Listen to the story of disappearing ice: Japanese local media not reporting climate risks to intangible culture and the journalistic norms

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2079806/v1

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Listen to the story of disappearing ice: Japanese local media not reporting climate risks to intangible culture and the journalistic norms

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2079806/v1

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Climate systems have experienced irreversible changes, including ice loss. It threatens the continuity of ice tradition. Journalistic norms determine people's awareness of climate risks posed on local intangible cultural heritage. Nevertheless, little has been studied about local media coverage of climate change in line with the culture in Japan. By comparing with foreign articles, this paper investigates what hampers Japanese local journalists from reporting climate risks on local intangible cultural heritage. A case selected is a winter tradition in Nagano; ritual for ice ridges on Lake Suwa, which local people have considered the god's crossing (omiwatari) and have worshiped for five centuries. This research utilizes quantitative analysis of text mining with word clouds to highlight the different viewpoints of articles written in Japan and abroad. Qualitative analysis scrutinizes the focal points of the local journalists who report the tradition. The results showed the different characteristics of the one-shot articles in foreign media and a series of news in the Japanese local newspapers. Foreign media emphasized the climate risk of continuity of the omiwatari practice in the future, while Japanese local media focused on the daily practice of the seasonal event. Interviews in this research revealed that the Japanese journalists focused on ongoing challenges the practitioners face rather than future climate risks. It also recognized the difficulty of reporting invisible climate change impacts in daily news articles. Finally, the article discusses journalistic norms that hamper or encourage journalists to frame climate change and intangible cultural heritage.

Climate change

Intangible Cultural Heritage

irreversible loss and damage

adaptation

Japanese tradition

Journalistic norms

Local media have a critical role in safeguarding local culture from climate change by raising awareness of the risk of intergenerational transmission. Thus far, the media coverage affects the salience of climate-related issues for policy formulation (Ahchong & Dodds, 2012; Boykoff & Yulsman, 2013; Schmidt et al., 2013). According to the Public Arenas Model, media offer a space for governments, stakeholders, and communities where social issues are framed and discussed (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). Crow (2010) noted that the influence of media could form public opinion, potentially putting climate change issues on agenda setting. By framing climate change as an issue of local culture, policy makers and local culture practitioners could anticipate and prepare for the consequences of climate change (Ahchong & Dodds, 2012). However, Boykoff (2008) identifies fewer media coverage frames of culture as climate change issues.

Conventionally, risks to conservation and transmission of intangible cultural heritages have been globalization (Aikawa, 2004), in addition to social change such as shrinking populations and changes in values. Climate change is now counted as an emerging risk. UNESCO developed policy documents for climate action to assess climate change impacts on the World Cultural Heritage (UNESCO, 2021). The aim of the policy is “a precautionary approach aimed at minimizing the risks associated with climate change” and to “anticipate, avoid and minimize harm to protect the heritage” (UNESCO, 2021). The policy document also suggests urgent climate action by updating national heritage management tools and action plans (UNESCO, 2021). While the speed of global ice loss is accelerated, safeguarding ice tradition is particularly imminent.

Local cultures have been exclusively transmitted by local people for generations but cannot gain global and national attention. Local people need support in safeguarding their culture because culture is a source of identity that differentiates one community from another and because local people are proud of themselves as members of the local culture (Tajfel & Turner, 2004). Climate has created and nurtured local culture in geographical, ecological, and social conditions (Watsuji & Bownas, 1961). If climate irreversibly changes, local culture is at risk of intergenerational failure transmission to future generations, resulting in loss of community identity and diversity in our human society. Safeguarding local culture from climate risks is hence a challenge for all our varied cultures.

Threats to the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritages can be greater than that of tangible cultural heritages. One approach to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is to adapt to a changing climate. In addition, effective safeguarding needs to consider different types of adaptation: autonomous or planned; anticipatory or reactive; and incremental or transformative (IPCC, 2022). Strategies to combat climate change impacts also include resistance, retreat, and rebuild (Scott et al., 2020). Although these strategies are applicable to tangible cultural heritage, the majority of which is objects, little is known if the strategies are applicable to intangible cultural heritages.

