some point in certain regions.

But he says the medical system and the testing and tracing infrastructure is much better prepared than it was a few months ago to detect and counter any new surge in cases.

Japan’s initial response to the virus was widely criticized, and Abe’s popularity has plunged.

The country has one of the highest death tolls per capita in Asia, outside the Middle East, and a business rescue package was seen as poorly targeted and overly bureaucratic.

The government was widely seen as having mishandled infections on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and criticized for failing to expand testing with any sense of urgency. It allowed thousands of people to return to the country from Europe and the United States without being tested in February and March, seeding a massive outbreak in infections.

Confused messaging also contributed to a fateful long weekend in March, when crowds turned out to view cherry blossoms and infections surged.

But there were unheralded successes too. Universal health care allowed Japan to detect cases early, even in remote rural areas, at a time when the virus appears to have been spreading undetected in Europe and the United States.