Social media has dedicated to Japan after the earthquake. It has helped us to get information which Japanese government, TEPCO, or even main media do not. Without social media, we might have not even known any situations of nuke plants in Fukushima.
Since Japanese government has been hiding the facts and main media have not covered the situation in Fukushima area which nuke plants are located, it is been hard for us to get the right information. The reasons are stupid, and complicated because of the money, power, and relationships among the government, TEPCO, and main media. So, instead of them which they have a huge responsibility to tell us all the fact, social media became clear its position that it is one of the tools to get the information of the reality.
Blogging is one of the popular social media in Japan. As I already mentioned on previous post, we have some blog SNS and one of them, “ameba blog” has more than 230 millions viewers per a month. So blogging is one of the influential tools in Japan. After the disaster, many free journalists and activists headed to Fukushima because no main media had covered the real situation around the area at that time. (Even now, it is rare to see those media report that.) Those journalists put the pictures and videos they took and share what they saw in the town around the nuke plants in Fukushima. One of the activists, Ken Noguchi also shared us on his blog. The pictures he put on his blog were that I did not want to believe that it is still happening in my country, Japan. If you really want to know what is going on and you are ready to look the pictures, please visit his blog. Although the content is written in Japanese, you can still check his pictures.
Also, Twitter is one of the most useful social media for us because it let us inform people if we are safe or where we are. Since it was very hard to use phones after the earthquake, people just posted on twitter to let their family or friends know about their situations.
What if social media did not exist? It must have been tough to get to know the situation of nuke plants area. The disaster proved that social media became a big tool to get information instead of TV or newspapers. Here is an interesting statistic about social media. We can see how the number of people on social media increased dramatically after the earthquake.
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| 月(month), 単位（unit: K）, April, 2010-March, 2011 |
You may think that Japan is not safe enough to visit yet. It’s hard to response to the feelings because I don’t even know the actual radiation level right now and doubt the information from government, TEPCO. How can foreign people believe information from Japanese government even many Japanese people cannot trust it? That’s why the number of foreign visitors is decreasing. But, most of the parts in Japan were not affected so I want you to visit Japan someday in the near future. Here is a really great video from ANA(All Nippon Airways). They just released an advertised video of Japan. Please check and come to Japan!!
I thought this was really interesting Mai - I had no idea that the Japanese government was trying to cover up these terrible tragedies and that it was actually up to smaller media and groundswell efforts to get the message out to Japanese citizens. I found it particularly interesting that the large news corporations did not report on the events - in the U.S. it would have been a great story that drew viewers so all of the channels would have jumped on the chance to air that big of a story.
返信削除But it's great to see just how successful those smaller news agencies can be! In the U.S. I feel like the smaller groups, although together they reach a lot of people, individually they are not nearly as effective or as widespread as the larger corporations. It's simply awesome to get a reminder that smaller news groups are effective!
Thank you for the comment, Katharine! In Japan, we have a press club which is only for major medias such as key TV stations, big newspapers...basically, free journalists and local newspaper/ TV cannot even enter the official government interview which is very ridiculous. So if main TV and newspaper report the same news at the same time, many people would believe them even if it was made up. Now, however, we have a great tool, social media. It allows us to get a lot of information from many sources. Although I know we still need to be careful if those resources are true or not, I really appreciated that how social media let us know a lot of information in the disaster.
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