福島県立医科大学 学術機関リポジトリ

Title

Visualizing the decline of public interest in the Great East
Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
accident by analyzing letters to the editor in Japanesenewspapers

Author(s)Hidaka, Tomoo; Endo, Shota; Kasuga, Hideaki; Masuishi,Yusuke; Kakamu, Takeyasu; Fukushima, Tetsuhito

Citation

Fukushima Journal of Medical Science. 68(1): 63-66

Issue Date

2022

URL

http://ir.fmu.ac.jp/dspace/handle/123456789/1650

Rights© 2022 The Fukushima Society of Medical Science. This
article is licensed under a Creative Commons [AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International] license.

DOI

10.5387/fms.2021-18

Text Version publisher

This document is downloaded at: 2024-10-16T09:55:19ZFukushima Medical University

Interest in the Great East Japan Earthquake

Fukushima J. Med. Sci.,
Vol. 68, No. 1, 2022

63

[Brief report]

Visualizing the decline of public interest in the Great East Japan
Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident
by analyzing letters to the editor in Japanese newspapers
Tomoo Hidaka, Shota Endo, Hideaki Kasuga, Yusuke Masuishi, Takeyasu Kakamu
and Tetsuhito Fukushima
Department of Hygiene and Preventive Medicine, Fukushima Medical University(Received August 2, 2021, accepted December 23, 2021)
AbstractThis study aimed to delineate the decline in public interest toward the March 2011 Great
East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (FNPP) accident in Japan over a ten-year period. In this longitudinal descriptive study, we searched for
publications within a ten-year period in Letters to the Editor that mentioned the GEJE, theFNPP accident, or the January 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (GHAE) that occurredin Japan, using the official databases of the three largest Japanese newspapers. The GEJEand GHAE- related publications (4,809 and 2,092, respectively) are depicted as scatterplots. The results show a gradual decrease in the publications mentioning GEJE orGHAE. The impact of GEJE and FNPP on Japanese society was enormous, but the publicinterest waned over time. Communication strategies that maintain a high public interest in
previous disasters may be necessary.
Key words : disaster, descriptive study, mass communication media, public interest, radiation
anxiety, risk communication

However, there have been no evidence-based studies examining this decline.
Japan has one of the highest levels of trust in
newspapers in the world6), and thus the Letters to
the Editor of newspapers are a useful gauge of public
interest. As of 2016, the total circulation of Japan’s
representative daily newspapers, the Yomiuri, Asahi,and Mainichi Shimbun, was approximately 19 million, and all three newspapers ranked in the top ten
newspapers circulated worldwide7). These figuressuggest that newspapers are deeply related to publicawareness amongst Japanese people. Evidence ofthe decrease of public interest in the GEJE andFNPP accident may contribute to the developmentof a communication strategy suitable during the recovery period from such disasters leading to improved support for disaster victims.

Introduction
Maintaining a high level of public interest after
the occurrence of a disaster contributes to an appropriate public health response and the prevention ofvictim neglect in a post - disaster society 1). Ten
years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power plant (FNPP) accident in Japan inMarch 2011. As a result of these disasters, approximately twenty thousand people have died, and forty
thousand people have been evacuated from their
homeland as of March 20212). Many reports in themedia, as well as those by scholars and the Japanese
Government have highlighted concerns in the decline of public interest in the GEJE, FNPP accident,
and the reconstruction from these disasters 3–5).

Corresponding author : Tomoo Hidaka   E-mail : thidaka@fmu.ac.jp©2022 The Fukushima Society of Medical Science. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International] license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
63

T. Hidaka et al.

64

The aim of the present study was to visualize
the decline of public interest in the GEJE and FNPP
accident longitudinally over a ten-year period.

Materials and methods
Using the official databases of the three representative Japanese newspapers (Yomiuri, Asahi, andMainichi Shimbun), we searched for publications
mentioning the following disasters that were published in the Letters to the Editor over a 10-year
period since the disaster occurrence : the GEJE orFNPP accident in March 2011, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (GHAE) that occurred in Japan in January 1995 for comparison to the GEJE.
The search terms were the Japanese equivalent to
the following English terms : “Great East Japan
Earthquake”, “Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant”, their abbreviations, and “Tsunami” for theGEJE ; “Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake”, its abbreviation, and related disaster sites such as “Hyogo” and “Kobe” for the GHAE. Unrelated publications were excluded manually. In addition to thepublication not mentioning the disaster topics targeted in the present study, the following three exclusion criteria were also determined : first, publications with the regional name “Fukushima,” such as
those regarding the corona virus pandemic recovery
in Fukushima ; second, publications written by authors named “Fukushima” or “Kobe,” which arecommon Japanese surnames ; and third, publications which partially matched with keywords due tothe specifications of the newspaper databases evenwhen an exact match was performed, such as thoseincluding the topics of sport events held in “East Japan,” in spite of the search using the keyword “GreatEast Japan Earthquake.” The numbers of publications that mentioned GEJE and FNPP were added
together because many publications mentioned both
GEJE and FNPP, or even in publications that appeared to only mention either the GEJE or theFNPP, there were contents that could be regarded as
referring to both GEJE and FNPP when the contents
were carefully examined. The total numbers ofGEJE- and GHAE-related publications included foranalysis were 4,809 and 2,092, respectively. To
compress the information, such numbers were converted into a logarithm with base 2. Scatter plots
with logarithmic approximation curves were depicted using the number of months passed since theearthquakes and the number of publications. Logarithmic approximation curves were employed because the characteristics of the data distribution on

the scatter plots showed that the trend in the number of publications rapidly decreased and then flattened out among GEJE- and GHAE-related publications.
Ethical approval was not required because alldata in the present study consisted only of existing
information that does not include humans/animals.

