This book has a point of beginning, a time and a place. At 14:46 (Japan Standard Time [JST]) on 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a subsequent tsunami struck the North Eastern coast of Japanās main island Honshu. Together, the quake and tsunami caused a major crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, 240 kilometres north of Tokyo. The effects of this triple disaster are still felt today. The Higashi Nihon Daishinsai or Great East Japan Earthquake is often referred to as ā3.11ā, after the date of the disaster.
The disaster resulted in around 20,000 deaths and missing persons. Some 170,000 people had to evacuate their homes. Three prefectures were particularly severely affected: Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima. In Miyagi alone, there were more than 10,000 fatalities. The tsunami flattened hundreds of kilometres of coastline, and whole towns and villages were reduced to rubble. Over 90 per cent of the people who died drowned in the tsunami. Most of the victims were vulnerable people: 65 per cent of them were over 60 years old. The communities that suffered were mostly traditional, often poor farming and fishing towns.
In June 2011, the Japanese government estimated the material losses from the disaster at 16.9 trillion yen (USD 152.2 billion). Over 25 million tonnes of rubble and general waste were left behind. The slow work of rebuilding the infrastructure, cleaning up the environment and the constant monitoring of the unstable nuclear reactors will require years of sustained investment. There is no way of measuring the stress and trauma caused to the victims of the disaster. It is impossible to put a price tag on their struggle for compensation from the state and the nuclear company Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). How could one assess the discrimination and stigma that the disaster brought to the people of the area?
No research can ever fully capture the human loss and suffering, the pain of people still living with the consequences of the events. A book that purports to trace the meanings and affects and the communication flows surrounding the event may thus be seen as yet another example of āfeasting on the apocalyptic image of the nuclear disasterā and the associated human tragedy, as some commentators have argued.1 It seems pertinent, then, to begin this book with an apology. There is something indecent about our point of departure, about exploiting this historic triple disaster and all the human cost and suffering it involved as an opportunity to research the dynamics of contemporary media and communication. We can only say that we are and throughout the process have been painfully aware of this.
Having said that, we must stress that the natural āoccurrenceā of the earthquake and its consequences to human societies and their endeavours offer exceptional material for an exploration of the contemporary global media landscape. From the critical hours of evacuation and rescue efforts to the political debates in Japan and abroad, and all the way to people hoarding iodide pills in the USA, events took place in relation to means, forms and manners of communication and media technologies. This still continues in the remembering of the events and in attempts to use the triple disaster for economic and political gain.
1.1 From an Occurrence to Varieties of Media Events
Occurrences happen; events are told, narrated and represented. One baseline definition of journalism has called it the discursive production of events (Ekecrantz 1997). Media representations select slices from the flow of occurrences, mark relative beginnings and ends of what has āhappenedā, and by doing so suggest causal links. There is an abundant literature on news as āstorytellingā, and most of it testifies to the increasing role of the mass media in constructing what has ājust happenedā. In concert with various modern expert bureaucracies and institutions (e.g. Lippmann 1920; Tuchman 1978; Schudson 2008, pp. 108ā125), the ānewsā has taken distance from the material, eyewitness and chronological observation of what happened and started to offer more abstract stories that shaped the social imagination (Barnhurst and Mutz 1997; Barnhurst 2016). This is the fundamental issue that lies behind the original notion of media events. For Dayan and Katz (1992), the original point of talking about media events was to show how mass media institutions were ableāin a historically new and powerful wayāto collect large, mostly national audiences to witness well-orchestrated symbolic moments. In their analysis, media events were not stories only shaped by journalists but giant rituals jointly scripted by established social institutions to highlight and celebrate the order and values of these societies. If routine news stories constructed events out the anarchic flow of occurrences, media events were occurrences created for the media in ways that already anticipated the story formats, production routines and reception schedules of twentieth century mass media systems. As Couldry (2003) pointedly clarifies, such rituals were in the business of constantly reproducing the myth of the āmediated centreā, a core around which society integrated. The three original ideal scripts of media events presented by Dayan and Katzācontests, conquests and coronationsāarticulated different types of power and authority: the rules-based legal rationality of contests, the heroic charismatic connotations of conquests and the traditional ritual authority of coronations. While explicitly drawing these links from a Weberian vocabulary, Dayan and Katz emphasized a Durkheimian sense for the functionality of such moments (state visits, leader summits and sports events). These were āliminal momentsā where the organizers of the events and the mass media system as a whole could āresonate togetherā and āmerge into oneā, producing āsocial integration of the highest orderā (Dayan and Katz 1992, p. 15; see Hepp and Couldry 2010; Rothenbuhler 2010).
In retrospect, by the time that Dayan and Katzās book came out in 1992, both the media and political realities had already quietly begun to question the explanatory power of this original notion of media events. The proliferation of channels and media outlets and the increasing targeting of audiences had begun to erode the national reach of broadcasters. The relative monopoly of established institutions to script big media events had been challenged by various kinds of ācontestingā actors (ranging from terrorism to Greenpeace and YesMen). Management of news events and public attention has since exploded and diversified: think of the 9/11 spectacle, the social media āproductionā of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or state-sponsored communication campaigns across borders (Liebes and Blondheim 2005; Cottle 2006; Couldry 2003; Fiske 1994; Kellner 2003). At the same time the role of media events as ācohesiveā rituals has been challengedānot replacedāby variety of ādisruptiveā mediated events and strategies (cf. Katz and Liebes 2007). Disruptive events (at least momentarily) explicitly challenge and erode social order, destabilizing the sense of security ...