Deconstructing the Official Statements of the Government on the Future of Nuclear Plants After Fukushima: From Safety Myth to Economic Myth

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogy of Disaster: Teaching About, Through, and Beyond Fukushima

Abstract

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdowns, the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11, 2011, devastated Japan and shocked the world. It was called the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history; people in the radiation-affected area were evacuated from their homes, not knowing if they could ever come back; the government has not been able to provide any practical solutions to clean the contaminated land or to handle the nuclear waste. The disaster has completely shattered the “safety myth of nuclear energy” and as a result all the nuclear plants in Japan have been shut down.
Despite such “unimaginable” devastation, many Japanese people still believe in the necessity of nuclear energy and support the re-opening of currently closed nuclear plants. Why is this even possible? How do government officials and industry leaders manage to push their agenda for the economic interests of nuclear energy, neglecting the safety of human lives? What are the discursive forces that make people take up the renewed, powerful discourse of “economic myth of nuclear energy”?
In order to understand how the discourse of economic necessity of nuclear power has been naturalized, this paper analyzes two official speeches made at a press conference by the former Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda (September 2, 2011 ~ December 26, 2012) of the Democratic Party of Japan (a center-left political party) and the current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe (December 26, 2012 ~) of the Liberal Democratic Party (a conservative political party) about their policies and plans for the future of nuclear power plants in Japan.
By conducting critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 2003) on the official statements made by the two Prime Ministers who have taken the highest office in government in succession after the Fukushima disaster, I attempt to unpack the mechanisms as to how a particular discourse is produced, distributed, and consumed by the public. To situate their speeches within the socio-historical context of discursive practices, other media reports and documents are also consulted.
Each text has been subjected to the dialectically related three layers of analysis—i.e., textual, discourse, and social analysis. Preliminary analysis suggests that each text tactically utilizes various rhetorical strategies and linguistic devices (e.g., ‘rewording,’ ‘(re)lexicalization,’ ‘substitution,’ ‘omission,’ ‘grammatical metaphor,’ and ‘recontextualization’) to ‘deceive,’ ‘confuse,’ and ‘threaten’ the audience and ‘justify the unjustifiable.’ Being confronted by the unprecedented disaster of Fukushima and facing a critical juncture whether or not to move towards denuclearization in Japan, people need to be able to “read the word to read the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This is critically important for us so that we can assess what is at stake and exercise our rights as social agents. Instead of doing critical discourse analysis as a mere social critique, this study attempts to connect its findings to education. To that end, implications of applying critical discourse analysis as a way to develop critical literacy in educational settings will also be discussed.

Author

• Yuri Kumagai, Smith College