The discursive reproduction of technoscience and Japanese national identity in The Daily Yomiuri coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

Abstract

Using critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the discursive representation of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in The Daily Yomiuri, part of the largest and most influential media conglomerate in Japan. A critical discourse analysis of The Daily Yomiuri reveals that Japanese national identity and the ideology of technoscience are reproduced through two discursive constructions: a diminished ‘risk’ from Fukushima radiation and citizens’ national duty in the nuclear crisis. Within these two constructions, 11 major techniques are identified by which The Yomiuri discursively mitigates the risks from Fukushima and calls Japanese national identity into the service of the nuclear industry. The article concludes with implications for understanding the impact of political discourse in mass media on other policy debates in Japan and elsewhere.

Keywords

Critical discourse analysis Fukushima Great East Japan Earthquake high reliability organization Japan legitimization mass media national identity news in the press nuclear power representation technoscience Tohoku earthquake

Introduction

Following the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Tohoku region of eastern Japan on 11 March 2011, nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site experienced a series of events that included loss of power, melting of the reactor cores (‘meltdowns’), hydrogen explosions, and contamination of the countryside and the Pacific Ocean with high levels of radiation. Because Japan has long held a reputation for some of the most advanced and reliable scientific and technological achievements, the disaster at Fukushima was a particularly serious blow to the nuclear industry. Indeed, the industry and its supporters in government agencies, universities, and research institutes had long promised that a disaster such as Fukushima could not occur (Dvorak and Hayashi, 2011; Frontline, 2012). As a result, the disaster disrupted the hegemonic ideology of ‘technoscience’ that positions official technical and scientific specialists and institutions as the dominant legitimate voice in policy debates about nuclear energy. With the serious threat to public support for nuclear power that the Fukushima disaster presented, the nuclear industry and its supporters faced a serious discursive challenge: to reassure the public about the immediate threat from the crisis and the long-term safety of nuclear reactors.

In the wake of the disaster, a leading actor in the debate about nuclear power has been the country’s largest daily newspaper, The Yomiuri, which has played a central role in promoting nuclear energy since the mid-1950s, and is currently published in both a Japanese edition (Yomiuri Shimbun) and an English edition (The Daily Yomiuri, renamed The Japan News on 1 April 2013). Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study analyzes the discursive representation of the Fukushima disaster in The Daily Yomiuri. Specifically, through a critical analysis of articles and editorials about the crisis from 11 March 2011 to 12 February 2012, I argue that the newspaper’s representation of Fukushima reproduces technoscience and Japanese national identity through the discursive construction of ‘risk’ from radiation and the discursive construction of citizens’ national duty in Japan’s response to the crisis.

I begin with a summary of the important role of The Yomiuri in promoting nuclear power since its inception in Japan in the mid-1950s. Then I present the conceptual framework, the sources of data, and the research methods, followed by analysis of the construction of risk from radiation and the construction of the appropriate national response to the crisis. I argue that The Yomiuri reproduces the ideology of technoscience on which the nuclear industry depends and calls Japanese national identity into the service of the policy goal of maintaining reliance on nuclear power. Finally, I discuss the implications of this study for understanding the impact of political discourse in mass media on other policy debates in Japan and elsewhere.

The Yomiuri and nuclear power in Japan

Fundamental to CDA is an understanding of the institutional and social context in which text production occurs. The Yomiuri, published in several editions in Japanese and English, has the largest average daily circulation of any newspaper in the world (approximately 10 million, or as many as 14 million including its morning and evening editions). It is part of the Yomiuri Group, the largest media conglomerate in Japan and owner of the iconic baseball team the Yomiuri Giants. Its owner from 1924 until the 1960s was Matsutaro Shoriki, one of the founders of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled Japan from 1955 to the present (except for 11 months in 1993–1994 and from 2009 to 2012, including the time of the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami and the first nine months of the Fukushima crisis). Running on a platform of reopening nuclear power plants closed after the earthquake and tsunami, the LDP regained control of government in a landslide victory in December 2012.

Matsutaro Shoriki played a foundational role in establishing the nuclear industry in Japan. In 1954, public opinion in Japan was strongly opposed to nuclear energy, due to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the radiation poisoning of 23 crew members of a Japanese fishing boat (one of whom died) from a US thermonuclear bomb test in the Marshall Islands in March of that year. Cooperating closely with the United States (Arima, 2008; Warnock, 2012), Shoriki used The Yomiuri to overcome this opposition with the highly successful discursive program ‘Atoms for Peace’ (Kuznick, 2011), which associated the nuclear industry with ‘peaceful’ energy rather than nuclear war. Moreover, after being elected to the Japanese Diet in 1956, Shoriki became the first president of Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission, charged with regulating the nuclear industry. Thus Shoriki embodied the close ties between the media, the nuclear industry, government regulatory agencies, and Japan’s national security apparatus. Since Shoriki’s death in 1969, The Yomiuri has remained the largest and most influential newspaper in Japan, closely allied with the Liberal Democratic Party and a staunch supporter of nuclear power.

Although The Yomiuri is widely recognized as allied with the LDP and the nuclear industry, its status as Japan’s most important ‘newspaper of record’ (Martin and Hansen, 1998) depends on its reputation as a serious source of accurate and reliable news. Thus its ability to promote nuclear power is constrained: as public dissatisfaction and mistrust of government authorities and the nuclear industry deepened in the weeks following the disaster, the media was under pressure to acknowledge the failures of political leaders, government regulatory agencies, and the nuclear power industry (especially the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, the owner and operator of the Fukushima reactors). Thus rebuilding public support for nuclear power requires a complex and subtle acknowledgment of public concern while also mitigating its impact on Japan’s energy policy.