Anticipating and planning adaptation to safeguard local culture requires time for consideration. When climate change would irreversibly alter the local climatic condition, some cultures may lose their foundation and is likely to vanish and become a legend. Hence, reactive adaptation can be out of options for intangible cultural heritage. Culture encompasses a variety of values held by the people of a community. When considering planned or transformative adaptation to complement the changing of the local natural environment, the value needs to be discussed and agreed upon within the community. The process needs considerable time. Nevertheless, media coverage often starts after a strategic decision has been made (Crow, 2010).

Climate risks to local culture do not always have public attention because these changes are sometimes slow-onset and invisible in daily life. However, the impact severely affects the community in the long run. An example is people forced to migrate due to sea level rise. In such a case, attention at the national and global level is placed on migration, not the year after year rising sea level. More importantly, the local community can lose its local culture due to migration; language, rituals, and other practices provide sources of people’s identity and cohesion (Neil Adger et al., 2013). These can be considered trivial at higher levels of governance (O’Brien, 2009) because the value is exclusively shared within the community, while extreme climate events such as drought and flooding lead the whole society to a crisis. In this context, local media have a critical role in drawing community attention to climate risks to local culture as the local media are part of the community and share the same values.

The local media have nevertheless focused little attention on climate risks to local culture. A number of reasons explain the minimal attention. First, the majority of newspapers have framed climate change as a global issue and do not reframe it as relevant to the local context (Marin & Berkes, 2013). In addition, climate change issues in social science have not been supported by academic bodies, which is unlike the physical impacts of climate change that are scrutinized by, for instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Consequently, the study on climate change impacts and the risks to intangible cultural heritage is in its infancy (Orr et al., 2021). The lack of reliable facts can also hinder the media coverage of climate risks to local culture (Anderson, 2009; Secko et al., 2013).

Boykoff & Boykoff (2007) argue that journalistic norms of personalization, dramatization, novelty, and authority-order hamper media coverage of climate change: (1) personalization norm prioritizes human interests over more significant issues in society by focusing on attractive personalities; (2) dramatization norm requires journalists to emphasize particular events over continuity by focusing on the present rather than the past or future; (3) novelty norm reinforces the dramatization norm, as redundance degrades the dramatic value, and finally (4) authority-order norm lets journalists rely heavily on authorized information. The last norm is particularly evident in climate change coverage as climate change is a crisis for governments at all levels, and reliable information is critical for decision-making. As such, the four journalistic norms influence media frames on climate change (Boykoff, 2008; Boykoff & Boykoff, 2007).

A single issue is often framed differently in media coverage. Comparative media research with multiple countries can highlight different frames of media coverage over an issue and help explore why the difference will occur (Anderson, 2009). For instance, Lehotský et al. (2019) revealed that the Czech media separated coal mining from climate change issues because of the significant role of the coal industry in the coal-intensive country. The Czech mediacase affirms that cultural background can influence frames of climate change. This is especially noticeable when thoughts on nature are different from other regions of the world, such as in Asia and Europe.

The different perspectives of Japanese people on nature from Western perspectives can influence media frames of climate change. Makoto Shinkai, a Japanese filmmaker and animator, noted during an interview with the United Nations that different media perspectives were present in different countries in his blockbuster film, Weathering With You, which addressed the climate crisis without mentioning climate change in the film. The film is built on the premise that the geographical conditions of Tokyo are completely altered by two and a half years of rain, and that one-third of the area of Tokyo is underwater. The interview article stated that “(Shinkai) was hardly asked about climate change from media in Japan as well as those in Russia and China. That was not the case when he visited the USA, the UK, France, and India” (United Nations, 2020). Shinkai concluded that the situation regarding climate change differs by country and that the Japanese have their own perspectives of nature in which “nature is way beyond human control and that human is no match to nature” (United Nations, 2020), which Flint et al. (2013) validates in their research.

