The numbers are better in Tokyo. A survey conducted at the end of March by the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry found that 26 percent of companies had instituted teleworking. On Monday, two days after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe asked businesses to cut commuting to meet social distancing goals, commuter traffic in the capital was down significantly, and business districts were quiet.

Other cities and rural areas are unlikely to see such a dramatic shift. A study in late March by Tokyo-based Persol Research and Consulting found that in Nagoya, Japan’s fourth-largest city and one of the first places to be hit hard by the coronavirus, just 9 percent of permanent employees were telecommuting.

“Japanese companies, a lot of them, are set up on the premise that you’re all going to be in the same place,” said Rochelle Kopp, a consultant who specializes in Japanese business practices. “Even if you have a laptop, you can’t always take it home. There are a lot of software and hardware issues.”

“The inability to work from home is really hampering Japan’s ability to deal with Covid-19,” she said, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

For several weeks before Japan declared the state of emergency, it avoided recommending the kind of stringent measures used by other nations to limit people’s movement. Many observers have attributed that reluctance to the damage it would inflict on Japan’s already-limping economy — damage that could be compounded if companies had to severely curtail operations because they could not easily shift to telework.

For the many workers in Japan who believe they face a false choice between their jobs and their well-being, few things have exemplified the dilemma more than the distinctive red imprint of the venerable hanko.