Photo © Mike Hollingshead/ExtremeInstability.com
As a longtime climate change watcher, I expected the report would
add some background on global climate change and IPCC assessment. But it did not.
In fact, the Japanese media almost never associate recent unusual weather
phenomena like record hot summer and increasing heatstroke deaths and IPCC or
climate science in general.
This week I attended an international expert workshop on climate
change and was astonished by a colleague’s experience when the person received
a press interview on climate change. A reporter told the expert not to comment
on climate science as a cause of recent abnormal weather events because
reporting on that connection is prohibited by sponsors. The “embargo” was in
place for a long time in Japan, but it was released last summer, the colleague
added. Unfortunately, the news show I saw last weekend might not be too updated
on that front.
I have been wondering why the Japanese public awareness on climate
change, even among well-educated people, is so low, and think I got the answer.
As a result, climate change has almost never become election agenda in Japan. This
makes a stark difference from other G7 countries such as Germany, the UK, or
the USA in which both presidential candidates discuss climate change, though
their positions sound quite different.
At the workshop, a German expert recounted that there are
intense discussions whether recent floods in Southern Germany are due to
climate change. In Japan, even debates on these topics do not take place in the
media, apparently due to the perennial embargo.
According to the latest free press ranking by Reporters without Borders,
Japan was only the 72th out of 180. As a developed country, this is quite low.
We have serious repercussions from disabled press.
We have serious repercussions from disabled press.