With this background, this paper examines to what extent Japanese local media frames climate change from the local culture’s perspective and the local journalists’ focal points when they report the local culture at stake because of climate risk. This study applies comparative media research to clarify the viewpoints of the Japanese media on climate change in line with local culture. In doing so, this study explores what journalistic norms hamper or encourage Japanese media coverage to report climate change in local culture.

A case of climate risk of Japanese local culture created on ice is adopted in this research. Physical impacts of climate change irreversibly alter the local climate, and culture based on ice and snow has been severely affected (IPCC, 2019). Another reason for selecting this particular case was because foreign media recognizes the local culture (ex. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/ice-lake-suwa-japan-torne-river-climate-change-monk-shinto). The selected case allows comparing the framing of domestic and foreign media on the same topic. I use a mixed-methods approach to investigate how Japanese local newspapers and online articles written outside Japan frame the local culture and climate risks. Content analysis of the articles with text mining visualized the different focal points of the articles at home and abroad. In addition, Japanese journalists’ perspectives were unveiled by observation of the reporting sites and a focus group interview with journalists who wrote the articles.

This paper begins with an introduction to the case of Japanese local culture, omiwatari, followed by the method applied. The subsequent section describes the results of the content analysis and the interview, followed by a discussion of the significant findings of this research.

1. The omiwatari case study

Suwa in Nagano prefecture is a mountainous area with the population of 198,000 (Nagano Prefecture, 2018). Surrounded by the Japan Alps, Lake Suwa looks like water at the bottom of a bowl. Differences in daytime and nighttime temperatures in winter caused the ice on the lake to crack and form ice ridges on the surface of the water. The ridges were reportedly generated in one night with massive cracking sounds echoing through the mountains, making local people feel in awe of nature (Nakazawa, 1965). These people have lately imagined that the ridges were the footsteps of a male god who visited his wife living across the lake. Taking the sound as a cue from the male god, local people assembled to observe and conduct rituals for the occurrence of the ice ridges (Ito, 1957). Since then, omiwatari, or holy crossing, has been a traditional Shinto ritual in the Suwa region.

The occurrence of omiwatari has been authorized by the Yatsurugi shrine by identifying ice ridges on the lake. The observation of omiwatari is divided into three phases of ice formation on the lake: the first day of the freeze, the freeze around the shore, and the fully frozen. The fully frozen ice repeats contract and expansion that thickens the ice, and cracks in the ice eventually occur. The annual occurrence of omiwatari has been recorded by parishioners of the Yatsurugi shrine since the 15th century. A document, the miwatari-cho, archived the date of the occurrence and the directions of the ice ridges. The miwatari-cho is considered one of the oldest observation records of global ice formation (Ishiguro et al., 2017a), and is valued by climatologists (e.g., Ishiguro et al., 2017b; Knoll et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2016).

In history, the occurrence of omiwatari had been reported to rulers of the country as foretelling the future (Ito, 1957). However, during the Japanese restoration to modernization, the continuity of the ritual ceased for 22 years (Miyasaka, 2007). Seeing the value of the ritual, a meteorologist, Sakuhei Fujiwhara, suggested that the data be submitted to the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the shrine has annually reported the occurrence (or the absence) of omiwatari since 1920. The Yatsurugi Shrine has also reported the omiwatari observation to the Imperial Household Agency since 1926 (Miyasaka, 2007). Today, the occurrence of omiwatari has drawn media attention in Japan (Sukigara, 1981).

