2021 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Domestic and International Online Discourse on Polarized Issues: The Case of Japanese Whaling
| Project/Area Number |
19K01442
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| Research Institution | Hitotsubashi University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | Twitter / social media / political communication / whaling / comfort women / Tokyo Olympics / Japanese politics |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In 2021 I completed (and kept up to date) my database of national and local Japanese politicians' Twitter accounts, including their tweets and followers. I plan to write an article analyzing the structure of the Japanese Twitter political network using the follower data. I also expanded the database to included politicians' Facebook and Instagram accounts.
I continued to collect whaling data, and plan to write an article reporting which Japanese politicians pay attention to whaling in their online communication, and which segments of the Japanese online political community of Twitter users express interest in the issue.
Turning to other cases of internationally polarized issues, I updated and rewrote the comfort women paper I presented in 2020. The article is now in its final draft and due to be published in 2022 as a chapter of an edited volume about sites of historical memory in East Asia. I also used the findings of this study to write a chapter in a shared volume of Japanese essays published in April 2021.
I also used the database to analyze how Japanese politicians and their followers communicated about the Tokyo Olympics, which was an issue of great controversy during the spring and summer of 2021. I presented a paper on the topic in October 2021 at an international online workshop investigating various aspects of the Tokyo Olympics, and am currently editing the article for submission to a special edition of an edited journal.
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