At 2:47 p.m. on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit Japan. A few minutes later, wave after wave of a massive tsunami struck the entire Pacific coast. As if the natural disaster alone was not enough, at 3:35 p.m., the waters from the tsunami - 15 meters high - damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor, spreading rumors and fear of mass nuclear contamination. Almost everything we know now, and especially what we knew of the quake and tsunami in the hours and even days after the events, was significantly shaped by social media. In fact, the generation of information and images occurred at such a fast pace that social media not only represented, but also directly mediated, our experience of the disaster more than in any other event to date. If Vietnam was the first war fully experienced through television, 3.11 was the first "natural" disaster so fully experienced through social media.1 This is the result of a number of factors, some a function of the way that technology use has developed in Japan, especially the fact of mobility of hand-held media, others due to the particular ways that networks of people reacted in the time of crisis. But social media was also much more than a source of information; it was also a tool of social and political action.

David H. Slater is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Sophia University, Tokyo, whose work involves youth culture, social class and urban space. He is the co-editor with Ishida Hiroshi of Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting and Strategies. Since 3/11, he has been doing the ethnography of disaster and relief in Tohoku, and was the Guest Editor of Hot Spots: 3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Fear and Anger, Possibility and Hope, in Cultural Anthropology (2010)

Keiko Nishimura is a graduate from the MA in Japanese Studies from the Program in Global Studies at Sophia University. Her article, "On Exhaustion, self-censorship and affective community," came out in Hot Spots: 3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan. Keiko is currently a research associate at Duke University.

A graduate student in Japanese studies/anthropology at Sophia University, Love Kindstrand studies emerging expressions of political subjectivity and struggles for representational space in Tokyo and Japan. His article, "The Politicization of Precarity: Anti-Nuke Protests in Japan since the Great Tohoku Earthquake" came out in Hot Spots: 3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan.  

Recommended citation: David H. Slater, Nishimura Keiko, and Love Kindstrand, "Social Media, Information, and Political Activism in Japan's 3.11 Crisis," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 24, No 1, June 11, 2012.

Piers Williamson, Plutonium and Japan's Nuclear Waste Problem: International Scientists Call for an End to Plutonium Reprocessing and Closing the Rokkasho Plant    

Piers Williamson is a research assistant to Professor Andrew DeWit at Rikkyo University. He holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Sheffield.

Recommended citation: Piers Williamson, 'Plutonium and Japan's Nuclear Waste Problem: International Scientists Call for an End to Plutonium Reprocessing and Closing the Rokkasho Plant,' The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 24, No 4, June 11, 2012.

Kosuke TAKAHASHI , Japan and China Bypass US in Direct Currency Trade

Vaclav Smil, Japan's Economy in 2012: Multiple Challenges   

"Adding insult to injury" sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂 nakitsura ni hachi -- literally "a bee to a crying face". But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has been through during the recent past. In March 2011 its economy, slowly recovering from the worst global post-World War II downturn, was hit by a powerful earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. That twin disaster disrupted many supply chains of Japan's important manufacturing sector and caused a catastrophic failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant; the ensuing fears led to the eventual shut-down of all of the country's nuclear generating stations, limited electricity supply, increased imports of fossil energies and the first annual foreign trade deficit in a generation.
But even without these setbacks the country's record during the past two decades would stand in sharp contrast to its 35 year-long rise from post-WW II destruction (pre-war GDP was equalled only in 1954) to the world's second largest economy whose accomplishments by the 1980s were widely seen as a foundation for further advances toward possible global leadership in the 21st century. Japan's economic face has not been smiling for more than two decades, since the early months of 1990 when the bursting of the real estate bubble and the falling stock market exposed the fragility of those seemingly solid pre-1990 achievements and ushered in decades of stagnation and uncertainty. This article assesses Japan's economic prospects in light of social and demographic problems.