The miwatari-cho has also recorded the absence of ice ridges, naming the phenomenon ‘ake-no-umi’ or sea of dawn (Fig. 1). Arai (2000) summarized the phenomenon and found an increasing trend of ake-no-umi after the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The continuity of ake-no-umi has transformed the ritual practice. In the past, people summoned a priest to perform the ritual when omiwatari occurred. Today, the priest, who has been engaged in the ritual since 1985 (Nagano Nippo, 2022), transformed the ritual practice and initiated the daily observation of the lake with his people and has led the observation annually because the absence of the ice cracking has no longer summoned the local people. The observation of the lake has now been acknowledged as a seasonal local tradition. Local newspapers report the observation almost daily during the observation period starting the first day of cold winter (beginning of January) to the first day of spring (beginning of February) in the traditional Japanese calendar.

On February 4, 2022, the priest declared the 76^thake-no-umi since 1443, and 25 ake-no-umi occurrences have been observed since the 1990s (Kurakata, 2022). So far, the shrine has not observed omiwatari for four consecutive winters. The Japan Meteorological Agency projects that the temperature in Nagano prefecture is likely to increase 2.0 degrees C under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 2.5 scenario and 4.6 degrees C under RCP 8.5 at the end of this century (Nagano Meteorological Observatory, 2022).

Fig. 1. The number of ake-no-umi or Lake Suwa without ice ridges to practice the local ritual or ‘omiwatari’. The priest of Yatsurugi shrine Kiyoshi Miyasaka counted the number recorded in the miwatari-cho from 1443 to 2021. He recognized five missing annual records: 1457, 1594, 1682, 1824, and 1864, which were excluded from the count.

2. Material and Method

I used a mixed-methods approach to quantitatively investigate the framing of Japanese media coverage and online articles written outside Japan. In addition, I qualitatively scrutinized the framing of Japanese media with a narrative analysis of news articles. It was then complemented with an observation of and a focus group interview with local journalists who wrote the articles.

I first conducted a comparative content analysis of Japanese news articles and foreign online articles, both of which reported omiwatari. I used Google.com to locate articles in the Japanese news. The search word of 御神渡り (omiwatari) for Japanese articles was selected after several tests with combinations of multiple keywords to confirm that the terms did not yield any difference. The period of the publication was between December 2021 and February 2022 when the possibility of the ice ridge occurrence was high. The search included various forms of articles such as blogs, travel guides, and Twitter texts, but online contents of newspapers were exclusively selected for the analysis. Twenty-eight articles were found in the local sections of the three national newspapers, 72 articles from three local newspapers, one article from the website of a Japanese news agency, and four from the website of three Japanese television companies. In total, 105 articles were identified as data for this research.

I collected articles written outside Japan through the aforementioned search engine using three sets of search terms, omiwatari, lake, and Suwa, and the combination of the three because the term omiwatari alone drew articles that were not relevant to this research. One article was found in Dutch and published by a company in Belgium. The article was machine translated into English with Google translation and included in the dataset. I did not determine the period of the publication of the foreign articles because of the very limited availability of the articles. I read all the downloaded articles in full to confirm that the articles were about omiwatari. In total, 14 English articles were prepared.

Although debates remain on collecting representations of online articles as research data (Blatchford, 2019), online news articles have gained value over time (Goyanes et al., 2021). In addition, media in the easy-to-access form reaches more readers. This is particularly important because issues of climate change need collective action from society (Boykoff, 2008). On top of that, there were no other ways to highlight the Japanese media’s framing of local culture and climate change by comparing the framing done by non-Japanese media because of the limited recognition of omiwatari outside Japan.

I then analyzed the narrative of the article contents in addition to text mining with word clouds. Word clouds quickly highlight the differences between the contents of the articles and statistically summarize the text for the comparative analysis (Heimerl et al., 2014; McNaught & Lam, 2010). Furthermore, the most frequently appearing words showed overviews of the key points in the text (McNaught & Lam, 2010), which effectively compares the framing of media in different languages as the visualization assists the analysis by directly focusing on the critical topics without translation.

