“The sea is not a dump yard”. A comparative corpus-assisted analysis of media representations of the Fukushima nuclear water release in China and Japan

On 13 April 2021, the Japanese cabinet, with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approval, decided to release Fukushima nuclear plant water into the Pacific Ocean over 30 years. This decision elicited significant domestic and international opposition, including a seafood import ban from China. Although various studies have addressed the Fukushima nuclear water release from legal (Wu and Gong 2023), marine safety (Yue and Yang 2024), and the global economic (Wu et al. 2023) perspectives, the media representation of this issue remains insufficiently explored, particularly due to the absence of linguistically-informed, corpus-based discourse analysis. Our study conducts a comparative analysis of representations of the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water issue by contrasting coverage in the English-language press of China and Japan. Drawing on a corpus-driven investigation of 141 news articles published in the China Daily and Japan Times from August to September 2023, we explore how different news agencies represent, legitimise, and stigmatise the release of contaminated water. The findings of our analysis reveal differences in the use of keywords and metaphorical expressions in the news articles published in these countries. China Daily tends to emphasise the potential environmental harm from the discharge of nuclear wastewater and calls for international attention, while the Japan Times predominantly portrays the safety of treated wastewater and deems China’s seafood import ban unjustified. The combination of corpus-driven methodology and metaphor analysis highlights the potential of keywords and lexical-conceptual patterns in deepening our understanding of the ideological differences and geopolitical tensions.