The following article was written as a group assignment for the Introduction to Public Relations class.
Abstract
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| Investigation report (FGDI) |
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This paper explores what the Japanese government had done for public relations right after a huge earthquake that hit the northeastern part of Japan in 2011. More specifically, its media management in three different media categories (mass, social, and international media) is to be examined in detail with two investigation reports recently published on the crisis, several official documents, and some scholarly works on crisis management. Actual management practices by the government such as the frequency of the Prime Minister's press conference and its uses of Twitter and Facebook during the crisis are to be examined in detail, and finally its crisis communication policy that only confirmed facts should be provided is critically analyzed referring to other crisis management studies including the one written by
Arjen Boin. By the end of the argument, this paper will provide better understanding of what the Japanese government could have done better during the disaster for the public relations.
Introduction
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitute earthquake hit the northeastern part of Japan. People all over the country had faced the threat of radioactive pollution right after the Fukushima power-plant accidents had happened by tsunami on the following days. During that time, the Japanese government had to deal with this unprecedented crisis and at the same time convey its urgent messages to the publics using various kinds of media in order to inform them of crisis situation and give them a relief. A year has passed after the quake and two investigation reports on the government's crisis management during the disaster were released. One is published by a private think tank (
Fukushima Genpatsujiko Dokuritsu Iinkai [FGDI], 2012) and the other is by the National Diet of Japan (
The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission [FNAIIC], 2012).
Purpose of Study
In this paper, the practices of crisis communication by the Japanese government during the crisis are going to be examined in three different media categories (mass, social, and international media) mainly with the two investigation reports and several related scholarly works on crisis management.
Justification of Study
This paper is written to contribute to the better understanding of what the Japanese government could have done better during the disaster for the public relations and what it should now do for the preparation for the next huge disaster. The paper may also contribute to the study of crisis management by a government as a case of a media management at a huge natural disaster in the digital era.
Review of the Scholarly Literature
Crisis Management by a Governmental Organization
A volume of preceded scholarly literature can be found regarding crisis management theories and practices. Among them,
Arjen Boin's work (Boin, 2009) mainly focuses on the challenges that a governmental organization would face at a huge natural crisis. Through the examination and analysis of how the Louisiana State Government had dealt with Hurricane Gustav in 2008, Boin points out the main characteristics of today's transboundary crises and illustrates the five main tasks that an administration must do for its crisis management and policy making.
Reports and Records on Japan's 2011 Tohoku Earthquake
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| Investigation report (FNAIIC) |
After a year has passed since the earthquake, there are two full investigation reports on the government's crisis management available so far. One of them was released by a private think tank called
Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (FGDI, 2012). The investigation committee members had interviewed more than 300 people who involved in the crisis management. They analyze risk-communication process among the Prime Minister's Office, TEPCO, and the on-site center at the nuclear plants in Fukushima and examine how the government had actually conveyed its messages to the public during the disaster. Prior to the publication, they released
the summary of the report in English (Funabashi and Kitazawa, 2012). In this summary, the authors severely criticize the crisis management done by the staffs at the Prime Minister's Head Office as we shall see in detail later in this paper. The other report was released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission established by Japan's Diet. The investigation team had interviewed more than 1,000 people who involved in the crisis management. However, this report does not spare many pages for the crisis management in public relations during the disaster. Still it points out the professional negligence of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) as a main cause of the human disaster, and strongly suggests that the government should have had a clear guideline of information disclosure at a crisis (FNAIIC, 2012). There are also some English materials that were released by the governmental office available on the web including
the PowerPoint slides presented by a public affairs official at a global communication conference (Shikata, 2011) and
an op-ed under the name of the Prime Minister which was covered on several international newspapers all around the world (Kan, 2011).
Other Scholarly Literature on the Tohoku Earthquake
Because very few complete investigation reports are available at the moment, there is very small amount of scholarly literature that focuses on the crisis management by the Japanese government. One of the few works that deals with a crisis communication issue is
the paper written by Ronald L. Carr, Cornelius B. Pratt, and Irene C. Herrera (Carr, Pratt, & Herrera, 2012). In here, the authors examine the disaster and how Japanese publics reacted to the government through SNSs with a sense of distrust. They point out that the public's frustration had emerged to a perceived level with a great help of new social media.
