Paper short abstract:

This year marks ten years since the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan. This paper is the first attempt at comprehensively investigating the manner in which Japanese major newspapers have critically responded to the disaster and nuclear power policies in the last ten years.

Paper long abstract:

This year marks ten years since the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan. It became the catalyst for a clamour among the nation’s media to call for a ban of nuclear power in Japan, a country with over 50 nuclear power stations.

In 1945, in the final days of the Second World War, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following this experience, the construction of nuclear power plants and the development of nuclear power for peaceful ends were pursued as a national policy and became an important part of the post-war national identity of the Japanese. The miraculous economic development of post-war Japan was linked in popular discourse with the so-called ‘dream of atomic power’ and the ‘myth of atomic safety’. For this reason, up until the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power enjoyed the support of the majority of the public in Japan.

The Fukushima disaster, however, changed everything. Public opinion has shifted with the majority of Japan’s population keen to see the end of nuclear power. Most deserving of attention is the post-disaster shift towards an anti-nuclear stance that occurred amongst the many Japanese members of the mass media who had until then supported the nation’s nuclear policy.

The purpose of this study is to explore how and why Japanese media have changed from before Fukushima, what they have then achieved, and what problems they involve. This study’s target is the editorials of Japanese national newspapers for the 10 years since the Fukushima accident. Three major newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, and Tōkyō Shimbun changed their positions after Fukushima and have presented numerous (1,974) editorials that articulated an anti-nuclear stance. These are the analysis subjects. Concerning methodology, this research adopts an interdisciplinary approach but is mainly based on a frame and content analysis, combining both a qualitative and quantitative approach. This study is the first attempt at comprehensively investigating the manner in which Japanese newspapers have critically responded to the disaster and nuclear power policies in the last ten years.