Paper short abstract:

Through the examination of the corpus built from Yomiuri, Asahi and Twitter data from 2011 to 2014, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the Fukushima effect in Japan's media focusing on a discussion of nuclear phase-out from the point of view of corpus-driven discourse analysis.

Paper long abstract:

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster led to catastrophic environmental and economic consequences and temporarily eroded the public attitude towards nuclear energy not only in Japan but globally. In 2011, the Japanese DPJ-led government gained worldwide attention for the plan to phase-out. However, while some countries seized the opportunity to move away from nuclear energy and to expand the use of renewable energy sources, the succeeding Japanese LDP-led government, despite growing public distrust towards nuclear facilities, eventually decided to restart nuclear plants and continue to rely on nuclear energy in 2012.

In this paper, I examine the discourse of nuclear phase-out represented in Japanese media, contrasting data from two newspapers (Yomiuri Shinbun and Asahi Shinbun) and social media (Twitter). To explore the discourse, I undertook a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of a large corpus of newspaper articles and tweets on nuclear phase-out in the period of 2011-2014. The analysis shows not only the growing media convergence between social media and the mass media and thus their close interrelatedness but also instances in which social media has become more influential than the legacy media outlets.