Conceptual framework

This study adopts a socio-cognitive framework of critical discourse analysis, particularly the concepts of ‘representation’ (Van Dijk, 1995a) and ‘legitimization’ (Chilton, 2004), to investigate how Japanese national identity and the ideology of technoscience are reproduced in news discourse about the Fukushima crisis. The analysis is critical in the sense that it seeks to make explicit opaque ‘structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 10) as manifested in The Yomiuri’s coverage of the Fukushima crisis.

Central to the analysis are ideology and the concept of representation. The term ideology refers to ‘basic frameworks of social cognition, shared by members of social groups, constituted by relevant selections of sociocultural values, and organized by an ideological schema that represents the self-definition of a group’ (Van Dijk, 1995a: 248). Ideologies are ‘sociocognitively defined as shared representations of social groups’ (Van Dijk, 2006: 115). Representations are socially shared forms of knowledge that are organized around ideas about group identities; particularly important is national identity, which is often structured in ways that maximize the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Van Dijk, 2009). National identities are constantly reproduced, creating what Billig (1995: 4) calls an ‘ideological consciousness of nationhood’ involving a ‘complex set of themes about ‘‘us’’, ‘‘our homeland’’, ‘‘nations’’ (‘‘our’’ and ‘‘theirs’’), the ‘‘world’’, as well as the morality of national duty and honor’. Reconstructed through the mundane details of daily life (e.g. flags on office walls, news stories about individual citizens, speeches by political leaders on national holidays), such ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995) is ready to be called into service during crises such as wars and disasters.

Individuals and groups constantly construct and reconstruct national identities in part by responding to changing historical events (such as a disaster) that may disrupt key ideas about identity. By revising and reconstructing the myths, historical and cultural achievements, and national characteristics that are central to discourses of national identity, news media play an important role in times of crisis. As widely documented, news discourses of the mainstream legacy press emphasize the discourses of those in power (Chan, 2012), and indeed the ideas about national identity that The Yomiuri reproduces reflect the powerful interests of the nuclear industry, including its supporters in government, research institutes and universities, and financial institutions that are heavily invested in the industry.

Chilton (2004) argues that policy debates in mass media involve political actors who articulate visions of national identity that are central to the process of legitimization. The term legitimization refers to positive self-representations of one’s own group and its supporters, whereas delegitimization refers to negative other-representations (such as other national groups or opponents in policy debates). Techniques of delegitimization include ‘the use of ideas of difference and boundaries, and speech acts of blaming, accusing, insulting, etc.’ (Chilton, 2004: 46). Similarly, Van Dijk (2006) examines ‘how members of ingroups typically emphasize their own good deeds and properties and the bad ones of the outgroup’ (p. 115) to achieve the ‘manipulation’ of others (p. 359). As we shall see, The Yomiuri reconstructs Japanese national identity in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in ways that delegitimize opposition to nuclear energy, by representing such opposition as fundamentally ‘not Japanese’.

The discursive expression and reproduction of national identity was particularly crucial in the days immediately following the earthquake, as the Fukushima disaster seemed to present an existential threat to the nation, especially after TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) management decided on 14 March (three days after the earthquake and tsunami) to order its workers at Fukushima to abandon the site. Had it been carried out, this action may have led to a complete meltdown of all reactor cores and the release of high levels of radiation over much of eastern Japan (Dvorak and Obe, 2012; Onishi and Fackler, 2011). In such dire circumstances, newspapers and other mass media played a crucial role in constructing a narrative of Japanese identity that guided the population through the crisis, including emotional stories about the ‘Fukushima 50’, the nuclear workers remaining at the site, who were represented as national heroes making great personal sacrifice in defense of the nation. Although as many as 580 workers were at the site by 18 March, ‘Fukushima 50’ continued as the key identifier in mass media, thus emphasizing the selfless heroism of these isolated workers. Embedded within this representation of heroic national identity was the beginning of the reconstruction of the ideology of technoscience: nuclear workers represented as national heroes, not as part of an industry that was responsible for the disaster.

The ideology of technoscience

The term technoscience refers to the view of scientific and technological knowledge as socially constructed and historically situated. The critical analysis of scientific practice examines the discursive construction of scientific knowledge and its hegemonic social position since the mid-20th century (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Pellizoni and Ylönen, 2012). Power and hierarchy are implicated in the social positioning of technical and scientific institutions and experts, and manifest in the authority they wield in policy debates. The promotion of nuclear energy relies in part on the discursive processes that regulate who may speak about nuclear energy: ‘credibility’ about nuclear power depends on the established, hierarchically positioned authority of state agencies such as nuclear regulatory bodies, corporations that build and operate nuclear plants, and experts in the science and technology of nuclear energy. After many years of assurance by these actors that a nuclear disaster was impossible, the Fukushima crisis destabilized the ideology of technoscience by undermining public confidence in the hierarchy of scientific and technological authority on which the nuclear industry depends. The discursive task facing the nuclear industry, therefore, is to reconstruct a technoscientific ideology that can withstand the discursive challenge by citizen activists, environmentalists, and other critics.

The ideology of technoscience has three interrelated components (see Pellizzoni and Ylönen, 2012): 1) a hierarchy of information authority that delegitimizes citizens’ knowledge, opinions, and concerns, and instead legitimizes the voices of ‘insiders’ in state agencies, scientific and technological institutions, and industry; 2) the representation of insiders as calm, dispassionate (‘scientific’), and comfortable with science and technology, in contrast to outsiders, who are represented as prone to panic and confusion in the face of exotic and unknowable technologies; 3) a technical language that is difficult for outsiders to master. All three components are reproduced in Yomiuri texts about Fukushima.