To compare the key points of the articles in their respective languages, I separately generated two sets of word clouds with the Japanese and one cloud with English article. I did not distinguish the articles by publisher because the objective was to compare how the Japanese and the foreign media frame traditional practice in the news coverage. Also, the very small number of the articles did not yield noteworthy results. Again, due to the limited data, I dropped the titles and captions from the analysis as they unintentionally increased the frequency of appearance. Texts such as author and publishers’ names, dates of the post, or the like were excluded and were nominated as stop words to remove from the analysis. I then translated the Japanese articles into English by Google translation to make the comparison easy. The purpose of the translation was to count the frequency of the keywords. All translations were briefly reviewed; accuracy of the translation was not prioritized.

Nvivo 11 was used to generate word clouds for each language. I set Nvivo to generate word clouds for all words in the texts with ‘exact matches’ to highlight the key terms in the articles. Because of language characteristics, word clouds had two different minimum lengths by language to exclude short words from the results: two and three Japanese characters for the Japanese articles and three- and four-letter words for the foreign ones. However, the English-based word clouds did not show significant differences, and I consequently dropped the minimum length to three letters for the later analysis. A total of four-word clouds were prepared: one for foreign articles, two for Japanese articles, and one for English-translated Japanese articles.

Although word clouds effectively visualize key points of an article without close reading, clouds have limitations. First, words do not always appear in the clouds as they are in context, and words that are not relevant to the text require manual removal (Ramsden & Bate, 2008). I also noticed that comparing texts in different languages was challenging in a single software. NVivo analyzes multiple languages including Japanese, but the software does not always accurately recognize Japanese words. It cuts off spelling at inappropriate places, resulting in an increased frequency of irrelevant terms, which increased the number of stop words. However, I prioritized consistency in this research and analyzed the contents in the same environment.

In addition to the content analysis, I observed the local journalists engaged in the omiwatari reporting at the observation site in January and February 2021 and 2022 and conducted a focus group interview with journalists in 2022. These journalists regularly came to the observation site during the observation period to report and write articles. About ten journalists gathered every morning. I asked them for a focus group interview after the morning observation on January 12, 2022, and five responded. In addition, one local journalist volunteered for an in-person interview and answered the same questions asked in the focus group interview. In total, interview data from six journalists was collected. The following questions were asked:

1) How often do you join the morning observation? Why?

2) Are your articles published every day?

3) What is the focal point of the reporting?

4) Have you ever reported omiwatari from a climate change perspective?

5) Which priority of climate change issues does your company have: low, middle, or high?

Their perspectives on the practice and climate change risk are seen in the next section following the word clouds and the narratives of the articles, which compare key topics in the foreign and the Japanese articles about the same traditional practice.

3.1 Foreign media articles about omiwatari

Fig. 2 shows the words in the word clouds frequently used in the foreign articles. The most frequent words in the articles are highlighted in orange: ice, lake, records, years, suwa, and climate. These words correspond to omiwatari practice. Words in bold black were the next highest frequency, and included industrial, revolution, freeze, change, winter, and data. These words suggest changing winter since the Industrial Revolution.

The focal point of the foreign articles about omiwatari is its past and the future: continuity of the record of the ice formation on Lake Suwa. Twelve articles linked the climate change in Suwa and the industrial revolution. The record was introduced as citizen science or indigenous knowledge. Some also mentioned that climate scientists used the data to track back climatic conditions centuries ago. Four articles featured the Priest Miyasaka. In the articles, his role as a key practitioner of omiwatari was doomed due to increasing ake-no-umi. An article predicted that omiwatari will not be able to observed after 2040.

3.2 Japanese local newspaper articles about omiwatari

The narrative of the Japanese articles was established according to an issue attention cycle (see Fig 3). The focal point of the Japanese media was on the condition of the ice on the lake within the annual omiwatari observation period. All the articles contained comments of the priest about his prospects of the ice formation and expectation to the occurrence of omiwatari.