Media Management of Mass Media
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| Tsunami flooring in Sendai Airport |
In mass media, there are several incidents that had caused the public's disappointment and sense of distrust against the government. According to the investigation report, the Prime Minister then Naoto Kan had press conferences after the crisis only on March 13, 15, 18, 25, April 1, and 12 (FGDI, 2012). The number of the conferences was few and the frequency dropped rapidly toward the end. Kan's appearance in media was intentionally avoided by the media relations team in order to hedge the risk of his making a slip of the tongue since he had hostile feeling against media long before the disaster happened. Another example is a strange personnel replacement of a spokesperson in the government. On March 12 around 2:00 p.m. at the press conference of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Koichiro Nakamura, who was responsible for publicity at that time, stated that there was a possibility of meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. On the same day at 5:15 p.m., there was another press conference, which became the last one for Nakamura to attend. A new director of publicity was assigned right after that. Although the government officials denied that Nakamura was replaced due to his improper speech about the meltdown, it was one of the momentums that people held doubt about what the government announced. The publics also cast doubt on the government's ambiguous announcement on public safety. The Chief Cabinet Secretary then Yukio Edano had often said to the publics that “There is no immediate effect” regarding the effect of radiation to the health. However, this announcement sounded too ambiguous for many people and the possibility of long-term radiation effect was immediately raised as a counterargument. Edano told the investigation team in his interview that he had tried his best to speak as simple as possible avoiding technical terms in order to make his announcement understandable to the general public (FGDI, 2012). Furthermore, observational data of radioactive diffusion was not released immediately when it was needed. The System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) remained largely unused during the crisis despite the fact that there was widespread environmental contamination by radioactive material between March 11th and 15. The SPEEDI data was not officially provided to the Prime Minister's Office until 23 and evacuation orders were issued without the data (Funabashi & Kitazawa, 2012). As a result, only 20% of the residents living near the plants knew about the nuclear accident when they received the evacuation order on March 12th (FNAIIC, 2012).
According to FGDI, around 70% of the respondents of a public-opinion poll said “insufficient” about the information provided by the government during the crisis. The other poll indicates the public's strong dissatisfaction with the public relations activities by the government. Moreover, about 60-70% of people did not support its crisis management (FGDI, 2012). Public opinion became more negative after the TEPCO admitted that the nuclear meltdown had actually occurred right after the earthquake. The public support had largely gone down as negative criticisms for the government's initial response to the disaster had increased. (FGDI, 2012).
Media Management of Social Media
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| Prime Minister's Office |
According to FGDI, many people were using the Internet right after the massive earthquake and tsunami. They used social media as a communication tool since telephones had not been available for a while right after the earthquake. The Japanese government also took action on the web using social media. It created a website on the same day of the quake and had its own Twitter account (@Kantei_Saigai) two days later for sending out disaster information. It was a quick action that many people, especially the evacuees at the disaster-hit area, really wanted at that time. In its twitter feeds, it mainly announced what the Press Secretary had said at press conferences. Tweeting had been managed by three young officials who worked in the public relations department of the government. They worked 24 hours a day in rotation. By March 21, the number of followers of the government's account was about 260,000 and became 300,000 by the 28. These figures show how curious people were about the actions that the government had taken at the time. The government also tried to fulfill the public's needs. It had tweeted 48 times on March 14 and 62 times on the next day. However, the numbers decreased after that. On March 23, it had only tweeted 23 times. The government's Twitter account was only used for sending disaster information to the followers, not replaying to them.
At the other departments like Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIAC), the staffs there acted together to build an online system that enabled the official administrators to acquire a certified Twitter account smoothly and at the same time list their accounts on a social media portal site as a public institution.
Even with the various efforts mentioned above, the government did not seem to earn public's trust much. According to a poll in the report, 28.9% of people decreased confidence in the information released by the government, whereas only 7.8% increased it. On the other hand, 23.1% still saw the governmental announcement as a valuable resource (FGDI, 2012).
Overall, the government had insufficient PR organizations at the disaster. First of all, the government did not have proper staffs who knew about social media very well. There was no specialist from a social media industry until it finally employed a blogger who are assigned to interact more with the public in September (FGDI, 2012). In a word, most of the PR practices that the government did were one-way communications to the public and were not intended to get feedback from them.