For residents in Japan, a main concern is ‘risk’: What threat to public health and safety does the radiation from Fukushima present? The nuclear power industry (including TEPCO and other corporations operating reactors) is a complex ‘high reliability organization’ (HRO), a term that refers to sociotechnical systems that ‘must not make serious errors because their work is too important and the effects of their failures too disastrous’ (LaPorte and Consolini, 1991: 19). Although the safety of nuclear power plants is so important that it is often termed ‘non-negotiable’ (Areva Group, 2012), in fact safety is constantly negotiated through policies, regulations, communicative practices, and meanings (Kinsella, 2004, 2013). Building and maintaining nuclear power plants depends on successful discursive campaigns to convince regulators and the public that nuclear HROs have achieved acceptably low levels of risk. In practice, this means that risk is usually defined in ‘absolute, realist, objectivist, and binary terms: safe versus unsafe . . . regulatory compliance or non-compliance and such’ (Kinsella, 2013: 3). Thus the nuclear industry and other HROs often pose as ‘risk-free objects with clear boundaries’ (Latour, 2004: 22–23). Moreover, the industry and regulatory agencies typically represent their domain as a ‘black box opaque to non-experts but amenable to expert control’ (Kinsella, 2013: 3). The Fukushima crisis, however, ruptures this closed system by creating intense concern about the short- and long-term health risks from exposure to radiation that was released in an event that had been declared impossible by those same experts. Thus the public’s assessment of risk takes place within the context of loss of confidence that the nuclear industry has functioned properly as a high reliability organization.

Closely connected with the assessment of risk is residents’ second major concern: How should one respond to the perceived risk? For many days after the first reports of the release of radioactive material, residents faced critical decisions: Should I stay in the area or leave? Should I keep my children inside, sheltered from any invisible radiation? Are food and water safe? Residents turned to many sources for information and guidance: friends and relatives, government officials, TEPCO, and above all the mass media. Indeed, all forms of traditional mass media, including radio, television, and newspapers, experienced significant increases in use during the initial crisis (Johnston, 2011; Perko et al., 2011). My analysis of The Yomiuri examines the discursive construction of the risk from Fukushima and the discursive construction of the appropriate response to the crisis. In these constructions, The Yomiuri reproduces the ideology of technoscience and a discourse of Japanese national identity, called into the service of the nuclear industry.

Findings and analysis

Data are drawn from a Lexis-Nexis Academic search for the key word ‘Fukushima’ in The Daily Yomiuri from 11 March 2011, the day of the earthquake and tsunami, to 12 February 2012, seven weeks after the issuance of the preliminary report by the official panel investigating the cause of the disaster (Tabuchi, 2011). This search yielded 1488 items. The analysis is restricted to texts that focus primarily on the nuclear disaster, excluding texts that focus instead on related issues such as earthquake and tsunami damage to buildings and infrastructure in eastern Japan, the search for victims, the political consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, or their economic effects. After eliminating such articles, a total of 280 items remained for analysis. The analysis began with initial coding of texts for key themes (see Hsieh and Shannon, 2005), guided by the following questions: a) How are the events at Fukushima represented? b) How is the representation of Fukushima discursively linked to the future of nuclear energy in Japan? c) Which major actors are identified in the texts and how are they represented (positive, negative, neutral)? d) How is Japanese national identity discursively linked with these major actors and with the Fukushima crisis? Initial analysis was followed by multiple readings and continuous revision of themes until they could be organized into meaningful clusters that recur in multiple texts. Findings are summarized within two broad themes related to the nuclear emergency – the risk from the disaster and the appropriate response to the crisis by Japanese citizens, and 11 discursive techniques by which The Yomiuri constructs its representation of risk and the appropriate national response.

The discursive construction of risk

The central concern about Fukushima for individuals in eastern Japan is the danger from exposure to radiation. Although many Yomiuri texts report evidence of radiation contamination as far away as Tokyo (approximately 225 km from the Fukushima reactors), the specific descriptions of radiation contamination in The Yomiuri downplay the level of risk through six major techniques, summarized below with examples from Yomiuri texts.

1. Representing radiation contamination as isolated and highly localized

Reports on areas that are found to have high levels of radiation typically use language that focuses readers’ attention on the specific site of the contamination, often to a scale of a few meters. For example, contamination of a schoolyard is described as follows: ‘The [high radiation] reading was recorded under the drainpipe attached to a gutter of a machinery room next to a swimming pool’ (19 October 2011). Such descriptions suggest that the risk is limited to this particular spot. Similarly, an article about the discovery of multiple sites of contamination uses such limiting terms as ‘isolated’ and ‘small’ to describe the spread of radiation beyond evacuation zones: ‘readings have been confirmed in several isolated areas outside evacuation zones . . . on a small patch of land . . . [Several] factors can concentrate radiation in small areas’ (19 June 2011). By late summer 2011, The Yomiuri (and Japanese nuclear authorities) routinely used the term ‘hot spot’ to refer to sites contaminated with radiation, evoking an image of radiation that is isolated to a ‘spot’ and therefore easily avoided.

