Many thanks to all for the continuing fascinating discussion from many points of view. As a Social Science Japan list, it seems to me that our purpose should be to discuss propositions about how Japanese society (including politics, economics, culture, etc.) works, and to subject such propositions to the light of objective evidence (whether from statistics, surveys, participant-observation, historical studies, etc.) and refine or demolish them thereby.

Peter Cave's post called for empirical research comparing the coverage of climate change by Japanese and other national media. Fortunately, I can present just such research. My research project (COMPON) with teams in 17 countries analyzed the amount of coverage about climate change/global warming from 1997 to 2008 in each of the 17 countries. This resulted in a total of around 30,000 individual articles mentioning the terms. We then analyzed random samples of the articles for the years 2007 and 2008 (just before the pivotal Copenhagen COP 15 conference), analyzing the "frames" used by each national media (top three newspapers). From about 130 frames, this reduced to 31 main frames. (a frame is a way of interpreting the term climate change/global warming, such as talking about UN policies, domestic ecology, mitigation policy, etc., in conjunction with mentioning CC/GW). We then analyzed the major trends in framing the topic of CC/GW for each country. The resulting article (with 33 co-authors) has been published in an open-access journal, Socius (2016, Vol. 2, pp. 1-17) and is available for free at the following URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023116670660

To briefly summarize the results reported in the article, the amount of climate change/GW coverage during 2007-2008 by Japanese media (combining Asahi, Yomiuri and Nikkei) tracked at about average for the 17 countries. Concerning how the national media "framed" the issue of CC/GW during 2007-2008, all the 17 countries showed distinct patterns. The US for instance, led in coverage of climate change denialism. In Japan, CC science denialism was non-existent, but even positive discussion of CC science was very low. Japanese media's framing of the CC/GW issue was highest among all 17 countries for the framing categories "Politics Global-UN". "Business-voluntary action," "Mitigation policy-pro" and "Energy-Pro Nuclear." Japan was among the lowest (along with Korea, Taiwan and China) in framing of "civil society-domestic," For more details please consult the article with its figures and data table. In Japan, discussion attaching moral responsibility for climate change/GW was very low. This contrasted strongly with Germany, for instance, which had the highest level of concern about the "global environment."

If we bring this media coverage and framing evidence to bear upon our current discussion topic of "why so little popular climate activism in Japan?", it would seem to indicate that the dominant tendency of Japanese media framing is to convey the impression that the CC/GW issue belongs to the government in conducting foreign and global policy, and that mitigation policies (such as conservation, cap and trade, etc) are desirable, but they should be carried out voluntarily by business. This kind of framing takes responsibility away from citizen activism, which is not much reported on (even if it does exist). Such framing tendencies would encourage many Japanese citizens to think, as Mackie points out, that they do not know enough about climate change/GW to make an informed judgement, and therefore should keep quiet.

Responding to Mackie's doubts about the effectiveness of public protest, it seems to me that the worldwide evidence shows that, in any country, if citizens' movements do get strongly aroused, they can force changes to occur in government policy. This is an objective reality. In Japan concerning environmental policy, for instance, the wave of environmental pollution protest movements in the 1960s was directly responsible for the Japanese Diet passing the 1971 set of very progressive environmental laws which cleaned up much of the nation's air and water pollution. For a detailed empirical study of that influence process, please see Broadbent, Environmental Politics in Japan (Cambridge U Press, 1998). Of course, those movements were protesting multiple instances of severe local industrial pollution. This fit with the localism of Japanese civic concerns. But this wave of protest quickly died out in the early 1970s after the passage of the new laws and under the economic pressures of the first Oil Shock. Due to the localism of Japanese civic culture, the public did not join and financially support national (much lss international) environmental NGOs to any extent. That, coupled with laws prohibiting voluntary organizations from incorporating (until the 1998 NPO law), meant that national and international NGOs did not flourish or become influential political players as they have in other OECD countries.

Popular protest over global climate change is, it seems to me, based on acceptance of a personal ethical responsibility for acting to try to save the global biosphere and save one's own species as a whole, such as evinced so eloquently by Greta Thunberg. This sense of personal moral responsibility may be a very Protestant Northern European tendency (as Max Weber's classic work argues). Those activist youth have a strong sense of the need for much faster emergency action and are trying to push governments to act. One post about working with Japanee youth indicated their difficulty in knowing how to articulate a political position and the lack of skills to take action on it. This indicates a lack of practice (including in Bourdieu's sense). I wonder if youth in other OECD countries evince higher levels of such political articulation and practice skills? This is a fascinating empirical question.

Perhaps analysis of the World Values Survey data or similar surveys would shine some light on this question. Those surveys show that Japanese public values "giving people more say in governmental decisions" at considerably higher rates (33%) than other E. Asian countries/regions (except Hong Kong), and is equal to the US and Germany. (see Broadbent, "Introduction: East Asian Social Movements" pg. 21 in Broadbent and Brockman (eds.) East Asian Social Movements, Springer, 2011). The Japanese public's degree of distrust of major institutions is far stronger than in the US or Germany. But Japanese public's experience in joining civic voluntary associations is far lower than in the US or Germany (though this data may be changing since the 1998 NPO law, and this needs research on recent trends). Another contributing factor is that work organizations so totally absorb especially men's lives in Japan leaving them little time for community activism and affairs. Perhaps surprisingly, urban community networks in Japan and feelings of reliance on neighbors are very weak compared to China (my recent comparative research on network survey data).

