Ever since the huge earthquake that hit Japan's Tohoku-Pacific coast on March 11, 2011, the country's mass media have obsessively focused on the magnitude of the physical damage and the loss of life. Repeated broadcasts of traumatic video images of the great tsunami and the damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant have been seared into Japan's collective memory.
One year later, the media will be sure to intensify its reports and broadcasts along the same lines, encouraging the Japanese public to become all the more determined to overcome the disaster. But the public may already have fallen victim to an unforeseen pitfall.
What the public has endured over the past year is somewhat analogous to what Americans experienced following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Both events severely distorted public discourse. In the United States, the government employed massive propaganda to promote public support for the "global war on terror" that it was about to wage. Video images, particularly of the World Trade Center's collapsing twin towers, fanned the flames of conflict.