Kaori Hayashi

This study investigates how broadcast journalism in China, South Korea, and Japan covered the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine and analyzes the origins of the differences in news coverage. The framing employed during the initial stage is crucial, as it influences the dissemination of ideas and emotions, setting the tone for public perception. Thus, we conducted a framing analysis of news coverage by focusing on three critical dates during the initial stage of the crisis. Our analysis revealed significant disparities in defining the situation, interpreting the causes, assessing moral implications, and proposing solutions, with particularly pronounced differences in sourcing practices. We found that each country’s foreign policy, degree of state involvement, and collective memory were dynamic factors that framed Ukraine’s war. In particular, the varying degree of state involvement influenced the intensity of the “Us” versus “Them” dichotomy and the latitude given to the media in framing the issue.

Recent technological advances have accelerated the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world. Public concerns over AI in ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) may have been enhanced, but their awareness has not been fully examined between countries and cultures. We created four scenarios regarding the use of AI: “voice,” “recruiting,” “face,” and “immigration,” and compared public concerns in Japan, the US, Germany, and the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea). Additionally, public ELSI concerns in respect of AI were measured using four items: ethics, tradition, law and social benefit. Respondents with AI knowledge tended to exhibit stronger concern about ELSI in various situations. In terms of law concerns, Japanese respondents displayed greater concerns. In contrast, the US, when compared Japan, expressed a relatively optimistic view of the current law landscape. Regarding social benefits, Korea, compared to Japan, exhibited a more positive outlook, whereas Germany, in comparison to Japan, expressed heightened concerns about it across different scenarios.

This study investigates the persistence of gendered choice and use of media, particularly in Japanese domestic settings. It shows how women’s significant presence in the digital media environment does not necessarily translate into substantial changes in gendered power dynamics in choosing and using particular media for certain purposes at home. This project’s authors, researchers from Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US, analyzed interview data from Japan by drawing on the Foucauldian concept of micro-level power, which is categorized into three main types: personal authority, media affordances, and space-time constellations. Through this process, we interviewed 77 individuals, revealing that persistent gendered media choices and use exist in Japan. The project team also looked for similar cases in other countries for further theoretical implications. As a result of this investigation, we argue that the patriarchy continues to influence women’s choice and use of media at home even in this media-saturated digital age. Our interview data show that “old media” such as radio, television, newspaper, and magazines not only mediate information and entertainment contents at home, but also structure people’s quotidian use of media, both old and new, and sustains existing gendered assumptions and values.

This article comparatively examines news avoidance in a rapidly changing media environment. We utilize findings from a large dataset of 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers, conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US. We aim to make a contribution to the study of news avoidance by providing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the drivers, practices, and patterns of news avoidance as they occur in and are shaped by a variety of national contexts. We argue that news avoidance is shaped not only by individual characteristics, but is also manifested and performed as part of specific time frames and socio-cultural factors. We distinguish two drivers of intentional news avoidance: cognitive and emotional. The cognitive drivers are accentuated by distinct country-level contextual factors, whereas the emotional drivers for news avoidance are shared across diverse national contexts.

This article seeks to contribute to theorizing the dynamics of incidental news consumption. Through an analysis of 200 semi-structured interviews with people in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States, we show that intentionality in news consumption can be viewed on a continuum, which goes from deliberately setting apart time to access the news on specific outlets to skimming through unsought-for news on social and broadcast media, with intermediate practices such as respondents setting up an environment where they are more or less likely to encounter news. Drawing on structuration theory, this article conceptualizes incidental news in the context of the wider media environment and across multiple levels of analysis and explores how individual agency and social structure interact to shape information acquisition practices.

The Disaster and Media Research Group conducted for the first time, extensive, in-depth interviews with newsroom executives of 14 Japanese mainstream national media outlets (8 newspapers and wire services, and 6 broadcasting networks) on their reflections of Japanese media coverage of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The Japanese media takes pride in their ability to swiftly communicate news alerts and evacuation announcements. However, they recognized little issue in merely conveying official information from the government and power industry in coverage of the nuclear disaster, rather than demonstrating journalistic effort by seeking alternative sources, particularly for assessing the seriousness of radiation exposure. The main findings from the interviews were that Japanese media (1) are well prepared for broadcasting of immediate reports on seismic scales and tsunami alerts, but less so for assessing the risks of nuclear disaster; (2) share the view that the media’s role is to cooperate with the government to communicate during emergencies, even if this means sacrificing their watchdog role; (3) are steadfast in their belief in traditional platforms while lacking a strategy to adopt the web and smartphone; (4) have little or no interest in collaborative news gathering or journalism sharing; and (5) are negative to the idea of training reporters to specialize in nuclear science, nuclear plant safety measures, or radiation exposure (with the exception of two media interviewed).

The focus of this paper is the digital transition in major Japanese newspapers that sell millions of copies per day. By digital transition we refer to the shift to publishing content on digital platforms—in this case the shift from print to online and mobile media. Japan is globally one of the most important newspaper markets with the world's largest daily newspapers measured by circulation. The research focusing on the digital transition in Japanese newspapers and the implications of this shift has been hitherto almost non-existent. In this paper, the digital transition is examined by means of qualitative in-depth interviews with representatives from leading Japanese newspapers. The conclusion deriving from the empirical analysis is that for Japanese newspapers the most essential approach in coping with the transition to digital is protecting the printed paper and treating the digital platforms as supplementary.

This study challenges the ruling orthodoxy that foreign news tends to be reported in divergent ways, reflecting the interests and identity of the home nation. Instead it concludes that the Greek and US elections in 2012 were reported in very similar ways in the leading news media of five countries located in different continents. In the case of the 2012 Chinese election, there were striking affinities in the news reporting of four out of five countries. Powerful forces that make for global conformity include the dominance of a small number of international news agencies, the emergence of a transnational journalistic culture, the hegemony of market liberal thought, the legacy of the Cold War, and the shared perspectives of allied states.