Researcher(s):
Kassie Kometani Rachel Aragaki A post with the ID $student does not exist.
ENVS course(s): 220 Initiated: November 2016 Completed: December 2016 Go to project site
|
We are interested in the personal impacts (consisting of psychological, social, and cultural) of environmental hazards in Japan, with a particular focus on earthquakes. Earthquakes have been connected directly to nuclear disasters, tsunamis, mudslides, and other high-risk environmental occurrences in Japan, and the presence of these events can be tied to the historical development of beliefs and behaviors. Today's millennial generation, however, grew up with technology that has changed the speed and availability of information and communication. This project aims to examine the ways that Japanese millennials react and interact with environmental hazards via the internet, particularly social media platforms. To investigate, we compiled statistical data from external sources, examined narrative and trends in "tweets" from the social media platform Twitter, and conducted interviews with Japanese international students living in Portland. In our analysis, we discovered that popular social media "trends" (observable via copy/paste text templates and hashtags) were prominent and widely used even in times of disaster. We also found that, while safety and infrastructural stability were usually the foremost concerns, the Japanese people did not express a lot of anxiety or distress over disasters like earthquakes, and they recovered from such disasters quickly.