How good was 3/11 news coverage?

February 11, 2014

Many foreigners in Fukushima fled after crisis, news reporting questioned

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20140211p2g00m0dm074000c.html

SENDAI (Kyodo) -- Many foreign nationals living in Fukushima Prefecture at the time of the March 2011 nuclear crisis say they relocated either to their home countries or within Japan, according to a survey by a nonprofit group.

The Fukushima International Association said its survey also showed that they were troubled by the difference in media coverage between Japan and their home countries and that most of them relied on TV rather than radio because of language barriers.

Of the 70 foreigners who were living in the prefecture in late 2012 and interviewed by the association, 51 people (73 percent) said they evacuated. Of them, 29 left Japan for their home countries, while 21 moved out of the prefecture and one within the prefecture.

While simple comparisons are hard to make, this represents a disproportionately high ratio of evacuees when compared with the entire population of the prefecture.

According to the prefectural government, up to around 164,200 people relocated after the crisis, in May 2012, accounting for 8 percent of the overall population of 2 million.

The questionnaire was given to the 70 people interviewed as well as 30 others on other questions. Among them, 53 people had known the prefecture was host to nuclear power stations before the March 11, 2011 quake and tsunami that triggered the nuclear crisis.

At the end of 2010, 11,190 foreign residents were living in the prefecture, with just over 60 percent having either Chinese or Filipino nationalities. The total dropped to 9,489 at the end of June 2013.

Of the 100 people surveyed, 88 people said they gathered information from TV when the crisis took place, far more than the 30 who cited radio.

One man said, "Japanese newspapers were slower in providing information than media in my home country and were not trusted very much. I relied on information from my home country."

He also said the community radio service provided instructions for evacuation but it was hard to understand audio information.

Many others had trouble understanding the situation even when they watched television. One person could not understand why the then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano was giving a daily press conference with a "serious look" on TV.

"I learned from television that I probably needed to evacuate. But I was worried, not knowing where the nuclear power plant was and also about radiation," another respondent said.

(Mainichi Japan)