It is argued that the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011 affected public acceptance of nuclear power, risk perception and nuclear policy in many countries. While some countries seized the opportunity to move away from nuclear and to expand the use of renewable energy sources, the Japanese government, despite growing public distrust towards nuclear facilities, eventually decided to restart nuclear plants and continue to rely on nuclear energy in 2012.

The present research aimed at examining the nuclear phase-out discourse of Japanese newspaper (Yomiuri Shimbun) and social media (Twitter) in the period 2011-2014, through the application of corpus-based discourse analysis. The focus of this study is to uncover how nuclear phase-out- and anti-nuclear-related keywords contributed to the discourse construction and attitudes to nuclear phase-out in Japanese media. The analysis represents results in synchronic and diachronic dimensions by examining the frequency of concordances and revealing patterns associated with a particular keyword.

The results reveal confusion of definitions in the media and show that growing media convergence between social media and the mass media is a two-way process, with social media at times being more influential than conventional media outlets.