2. Representing radiation contamination as posing no ‘immediate’ threat to health

Radiation exposure entails both short- and long-term risk. For short-term exposure to create immediate harm, massive levels of radiation are required, whereas long-term exposure at low levels significantly increases the risk of cancer and other diseases (National Academy of Sciences, 2006). When government officials or technical experts are quoted in Yomiuri texts, attention often focuses on short-term risk, and readers are assured that radiation levels are not sufficient to create ‘immediate’ harm to health. For example, texts assure readers that ingesting radiation even beyond government safety limits poses no ‘immediate’ risk to health: ‘there is no immediate threat to health from eating meat contaminated with radioactive cesium over the government’s limit’ (22 March 2011); ‘[e]ven if some individual food items are found to contain [radioactive substances] beyond the [government safety] limits, that alone would not immediately threaten the safety of foods in general’ (23 December 2011). Similarly, when high levels of cesium were found in baby formula sold and ingested in Tokyo, parents were assured that the radiation posed no ‘immediate’ threat to infants.

3. Normalizing radiation

A common technique for assuring readers that radiation from the Fukushima reactors is safe is to discuss other sources of radiation in the environment, that is, to represent radiation exposure as a normal part of everyday life. ‘Background’ radiation exposures from multiple sources are described as routine and universal throughout the world: ‘In Japan, people are subject to about 1.5 millisieverts of radiation a year as they go about their daily lives. People in some areas of Brazil and India receive about 10 times this much. There is no need to be overly sensitive to small changes in radiation readings’ (19 June 2011). Texts also compare risk from radiation with other common risks, such as smoking, by expressing those other risks in terms of radiation levels, thus suggesting that radiation risks are no different from other health risks in daily life: ‘[T]he risk of contracting cancer from smoking is equivalent to that from being exposed to 1,000 to 2,000 millisieverts of radiation. The risk of cancer due to obesity is equivalent to . . . 200 millisieverts to 500 millisieverts of radiation’ (5 December 2011). When comparing the risk from not eating vegetables to the risk from radiation exposure, The Yomiuri concludes that it is healthier to eat contaminated vegetables than to avoid vegetables altogether: ‘. . . the risk from not eating enough vegetables is equivalent to 100 millisieverts to 200 millisieverts. [A] study [by a government panel] shows that people who refrain from eating vegetables due to radiation fears may face greater health risks than if they ate them’ (5 December 2011).

As the weeks passed after the initial crisis, The Yomiuri encouraged readers to eat contaminated produce from the Tohoku region, one headline, for example, addressing readers directly with the imperative sentence ‘Don’t Worry about Eating a Little Bit of Tainted Beef’ (18 July 2011). When radiation showed up in the milk of mothers who were breast-feeding their children, experts reassured readers by noting that contamination of milk was an expected consequence of the dispersal of contaminated material from Fukushima:

‘Radioactive material has been dispersed into the air and water and will be absorbed by the human body, so I expected tests on breast milk would reveal traces of radiation,’ said . . . an authority on radiation exposure. ‘However the levels detected were very low and can be ignored, so I urge mothers to keep breast-feeding their babies’. (2 May 2011)

4. Decontextualizing technical information

Whereas normalizing radiation from Fukushima entails placing radiation in the context of smoking cigarettes or not eating vegetables, decontextualizing technical information involves presenting data about radiation with little context or explanation, often in technical terms that make it difficult for readers to assess the significance of the information, as in the following: ‘According to the prefectural government, rice straw at his farm was found to have been contaminated with radioactive cesium, 30 times the legal limit of 300 becquerels per kilogram for grass’ (19 July 2011). Information about risk may direct readers’ attention to peripheral issues, such as a report about concentrations of cesium in beef cattle emphasizing that the level of cesium in the meat was lower than the level of cesium in the straw which the cattle had been fed (18 July 2011); or information about risk may depict news in the best possible light, such as the following headline about a government survey that found 42% of residents near the reactors had exposures beyond the government limit of 1 millisievert: ‘Survey reveals radiation doses: 58% of Fukushima residents likely exposed to less than 1 millisievert’ (21 February 2012).

5. Using scientific information in a highly selective or inaccurate manner

Because virtually all of the experts cited in articles about Fukushima support nuclear energy, the pattern of scientific evidence presented in Yomiuri coverage is highly selective in its representation of the risk from radiation exposure. Some evidence is hidden from the public. For example, although some media outlets reported on 12 March 2011 that meltdowns may have been underway, it was not until 12 May that government and TEPCO officials acknowledged that three meltdowns had indeed taken place; and the dispersal of airborne radiation as far as Tokyo, which was known by government officials as it occurred, was not reported until months later. The rationale for such deception is that it is necessary to avoid creating panic: ‘The government had been afraid of triggering panic,’ Goshi Hosono was quoted as saying (11 June 2011). (Hosono later was appointed Environment Minister and State Minister in charge of overseeing the Fukushima crisis.)

At times, experts cited by The Yomiuri gave inaccurate or misleading information. For example, one expert suggested that when cesium is ingested it will be flushed naturally from the body without causing harm: ‘Radioactive cesium is highly soluble in water, so if ingested, it’s gradually discharged from the body through sweat and urine, he said’ (18 July 2011). As it became clear that millions of residents were exposed to varying levels of radiation, The Yomiuri did not report on the influential finding that there is a ‘linear, no-threshold dose–response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of radiation-induced solid cancers in humans’ (National Academy of Sciences, 2006: 10).