Results
As shown in Figure 1, gradual decreases in thenumber of both GEJE- and GHAE-related publications were found. For the GEJE-related publications, a large deviation from the approximation curve
was found in the first two months (from March 11thto May 11th in 2011). The number of GEJE-related publications was higher than that of GHAE-related publications in almost all periods as shown in thegap between the two approximation curves.

Discussion
Our results suggest that there has been a decline in public interest in the GEJE and FNPP accident. The reason that the number of GEJE-relatedpublications did not decline in the first two months
may be because of the continuous interest in thecritical conditions of the FNPP which created uncertainty among people all throughout Japan. Ourfinding that the number of the GEJE-related publications was higher than that of the GHAE in almost alltime periods may reflect the severity of the longterm social and environmental impacts of the GEJE
and the FNPP accident on the public : public anxiety
towards radiation spread over a wide area is a specific enduring result of the GEJE. Topics related tothe GEJE may have been mentioned by more people
in the Letters to the Editor over a longer period oftime compared to those related to the GHAE, leading to the gap in the number of publications.
We need to be cautious about the possibility
that the Letters to the Editor of newspapers do notreflect public opinion but rather create it. The media has the right to decide which articles to adopt
and how to present such articles. Thus, the present results may be under the influence of suchbias ; the decrease in the number of GEJE-related
publications may be a sign of declining interest onthe part of the media rather than citizens. On theother hand, citizens refer to public opinion and also
create new public opinions based on informationfrom the media8). The decline in the number ofpublications related to the GEJE and FNPP accident

Interest in the Great East Japan Earthquake

65

Fig. 1. Time course decline in the number of publications in the Letters to the Editor in Japanese newspapers.
The solid blue lines and circles refer to the publications related to the Great East Japan Earthquake or Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, while the dotted gray lines and diamonds refer to the publications related to
the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.

in the Letters to the Editor may lead to a decreasein opportunities for citizens to be exposed to such
topics, and therefore public interest may decline.
Such a decline in the number of publications may be
explained by the changing media environment. Although these newspapers were mainstream media at
the time of GHAE, they may have been supersededby social networking services which have been
spreading rapidly since 2011, when the GEJE andFNPP accidents occurred. Thus, the public may
have had fewer opportunities to come into contact
with topics about the GEJE and the FNPP accidents
in newspapers. Regardless of whether Letters tothe Editor reflect or create public opinion, the results of current analysis may have an equivalentmeaning in terms of the difficulty in maintaining
public interest in GEJE, FNPP accident, and theirvictims. Although a causal relationship between
public opinion and publications in the Letters to theEditor of newspapers could not be examined due tothe research design, it is notable that we found a decreasing trend in the number of publications in theLetters to the Editor of newspapers and that such atrend may be closely related to the decline in thepublic interest in GEJE.
One limitation of the present study is that it did
not normalize the number of GEJE- and GHAE-related publications, and thus cannot deny the possibility that the difference of total circulation of newspapers from 2011 to 2021 for GEJE, and from 1995 to2005 for GHAE, influences the number of publications in Letters to the Editor. Future researchshould therefore employ procedures to normalize orcorrect the publication numbers for a more precise
comparison.
Even in 2021 with much progress made regarding the recovery and revitalization of affected areas
since the GEJE and FNPP accident, mental healthproblems are prevalent among disaster victims inFukushima9). Importantly, although mental healthproblems among disaster victims can occur years after a disaster, such victims may be socially neglected, and may not receive adequate mental health support when public interest in the disaster declines.

T. Hidaka et al.

66

In fact, Japan’s government budget for physical/mental health support has been gradually decreasing
since the GEJE and FNPP incidents of 201110), andsustainable public mental health support is atstake. Maintaining the public interest years after adisaster may contribute to continued funds and tosustainable public mental health support for disastervictims. Although there is consensus in risk andcrisis communication research on the need and importance for public mental health support in the relatively short period after a disaster, our results suggest that communication strategies suitable for therecovery period after the acute phase of disasters
are needed in order to achieve sustainable mental
health support for disaster victims. While risk andcrisis communication are of importance at times ofdisaster, communication strategies that maintainhigh public interest in a previous disaster may benecessary in the recovery process to ensure that novictim is left behind.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI (grant number 16K17338, 19K03289, and20H01603).

7.

Conflict of interest disclosure

8.

The authors declare that there is no conflict ofinterest.

9.

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