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As North Korea emphasized its "second mission," the reunification of the two Koreas, with its nuclear weapons, South Korea has been mobilizing all potential resources to deter North Korea's attempt. Indeed, it rapidly improved its relations with Japan as well as strengthened the U.S. extended deterrence through the "Washington Declaration" in early 2023. The United States, South Korea, and Japan even initiated their trilateral summit meeting to discuss their combined deterrence posture against North Korea. This article evaluates South Korea's current nuclear preparedness, including preemptive/preventive strikes, missile defense, and civil defense, identifies weaknesses, and analyzes whether Japan can mitigate the weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study examining the responses of librarians to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. Topics address include a poster created by a librarian from Fukushima, Japan that documented librarians efforts to provide reading and information services despite damages to library buildings, as well as the use of libraries as shelters.

Employing a social survey, this paper examines citizen attitudes towards local energy governance in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear power plant accident. The survey found that public comment and random sampling citizen deliberation led to a greater willingness to participate in discussions of municipal heating and power (energy) policy for a resilient community than did conventional citizen committee membership. The former mechanisms provided opportunities for individuals with considered viewpoints to participate in a public dialogue on energy and environment issues in post-disaster Japan. Respondents who did not have clear ideas about a roadmap for nuclear power generation showed a lower willingness to participate in local energy policy formulation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world had a sense of deja vu when a massive earthquake and a 15 m tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on 11 March 2011. As the world followed how the Fukushima nuclear crisis unfolded, nuclear engineers in Japan were trying their best to overcome the situation. Believing that their technical knowledge was adequate to understand what went wrong and to mitigate the crisis, Japanese nuclear engineers sought to assure the public that the condition of the crippled nuclear power plants in Fukushima was not as severe as what it appeared. In reality, as discussed in this article, the subsequent problems emerging in the Fukushima nuclear crisis went beyond the expectations of the engineers. Focusing on the emergency period of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, this article critically examines epistemological bias that prompted how Japanese top-level nuclear engineers made inaccurate assessments resulting in the prolonged crisis. The article specifically probes the concept of robust engineering and the way it is used to overstate the ability of nuclear power system to withstand external shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trifecta of disasters in Japan that unfolded on 11 March 2011 strains credibility: a 9.0-level earthquake (the largest ever recorded in Japan), a thousand-year tsunami that devastated a 300-kilometer stretch of coastline in northeastern Japan, and three nuclear reactors in meltdown, exposing significant portions of Japan to potentially dangerous levels of radiation. In the aftermath of these unprecedented disasters, the meaning and significance of this disaster have evolved. As Japanese government authorities and the general public alike have come to understand the nuclear disaster in more nuanced terms, retrospective evaluations now cast this crisis in its historical context and are coming to calibrate the level of significance in more consistent terms than was the case in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. This article analyzes how media and government authorities assessed the Fukushima nuclear disaster from its onset and considers how cultural frames of reference came into play, leading to selective perceptions about the nature of the accident and its presumed effects. The author discusses the nuclear disaster as a "moral panic," as the media constructed a narrative arch that amplified perceptions of risk in often melodramatic terms, filtering information that shaped public perception and influenced the action of decision-making elites. In addition to discussing how the nuclear disaster affected Japanese domestic politics, the article addresses the impact of the nuclear disaster on international alliances and its implications for the nuclear industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]