Cultural Framing of 'Heroes' in Time of Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of Japanese and Western Media, Journalistic Practice, and Audience Response During Japan’s 2011 Nuclear Crisis in Fukushima

Abstract

This research comparatively examines the media representations of a specific group of people – the workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant during the initial stage of Japan’s nuclear crisis in 2011 – between the English-language news media and their Japanese counterparts. The study explores the cultural portrayals of heroes in news narratives by looking at the salient schemata associated with the projected archetypes of ‘heroes’ and surveys socio-culturally constructed images with distinctively different characterizations. It also investigates the ways news audiences with different socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds have reacted to the hero frames. The study demonstrates how the cultural dispositions of journalists and news audience could influence the news narratives and discusses its implications.