Paper short abstract:

After the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011, radioactively contaminated beef that was sold in supermarkets around Tokyo caused a major scandal. This paper analyzes the public debate about this 'Cesium Scandal' as it is reflected in more than 1000 Japanese BLOG entries using new digital methods.

Paper long abstract:

During the Fukushima nuclear accident beginning on March 11, 2011, a large amount of radioactive material was released into the environment. However, the Japanese government reacted only slowly to control the ensuing radioactive contamination of food stuff. In particular, the sale of beef produced in contaminated areas was effectively prohibited only after beef products containing a dangerously high amount of radioactive Cesium had surfaced in supermarkets around Tokyo. This caused a major scandal in July 2011, destroying faith in the safety of Japanese food and confronting many Japanese consumers with the danger of radioactive contamination of their children and themselves.

The proposed paper analyzes the perception of the 'Cesium Scandal' by the Japanese population as it is reflected in a corpus of more than one-thousand Japanese-language BLOG-entries posted between March and December 2011. For this, a tool from the digital humanities is used to automatically analyze the content of the BLOGs and to visualize the way that the public debate has evolved. The results are then compared with a parallel analysis of the representation of the scandal in the Japanese print media. Among other points, it will be shown that many health and safety concerns of the Japanese population are reflected much more clearly in the BLOG entries than in print media. It will also be shown that these concerns were partly driven by factors that the conventional media excluded from their reporting almost entirely. The paper will end with a discussion of the usefulness of Digital Humanities methods to the analysis of Japanese public discourses.