6. Delegitimizing concerns about the risks from radiation

In the context of numerous reports about radiation contamination extending hundreds of kilometers from Fukushima, The Yomiuri often represents concerns about radiation as overblown, due to irrational panic among uninformed non-experts. In particular, The Yomiuri has adopted the term ‘rumor’ to refer to radiation reports, as in a story headlined ‘Fracas over school lunches’: ‘The board of education in Kashima, Ibaraki Prefecture, has stopped using agricultural products from the prefecture in school lunches . . . a move local . . . farmers are saying will fuel harmful, unfounded rumors [about radiation]’ (30 May 2011). When the government’s Official Development Assistance program announced that it would use products from the Tohoku area in its overseas food aid program, The Yomiuri reported, ‘The plan is aimed at supporting reconstruction of the disaster-hit areas and dispelling harmful rumors about local products [by donating them as aid to other countries]’ (20 September 2011). Indeed, the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘rumor’ is blurred in much of the media coverage about radiation, as well as in government discourse, such as in the program offering compensation for ‘rumor damage’: ‘Rumor-induced damages are defined as losses . . . whether due to rumor-based fears or to avoid real risk [from radiation]. This is because the difference between the two reasons is difficult to determine’ (NHK, 31 May 2011).

The discursive construction of the appropriate national response to the crisis

Facing the risk from radiation, residents make difficult decisions: whether to move from eastern Japan, evacuate children, reduce outside exposure, limit consumption of certain local foods, or many other individual actions. In its discursive construction of the appropriate response to the crisis, The Yomiuri legitimizes some voices and some actions while delegitimizing others, shaping recommendations for action around the discursive construction of Japanese national identity. Five major techniques construct the appropriate national response to the crisis.

1. Reconstructing the hierarchy of information authority

Faced with a flood of technical information and an unfamiliar lexicon (millisieverts, bequerels, cesium, strontium, gamma rays), residents struggle to make crucial decisions, occasionally with little time to seek clarity or consider options. As a result, some residents have made decisions with potentially harmful consequences. For example, when government authorities in March 2011 withheld information about the spread of radiation due to the fear of panic, several thousand residents near the reactors fled directly into its path (Frontline, 2012). In that context, a growing citizens’ movement has engaged in independent reporting, generating ‘nuclear risk knowledge by harnessing the Internet and social media’ (Abe, 2013: 1). Yomiuri articles counter such independent sources by recommending that residents defer to technical experts and government authorities: ‘it is difficult for ordinary citizens to judge whether their health is safe based only on information they hear about radiation level’ (19 June 2011). Some articles warn residents that their independent efforts to gather technical information may increase the likelihood that they would misunderstand the risk they face, as in warnings to consumers by the National Consumer Agency Center of Japan about private purchases of radiation meters (10 September 2011). Even some texts critical of TEPCO and government officials reconstruct the technoscientific hierarchy of expertise and authority, with the government and the nuclear industry as the only legitimate voice: ‘The government and the nuclear plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., must . . . prevent untrue and harmful rumors from spreading further around the world’ (25 April 2011). Indeed, a common theme in many newspapers in Japan is that residents should rely on authorities for information (e.g. Japan Times, 27 May 2011).

As months passed and the initial intensity of the crisis diminished, The Yomiuri became more explicit in its discursive construction of the technoscientific hierarchy. In December 2011, for example, a headline praised the government’s commitment to continue its nuclear energy policy: ‘World expectations high for Japan’s N-technology.’ The text explicitly reconstructs the dominance of Japanese technology:

The government’s maintaining the policy of promoting the nuclear power plant exports, even after the outbreak of the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, is believed to reflect the ability of Japanese nuclear technology to support world energy demands, which is increasing the expectations of the international community. (6 December 2011)

An additional aspect of reconstructing the authority of government and nuclear experts is the representation of the tsunami that led to the problems at Fukushima as a natural event that could not have been anticipated. Numerous government and TEPCO officials have made this claim, thereby suggesting that the experts should not be criticized for failing to anticipate the crisis. For example, reporting on a TEPCO panel that investigated the crisis, The Yomiuri notes that ‘[t]he panel . . . devoted pages of the draft to defending the utility’s handling of the crisis, such as saying that TEPCO could not reasonably have anticipated the size of the tsunami before the disaster’ (3 October 2011).

Although continuing to express concern about panic and rumors, The Yomiuri in late 2011 offered praise for what the newspaper claimed was the Japanese people’s increasing confidence in government information. In an editorial headlined ‘Calmly review radiation risks based on scientific evidence’, The Yomiuri stated:

[T]he nation is finally ready to calmly discuss and compare the risks of radiation exposure. We urge the government to take appropriate action on this matter, such as providing enough information so each citizen can calmly assess the risk of radiation exposure by themselves. Such information would . . . be useful in alleviating unnecessary radiation fears about food, preventing rumors about radiation, deciding the order of areas to be decontaminated and making decisions whether to let children play outside. Unfounded radiation fears seem to be continuing to spread. The government should not leave the problem untouched. (5 December 2011)

2. Delegitimizing foreign media

Foreign media offer a potential challenge to the hierarchy of authority dominated by government and industry officials. During the first two weeks of the crisis, foreign media were more likely than Japan’s media to assert that meltdowns had occurred, that radiation levels far from the reactors had reached dangerous levels, and that government evacuations were inadequate (Johnston, 2011). The Yomiuri has run numerous articles claiming that foreign media spread unfounded rumors, as in a report about trainees from overseas who refused to go to the Tohoku region (‘Trainees steer clear of Fukushima’, 14 December 2011), in contrast to those who did not succumb to hysterical media coverage (‘Filipina not giving up on Japan’, 31 March 2011). Indeed, major newspapers throughout Japan have published stories claiming that overseas press coverage of Fukushima was unreliable. The Japan Times, for example, published a collection of examples of what it called the foreign ‘media meltdown over Fukushima’ (Johnston, 2011).