Media Management of International Media
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| Prime Minister then Kan |
Regarding press releases to international media and non-Japanese residents in Japan, the Japanese government had kept providing information mainly in English. In dealing with international press, the Global Communications Office of the Prime Minister's Office played the main role. For example, the Head of the Office Noriyuki Shikata had had 65 interviews with the international press between March 11th and 30. Even after a month from the disaster, the Office post an op-ed titled “Japan's Road to Recovery and Rebirth” under the name of the Prime Minister then Kan (Kan, 2011) in order to lure foreign investment and business to Japan again. It was run on the Washington Post and other 128 media in 62 countries and areas (Shikata, 2011). For image management, the Office also placed an ad to express its thanks to other countries for helping Japan at the disaster on 216 media in 63 countries and areas including International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. Regarding social media relations, the Office made a new Twitter's account for English speakers right after the earthquake on March 14 and started tweeting about disaster information. It was just two days after the Prime Minister's Office started tweeting the same information in Japanese. The number of the followers expanded to more than 22,000 in two weeks. On the 23, the Global Office also made special pages of the 3.11 Earthquake on Facebook and started providing information there in English (Shikata, 2011). Even with these government's efforts to release appropriate information and messages about the crisis and recovery situations in Japan to the world, foreign media had often reported the disaster sensationally with distorted, negative images and wrong information.
Analysis
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| Map of seismic intensity |
As all the practices of public relations in three different media categories mentioned above suggest, the Japanese government did lose the publics' trust to a certain degree as a result. This was also attested by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Adviser then Hiroshi Tasaka (FGDI, 2012). The aforementioned poll showing that 60-70% of the public gave little credit to the government's accident response also supports the fact. What may have worsened the situation was the weakness and inefficiency of its “amateurish level” crisis communications (Funabashi & Kitazawa, 2012). It is clearly shown, for example, in the use of social media. The staff at the Prime Minister's Office did not know much about how to use it for the purpose of communicating with the public. It basically had one-way communication and did not try to receive and analyze what the public actually needed at the time of the crisis (FGDI, 2012). It could not even deal with the criticism raised by citizens and local governments through SNSs (Carr, Herrera, & Pratt, 2012). Most of all, however, the main reason for the management failure may lie in its crisis management policy (FNAIIC, 2012). The staffs in the Prime Minister's Office stuck to a policy regarding information disclosure. It was clearly stated by the Chief Cabinet Secretary then Edano at the press conference on March 13th, two days after the earthquake. He told the press that the government was trying to exclude uncertain or unidentified information from the press releases and only gave the certain, confirmed information swiftly (FGDI, 2012). This policy seemed totally fine as an official stance, but it actually worked very negatively to the public. Because of this policy, the government had often been seen as if it had not revealed important truth to the public (FNAIIC, 2012). Regarding crisis management, Arjen Boin points out that one of the most crucial leadership tasks during a crisis is to explain what is happening and what leaders are doing to manage the crisis. With the convincing rationale they offer, the public supports for their crisis management efforts (Boin, 2009). This is what the Japanese government should have done for the public first even if there had not been enough concrete facts to announce. Even the incomplete information should have been delivered to the public if it was used for the government's decision making (FNAIIC, 2012). Since the government did not fully put forth every effort on this point, it was seen to have very weak attributions of crisis responsibility and was perceived merely as a victim of the natural disaster (Carr et al., 2012). In other words, the Prime Minister's Office could not take a lead at all in its crisis management and was finally seen less credible and lack of leadership by its own public.
Conclusion
The impact of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and the following nuclear crisis in Japan were unexpected for all the staffs in the Prime Minister's Office. They could not handle them successfully, especially in the field of public communications. Due to a chaotic situation, communication problems in the Office, and inefficient uses of social media, the government had gradually lost the public's credit. The situation had gotten worse with its media-relations policy that it only conveyed the limited, confirmed information. The information policy only made the public and international media respect less of what the Japanese government said. There are still some investigation committees working on their final reports on the government's crisis management during the crisis. The English translations of the two investigation reports are also going to be published soon. Through these investigations and examinations, the Japanese officials and public will learn what went wrong during the crisis and know what can be prepared for the next possible natural disaster in the future.