In 2022, the first ice formation was observed on the 3^rd of January. Even though it was out of the observation period, two local newspapers reported it in conjunction with omiwatari. Subsequently, six out of seven newspapers reported on the 5th or the following day that the Shrine initiated the observation, according to the publishing schedule of the newspaper companies. On the 7^th, the first full frozen of the ice was observed, which was soon melted but again fully frozen on the 10^th. Likewise, the ice repeated the freezing and melting. On the 24^th, the strong wind broke the ice on the lake into big pieces and washed them onto the shore of the lake, which made a spectacular. Local people and tourists came to take pictures of the scenery while stepping on the ice. The local officials flew a drone to warn them to stay away from the lake. On the 29^th, the priest stated the unlikely occurrence of omiwatari this year, and terminated the observation on the 5^th of February. The ritual that announced ake-no-umi to the gods as well as the MET office and the Imperial Household Agency was held on the 20^th.

Two local newspaper companies located in the prefecture kept reporting the observation throughout the observation period. Their articles occasionally reported community events relevant to omiwatari as well as interviews with the parishioners who measured the air and water temperatures in addition to the thickness of the ice. A newspaper introduced the family history of some parishioners, such as the ones whose fathers took part in the observation and how they felt when they took over the responsibility many years later.

Figs. 4 and 5 are the word clouds generated with the Japanese articles with a minimum length of two and three characters, respectively. The frequently used words are differently visualized in the two figures, explaining the different nature of the Japanese language from English.

The key topics illustrated in Fig. 4 were 諏訪 (Suwa), 観察 (observation), 渡り(crossing), 宮坂 (Miyasaka, name of the priest) ‘宮司 (priest), and 結氷 (freezing). The second most frequently used terms in bold gray include 今季 (this season), 厚い (thick), 総代 (representatives of the parishioner),　センチ (centimeter), 期待 (expectation), 神社 (shrine), 諏訪湖 (Lake Suwa), せり (ridge), 全面 (entire surface), 午前 (morning), 出現　(occurrence), 続く (continue), 湖面 (surface of the lake), 気温 (temperature), 氷点下 (below zero), 上がる (rise), and 続ける (continue). All these terms correspond to the daily observation practice.

The key topics in Fig. 5 had slightly different frequency from Fig. 4. The most frequently used words are センチ (centimeter), 続ける (continue), 諏訪湖 (Lake Suwa), 上がる (rise), 氷点下 (below zero), and 割れる (break). The second most frequently used terms included broader topics such as 感じる (feel), 波打つ (wave), 解ける (melt), 冷え込み (cold), 繰り返す (repeat), メートル (meter), 厳しい (difficult), 高まる (getting high),　向ける (direct), つかさどる (preside), 現れる (occur), 下諏訪 (Shimo-Suwa, name of the place), 始まる (begin), 初めて (first), and 打ち寄せる (break onto). These terms suggest events during the observation period. Climate change (気候変動), global warming (地球温暖化), and Industrial Revolution (産業革命) are not recognized as key terms in either Fig. 4 or Fig. 5.

Fig. 6 is generated with the English-translated Japanese articles with a minimum length of two words. The key topics illustrated were omiwatari, Suwa, ice, city, lake, and Miyasaka (name of the priest). The second most frequently used terms in bold gray include Kiyoshi (first name of the priest), observation, water, frozen, year, morning, surface, shrine, temperature, day, freezing, degree, cold, guji (title of the priest), and Yatsurugi (name of the shrine).

When comparing the results shown in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 and Fig. 6, the frequencies of the key terms were relatively different, which could be attributed to the grammatical difference between the two languages in addition to the function of the NVivo software. However, the key terms matched the morning observation practice and the conditions of Lake Suwa.

Again, terms referring to climate change or global warming did not appear in the word clouds.

