Goshima (2012) analyzes the New York Times’ (as a representative example of American media) coverage of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant for the first month after the outbreak and concludes, while the newspaper presented people as heroes in reporting an earthquake in California in the past, there were no anecdotes about heroes in its reportage of the Fukushima disaster. This may not be the case, however, considering that Western media started to call the plant workers ‘the Fukushima Fifty’ just after the accident (e.g. “Japan’s Fukushima 50: Heroes Who Volunteered to Stay Behind at Japan’s Crippled Nuclear Plants,” ABC News, 2011/3/16).
Reading news reports in the Western media (not only American but also British, German, French, Spanish, and Australian media) confirms that it was popular to portray the workers as heroes. Furthermore, whereas Western media sources openly praised them, the Japanese media didn’t necessarily do so: for example, they used the equivalent expressions only either in quotations, mostly from foreigners (i.e. not in journalists’ texts), or in negative opinions (e.g. “what is needed now is strategies and logistic support, neither heroic tales nor heroes,” the Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, 2011/5/16).
In addition, the Western media complained about the Japanese media’s (as well as electric company’s and government’s) treatment of the workers (e.g. “faceless heroes,” the Guardian, 2011/3/16, “invisible heroes,” the Telegraph, 2011/3/27, “[companies] aren’t paying the workers extra or providing benefits beyond existing accident and sickness insurance,” the Wall Street Journal, 2011/3/24, and “In any other country, they would have been heroes. In Japan, however, there have been no awards, no interviews, no publicity,” the Guardian, 2013/1/2).
In this paper I examine how the word ‘hero’ and the equivalent expressions were used in the Western and Japanese media. The database and Internet research indicate that these expressions were used differently between them. I then relate the differences in use to the differences in the notion of ‘hero’: namely, the reluctant use of the expression in the Japanese media reflects that the knowledge schema of (war) hero in the West is not shared in Japan, especially after WWII.
