Japan actively avoids testing if those deaths are due to COVID-19. If someone recently dies with pneumonia, it's worth to test if this is the COVID-19 case. Japan doesn't and it claims that the public fear will overload and collapse their medical infrastructure. I don't really understand why this can even be the case, but this is a broadly accepted sentiment around Japan. And its annual death toll from typical pneumonia is around 100k, so Japan can easily hide it even if they had hundreds of the COVID-19 death cases by not testing it.
Meanwhile, Tokyo's governor is actively considering lock-down due to a potential explosive rise. Lock-down for a city like Tokyo (which has roughly one third of their entire GDP) is clearly a nuclear option. If you really have only hundreds of the cases, this can (and should) be handled by comprehensive testing and tracing like S. Korea. Or perhaps their confidential COVID-19 projection doesn't agree with Japan's official stats...
From that article they state that Tokyo had 154 infections, with 101 hospitalized. That hospitalization rate is roughly 5x higher than seen elsewhere; implying that their actual infection count is closer to 750. I think there's something amiss...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/24/national/tokyo-...
Meanwhile, Tokyo's governor is actively considering lock-down due to a potential explosive rise. Lock-down for a city like Tokyo (which has roughly one third of their entire GDP) is clearly a nuclear option. If you really have only hundreds of the cases, this can (and should) be handled by comprehensive testing and tracing like S. Korea. Or perhaps their confidential COVID-19 projection doesn't agree with Japan's official stats...