3. Delegitimizing independent action

As trust in official sources of information was destabilized, some citizen groups began to independently gather information about radiation, question government recommendations, and resist official decisions. One issue that elicited such independence in late 2011 was the school lunch program. Municipalities differ in the amount of radioactive material permitted in school lunches, the Fukushima Municipal Government, for example, permitting 350 becquerels per kilogram. Concerned that schools were not carefully monitoring radiation levels in lunches and that their children may be ingesting radioactive materials, some parents asked that their children be exempt from the requirement that they eat the food provided by the school. Receiving prominent attention was criticism by a member of the Assembly who argued that the school lunches, initiated soon after the Second World War, ‘built bonds and a sense of solidarity’, and that parents who wanted to opt out of the program were ‘a handful of egoists’.

They mix in the problem of radiation contamination after the nuclear accident and demand that they be given the freedom to drop out of the school lunch system because there are problems with radiation in food items . . . Indeed, this is the epitome of baseless rumor . . . Removing inconvenience for themselves, is that all they care about? When did such egoism take root in the Japanese people? (EXSKF, 2012)

Quoting an expert in nuclear physics from Tokyo University, The Yomiuri coverage focused on the variation in standards and testing practices among municipalities (‘Radiation testing on school lunches differs’) and the debate about when lunches should be tested for radiation: ‘Tests . . . before meals engenders a sense of safety, but tests after a meal can help prevent long-term internal exposure’ (29 January 2012). Other Yomiuri texts suggest that talking about the dangers of radiation could hurt Japan, with one headline imploring Japanese to ‘Step up fight against harmful rumors about Japan goods’ because these rumors put ‘the industrial sector . . . on the defensive by overreactions overseas to the nuclear plant problem’ (25 April 2011). As in many texts, the situation at the reactors is described in this article with the neutral term problem.

4. Delegitimizing non-Japanese who left Japan

The theme of panicked foreign residents abandoning Japan in a crisis led to new terms: ‘fly-jin’ and ‘bye-jin’, puns based on the word ‘gaijin’ (foreigner). Newspapers in 2011 published figures on the ‘number of foreigners who left Japan in panic’ (Johnston, 2011), often assuming that every foreigner who departed did so to escape radiation. Government officials in some regions have complained that the departure of panicked foreign residents led to a significant drop in the local population. In Chiba, for example, The Yomiuri reported, ‘the International Division of the prefectural government has asked foreign students living in the prefecture to blog in their native languages about the safety of living in the prefecture following the disaster’ (2 February 2012).¹

5. Articulating uniquely Japanese qualities in response to the crisis

An important theme that appears in many texts is that Japanese everywhere should identify with and support the people of the Tohoku region. For example, The Yomiui encourages readers to purchase food from the disaster region, with one article (headlined ‘Tohoku autumn delicacies go uneaten’) lamenting the cancellation of an annual mushroom-hunting event for tourists because of fears of radiation (although the article acknowledges that one of the local farmers posted ‘a notice indicating 26 becquerels of cesium . . . on boxes of Kosui variety pears’ (19 September 2011)). The Yomiuri also urges readers to spend holidays in Tohoku: as one headline just 10 weeks after the earthquake suggested, ‘Let’s plan holidays together’ (31 May 2011).

Identification with the people of Tohoku is part of the larger theme of what constitutes an appropriate ‘Japanese’ response to the crisis. What does it mean to be a good citizen? What particular practices, beliefs, and attitudes during the crisis demonstrate a commitment to the nation and its people? Although implicit in many texts, such questions are explicitly answered in several key articles, none more important than in the extensive coverage of Prime Minister Noda’s major policy speech in September 2011. Noda had replaced Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who resigned on August 26; Noda’s address on 15 September marked the six-month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami. In his speech, which was reported in all major media (with the entire text printed in The Yomiuri), the Prime Minister presented an emotional narrative of Japan’s response to the crisis: ‘Living during this national crisis, there is one thing we should never forget. That is the high-minded spirit demonstrated by the Japanese people in the midst of despair after the earthquake disaster’ (15 September 2011). Noda told the story of Miki Endo, a local official on the disaster prevention staff in Minami-Sanrikucho, who continued to broadcast warnings to local residents to flee to high ground as the tsunami approached: ‘Although her voice was tinged with fear and apprehension, Ms Endo continued to broadcast to the very end. She was engulfed by the tsunami and never returned home.’

Noda ended this portion of his speech with an explicit statement of Japanese national identity as evidenced in the response to the crisis:

Determination to fulfill a public duty in the midst of a crisis, as exemplified by Ms Endo, and also the countless people affected by the disaster who, showing kindness to others, have silently withstood the trials and hardships they face – are these not the qualities that ought to give us pride as Japanese and hope for the future?

After defining the key qualities of Japanese identity – fulfilling public duty, showing kindness to others, and resolutely withstanding hardships – Noda then linked the story of Ms Endo to the staff at the Fukushima reactors, also described as working silently to fulfill their duty:

There [at the reactors], more than 2000 people are continuing to work silently and tenaciously, wearing masks and protective clothing and facing the dangers of both radiation and heatstroke. . . Through various dedicated and ongoing efforts in the affected areas, Japan’s present and future are being supported. Shouldn’t we give greater consideration to these people with our encouragement and gratitude?

Thus Noda’s dramatic speech articulated a vision of Japanese national identity to guide his listeners and readers in their response to the crisis.

