An Analysis of Reporting of the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami : The Construction of an Idealized Narrative in Western Media

This paper will examine the foreign media representation of Japanese people and their behaviour following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis and put it in the context of other media accounts of disasters. To investigate the media representation of the 2011 disaster, a corpus of texts from both Japanese and non-Japanese media sources is assembled. This is then analysed through a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis techniques.It is found that non-Japanese media sources frequently used cultural stereotypes to construct a narrative of idealized Japanese behaviour following the earthquake and tsunami. This paper will discuss how this idealized representation was then contrasted with media representations of other disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and used as a way to both implicitly and explicitly criticize the behaviour of victims of other disasters