Our COMPON Japan team led by Professor Hasegawa Koichi (Tohoku U) has been continuing research on climate change activism in Japan and reports that since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown, a new type of citizen activist has been emerging in Japan with support for Green New Deal active government policies. So, culture can change and perhaps under the relentlessly increasing pressure from climate change disruptions, public political culture is changing.

Sorry to go on for so long. Its just a fascinating discussion and topic.





Jeffrey Broadbent
Professor, Department of Sociology
Fellow, Institute on the Environment
909 Social Science Building
University of Minnesota
267 19th Ave. S.
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
Office phone: 612-624-1828
Department Phone: 612-624-4300
Department Fax: 612-624-7020
Email: broad001@umn.edu
Curriculum Vitae Webpage
Compon: Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks project website
East Asian Social Movements

"The world is much more interesting than any one discipline." - Edward Tufte



On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 2:48 AM SSJ-Forum Moderator <ssjmod@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp> wrote:

From: Peter Cave <Peter.Cave@manchester.ac.uk>

Date: 2019/10/13

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this discussion. I'm going to
try to summarise my own thoughts in posts on different aspects of it,
starting with media.

A number of contributors have suggested that Japanese media coverage of
climate crisis/change topics is tame, and/or have hypothesised reasons
(e.g. Florentine Koppenborg suggested that 'well-staffed environmental
desks at big newspapers are rare and there are no powerful environmental
and climate NGOs that could put the topic on the agenda', while Yosuke
Buchmeier pointed to the kisha club system and other pressures on media,
and Nick Kapur suggested that media narratives might be affected by
oligopolies in corporate advertising and government 'quasi-control of
NHK' and what he described as a 'very impoverished, monotonic media
landscape'). On the other hand, Saki Mizoroki was more sceptical about
the role of the kisha club system. Meanwhile, Andrew DeWit suggested
that even a cursory search indicated that there has in fact been media
coverage of climate strikes in Japan.

Hypotheses are interesting and worthwhile. However, I find it quite
striking that nobody has been able to point to rigorous studies of how
climate crisis/change issues (or other aspects of green issues) have
been covered by the Japanese media. It seems to me that such studies
could be very interesting and fruitful - and even more so if they were
comparative. They would make good subjects for BA or MA theses by
linguistically able students.

A quick search of the Asahi Kikuzo database shows 30 uses of the term
気候危機 (climate crisis), and a search in Japanese with Factiva shows 145,
in both cases heavily concentrated in 2019 and especially the last few
months. On the other hand, a search using the term 地球温暖化 (global
warming) comes up with 21022 items on Kikuzo, and 199,636 on Factiva.
Obviously other terms could also be used, and it would be important to
analyse the content of the articles, the style, and so on. It is also
quite easy to do searches on documentary programmes on the NHK website.

While the Japanese media, like media in other liberal democracies, has
shortcomings, I think there should be considerable caution about
assuming that it is substantially worse in its coverage of environmental
and climate crisis issues than media elsewhere. In the UK, for example,
there are some media outlets (such as The Guardian) which give extensive
coverage to such issues. But The Guardian has a circulation of less than
half a million, even though the online readership may well be higher. I
strongly suspect that most of the UK press gives much less, and much
poorer quality coverage of climate issues. Nor do I have the impression
that climate issues are covered with that much intensity by the BBC (I
don't think I can actually remember a TV programme dedicated to the
issue, though obviously there are slots from time to time on news and
current affairs programmes), and, indeed, environmental activists have
repeatedly criticised the BBC for giving too much time to climate change
deniers and for inadequate coverage.

However, it seems to me that there is perhaps one hypothesis that might
be worth exploring. That is, while the coverage of climate crisis issues
might not necessarily be more extensive or of better quality overall in
(for example) the UK, it could be that the pockets of much more
intensive coverage in media outlets such as The Guardian help to inform
and motivate a relatively small number of more committed activists who
engage in street protest. If Japan lacks these pockets of intensive
coverage, then that could help to explain a situation where you have
broad acceptance of climate change and the need for action to combat it,
but not a significant minority of highly committed activists.

At any rate, there seems a lot of scope for empirical research to fill
the lack of knowledge we have. A quick and no doubt inadequate search on
CiNii suggests there is little research on this subject in Japanese too
(though there is an interesting survey comparison of consciousness of
German and Japanese students published in 1999, with the title
日独若者の環境問題に関する意識調査 - it shows some differences between the two
groups, but at a cursory glance seems to show quite high environmental
consciousness among the Japanese students).

Next, maybe, education.

Peter

Peter Cave
Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies
SALC, University of Manchester
Samuel Alexander Building
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 3195
www.manchester.ac.uk/research/peter.cave/