Discussion: Technostruggle, national identity, and citizen activism

As this analysis reveals, coverage of the Fukushima disaster by The Daily Yomiuri discursively constructs the risk from radiation and the appropriate national response to the crisis by the Japanese people. In its coverage, The Yomiuri makes two implicit claims about the crisis. The first claim – that the risk from radiation does not pose a serious threat to health – is made through six discursive techniques: 1) representing radiation as isolated and highly localized; 2) representing radiation as posing no ‘immediate’ threat to health; 3) normalizing radiation; 4) decontextualizing technical information; 5) using scientific information in a highly selective or inaccurate manner; and 6) delegitimizing concerns about the risk from radiation. The second implicit claim – that Japanese national identity entails avoiding independent actions and accepting official reassurances about the nuclear crisis – is made through five discursive techniques: 1) reconstructing the hierarchy of information authority; 2) delegitimizing foreign media; 3) delegitimizing independent action; 4) delegitimizing non-Japanese who left Japan; 5) articulating uniquely Japanese qualities in response to the crisis.

Particularly important in The Yomiuri texts is the representation of Japanese national identity, which is in contrast to ‘others’, including foreigners who fled the country ‘in panic’ and the foreign media, represented as contributing to panic through irresponsible reporting about the crisis. Thus Yomiuri texts articulate a contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and thereby position ‘good’ Japanese citizens as those who fulfill their civic duty, as did Ms Endo and the Fukushima 50, as well as parents whose children eat school lunches, shoppers who buy agricultural products from Tohoku, and tourists who spend their holidays in the Tohoku region.

The reconstruction of the ideology of technoscience also restricts independent action by sustaining the hegemonic authority of nuclear insiders, represented as ‘calm’, ‘scientific’ specialists – the only legitimate voices in assessing risk and deciding appropriate action – in contrast to ordinary citizens, represented as prone to panic and unable to objectively evaluate highly technical matters, and therefore delegitimized as participants in nuclear policy debates. Indeed, the reconstruction of the ideology of technoscience extends to an effort by government officials and The Yomiuri to highlight the technological benefits of the Fukushima disaster. In a 2012 article headlined ‘Contribute to world through decommissioning’, The Yomiuri quoted Goshi Hosono, the minister in charge of the Fukushima cleanup, speaking to a meeting (organized by The Yomiuri) of the International Economic Society about the benefits of new technologies developed to handle the disaster:

‘The skills we acquire during the process of decommissioning [the reactors], which will be conducted in the most severe environment, can be applied to nuclear power plants all over the world when they are decommissioned. We need to utilize the experience [of the nuclear crisis] for the future of Japan,’ Hosono said . . . He said he wants to use robots and other unmanned machines produced by Japanese companies as much as possible when removing the fuel rods, to demonstrate the high level of Japanese technology. (24 January 2012)

Thus ‘Fukushima’ is being discursively transformed from a disaster to an opportunity, and from a failure of the nuclear industry to a new source of pride in Japan’s nuclear technology.

Although both technoscience and Japanese national identity in The Yomiuri support the nuclear industry, the language of these reconstructions differs. Technoscientific ideology, usually with nuclear experts as the source, is characterized by language that is low in affect (Schnoebelen, 2012) and by agent-less constructions that avoid explicit assignment of responsibility for the disaster. The situation at the reactors is a ‘problem’ rather than a crisis or a disaster; radiation is ‘dispersed’ into the air, ‘recorded’ or ‘observed’, and described with adjectives such as ‘small’ and ‘isolated’; technical and scientific experts ‘expected’ ‘some’ radiation, which they describe with the scientific language of ‘becquerels’ and ‘millisieverts’. Through such constructions, these experts calmly delineate the reassuring ‘facts’ of Fukushima.

In contrast, the language of national identity is emotive. The Fukushima 50 and other citizens are praised in stories of self-sacrifice, fulfilling their duty through acceptance of their national responsibility and social position. In such stories, the focus is on people rather than ‘facts’, the stories told through active sentence constructions: Ms Endo ‘continued to broadcast to the very end [of her life]’; at the reactors, ‘2000 people are continuing to work silently and tenaciously’. In addition, such sentence constructions use inclusive pronouns: ‘Let’s plan holidays together [in Tohoku]’; ‘we need to utilize the experience for the future of Japan’; ‘one thing we should never forget . . . [is] the high-minded spirit . . . [of] the Japanese people’. Through such constructions, readers are encouraged to identify with these examples of citizens’ self-sacrifice.

In reconstructing both technoscience and national identity, The Yomiuri uses the device of the ‘transmission of the speech of others’ (Bakhtin, 1981; also see Samuel et al., 2012), which involves using quotations and paraphrasing to transmit views about Fukushima without explicitly articulating them as positions held by The Yomiuri. For example, when The Yomiuri quotes a scientist urging mothers to keep breast-feeding their babies despite tests revealing elevated radiation levels in breast milk, the newspaper avoids making its own assertion about the safety of breast-feeding, radiation levels, or nuclear energy. That is, through selective use of nuclear insiders as sources, the newspaper articulates the interests of the nuclear industry while positioning itself as an objective transmitter of information, working on behalf of concerned citizen-readers. Similarly, in reconstructing national identity, The Yomiuri transmits the emotional speech of political leaders, especially Prime Minister Noda of the LDP, as well as the speech of everyday citizens such as farmers worried about radiation rumors and (through the Prime Minister’s speech) Miki Endo, who died in the service of her country. The selective use of such speech allows the newspaper to articulate a vision of national identity that excludes ‘selfish’ ‘fear’ or ‘panic’ about nuclear energy, without explicitly aligning the newspaper with the views of the speakers or with the interests of the nuclear industry.

