“It always comes down to vaccines, to social restrictions [on] large gatherings, mask-wearing,” Dale Fisher, group chief of medicine at Singapore’s National University Health System, told The Daily Beast. “There’s no secret code that any country has discovered.”

While many countries including the United States struggle against a stubborn minority of fervent anti-vaxxers, Japan has quietly vaccinated 80 percent of its 126 million people. That’s nearly everyone who’s over 5 years old and thus eligible.

In a lot of countries, mask mandates are deeply controversial. But not in Japan, where many people habitually wore masks in public even before the pandemic.

When SARS-CoV-2 first came to Japan, the country suffered like every other country did, scrambling to contain the virus through a combination of business and school closures, mask mandates, contact-tracing, quarantines, and travel bans.