Despite such discursive processes supporting the nuclear industry, however, counter-discourses of ‘technostruggle’ (Weston, 2013) continue to pose a long-term threat to the hegemonic ideology of technoscience. Although citizens’ activism is largely ignored by The Yomiuri and other major newspapers (Liscutin, 2011; Murillo, 2013), and disseminated instead through new media (Abe, 2013; Binder, 2012; Friedman, 2011), polls in 2012 found that 70% of Japanese want nuclear power reduced or eliminated, a higher level of opposition than was found in the weeks immediately after the crisis began (Pew Research, 2012). Thus, although The Yomiuri constructs a discourse that rationalizes the government’s pro-nuclear policy, it has not convinced the majority of the Japanese people that nuclear energy is safe.

The gap between polls showing opposition to nuclear energy and the success of the LDP in achieving its goal of beginning to reopen nuclear plants closed after the meltdowns raises the question of the impact of The Yomiuri’s coverage of the Fukushima crisis. Noting work by Habermas (1989/1962) and Arendt (1958) on the relationship between the debasement of the public sphere and the debasement of democratic decision making, Fairclough (2010: 394) argues that a central issue in political discourse is ‘the question of what discursive practices, what forms of dialogue, are available for civic deliberation’. The Yomiuri’s reconstruction of the ideology of technoscience does not depend on citizens’ consent, but rather on the construction of a discursive regime that delegitimizes citizens’ independent discursive practices. Moreover, the delegitimization of citizens’ discursive practices is rationalized within discourses of Japanese national identity that constrain citizens’ opposition to official policies. As several studies have shown (Friedman, 2011; Liscutin, 2011; Murillo, 2013), citizens’ voices in Japan are largely excluded from the ‘mainstream’ coverage of policy dialogue, and it is in this process of exclusion that The Yomiuri has been successful.

Moreover, The Yomiuri has supported specific political goals that sustain the nuclear industry. An important example involved the Prime Minister during the crisis, Naoto Kan, from the Democratic Party of Japan (the main opposition to the LDP). On 6 August 2011, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and just five months after the earthquake, Kan announced in a widely publicized speech at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial that he planned to commit the government to a policy of phasing out all nuclear reactors. Especially important was his statement questioning the safety and reliability of nuclear energy, which undermined the dominant position in policy debates of government nuclear regulators and nuclear scientists and engineers: ‘We will deeply reflect over the conventional belief that nuclear energy is safe’, Kan declared. In addition, by making his announcement at the Hiroshima Memorial, Kan disrupted the discursive link between nuclear energy and peace that had been established in the Atoms for Peace program, and instead discursively reconstructed the link between nuclear power and nuclear war. Partly in response to this threat to the nuclear industry, The Yomiuri editorially campaigned for Kan’s removal as Prime Minister, with Kan resigning under pressure on 26 August, less than three weeks after his speech in Hiroshima.

Implications and future research

The findings reported here about media coverage of the Fukushima disaster have implications for political discourse in other policy areas and in other national contexts as well. The construction of a discursive regime that excludes citizens’ voices – effected in this case through the reproduction of the ideology of technoscience and Japanese national identity – debases democratic processes of policymaking and thus helps powerful institutions and groups influence citizens’ beliefs and achieve policy goals regardless of citizens’ opinions and preferences. The case of the Fukushima disaster suggests, as Fairclough warned, that the debasement of the public sphere permits dominant voices supporting official policies to maintain their hegemonic position, despite the damaging consequences of the policies they support and challenges from alternative sites, including new media. In the case of Fukushima, the nuclear industry has been discursively and politically protected even though it created a disaster that (in the words of Yotaro Hatamura, head of the government-appointed investigative panel) could have ‘made the eastern part of Japan totally uninhabitable’ (Frontline, 2012). Anti-democratic discourses mean that ‘talking about such things [as loss of power at a nuclear plant] isn’t tolerated, and putting into words what one is thinking isn’t tolerated’ (Hatamura, quoted in Frontline, 2012). Thus anti-democratic policymaking systems shield powerful institutions and individuals from the consequences of their failures. Therefore the task for citizen activists seeking to influence public policy is not only to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses that challenge dominant discourses in the mass media and elsewhere in the public sphere, but more fundamentally to gain legitimacy in policy debates, and thereby renew democratic processes of decision-making.

An important direction for future research is to compare official media discourses to citizens’ discourses in social media and alternative mass media (such as magazines in Japan). Such research would clarify the mental models (Van Dijk, 1995b) that mediate discourse and ideology: How do various readers ‘read’ and process the official political discourse in The Yomiuri and alternative discourses in alternative media? A second line of inquiry involves longitudinal analysis of political discourse: How are representations of Fukushima, national identity, and technoscience revised in response to external events, including citizens’ opposition to nuclear energy as expressed in public demonstrations and other forms of protest? Finally, are there important differences between the English version of The Yomiuri, with its English-knowing readership, and the Japanese version, particularly in the representation of Japanese national identity? Such studies can contribute to a better understanding of the intersections of policy, discourse, and ideology.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For their suggestions and comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Dave Carless, Chris Deneen, Yuen Yi Lo, Mai Yamagami, and Sandra Silberstein.

Funding

This work was supported by The University of Hong Kong (grant number 201107170198).

Notes

Author biography

James W Tollefson is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU in 2012, he taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA and in Japan, the Philippines, and Slovenia in the former Yugoslavia. His research interests include language policy, sociolinguistics, language and inequality, second language education, and language and ideology. His most recent book is Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues (2nd edn). His current research examines mass media coverage of social policy, language and nationalism in East Asia, and research methods in language planning.

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