3.3 Observation of the local journalists and focus group interview

I firstly observed the local journalist at the omiwatari observation site for three consecutive days in January 2021 and 2022, respectively. I recognized that some journalists took turns in their companies coming to the site, and many voluntarily showed up. Their experience joining the omiwatari observation ranged from a year to thirty years or longer. They gathered at the site even when the chance of occurrence of omiwatari was slim, like too warm or raining.

The group of journalists and the people of the shrine had a friendly atmosphere. The journalists helped the shrine people observe the lake. For instance, a journalist with a large flashlight illuminated the narrow lakeside path for the observers. Although no one claimed it, the journalist group seemed to have a leader with long experience joining the observation. The leader journalist once said that the motivation for reporting was to encourage the priest and his people who continue the morning observation. The leader quietly organized the morning observation to prevent accidents during the omiwatari observation. For instance, during my observation period in 2022, the prefecture raised the alert level for COVID-19 infection control. To follow the code, the leader suggested limiting the number of journalists who came to report and when. The rest followed his instruction.

On the other hand, a middle-aged journalist who was lately transferred to Suwa branch told that he did not know omiwatari before his move. He told that went to a local museum to learn about the history and the phenomenon. He also said that He joined the morning observation to fulfill his weekly duty. Although he had lived in Suwa less than a year, he felt his readers had a keen interest in omiwatari, and how frozen Lake Suwa was at this time of year.

The journalists at the site acted independently and focused on the reporting during the reporting. Some followed the members of the parishioners to the lake while others were interviewing visitors who stopped by the observation site. The morning observation always ended with an on-the-spot interview with the priest. The priest stated his feelings or perspectives of the ice formation in line with nature, which is the divines of the Shinto religion. Some journalists occasionally asked the priest how he felt about the warming winters and the continued ‘ake-no-umi.’ The priest’s answerers were about the religious perspective of nature, such as climate is beyond human control, and he did not mention climate change or global warming during my observation period.

As for the focus group interview, six journalists who responded to my call had less than ten years of experience in the omiwatari observation. The leader journalist declined the interview. Three of the six worked for a local branch of major newspaper companies, and two were from local newspaper outlets. One was from a public broadcast. Two major newspapers had a high priority on climate change coverage, whereas a national newspaper declared the importance was middle. Two local newspapers had low priority, although the journalist who belonged to one of them anticipated the priority would increase.

The six came to the observation site almost daily, although there was no chance of an omiwatari occurrence. The reasons were the media’s responsibility for not missing news. Some of the journalists claimed that watching changes on the lake was interesting and had become a daily routine. All said that the focal point of the reporting was to meet the demand of local readers, and the priest’s feelings about observing the lake were news. One response included the intention to report the fact that the seasonal tradition has become an uncommon occurrence. A journalist born in the prefecture where Lake Suwa is located said that the intention was to convey stories in relation to the local myth in addition to respect for ancestors

Two out of the six journalists reported omiwatari in the context of climate change. The one was from a national newspaper company with an extremely high priority on climate change, but the other local media company had a moderate focus. The rest had not reported the less frequent occurrence of omiwatari in relation to climate change, although the priority of climate change coverage in their news companies was relatively high.

This research analyzed media articles reporting the omiwatari ritual, which was created on ice and nurtured for five centuries by the community in Japan. The comparative word clouds produced with the contents written in Japan and abroad clearly visualize different perspectives. The primary focus of the foreign media is placed on the years of records of the ice on Lake Suwa and the changing climate. Omiwatari is also described as a Shinto ritual, but the phenomenon is reported in relation to the Industrial Revolution and the changing winter (Fig. 2). In contrast, the Japanese media focuses on the daily morning observation (Fig. 4, 5, and 6). The protagonists of the narrative are the shrine priest and the people who observe the ice on the lake every morning. These differences in the word clouds explain that the foreign media frames omiwatari in line with climate change issues whereas the Japanese media narrative is directed to the observation of the lake and the ice on it.

The different media perspectives in and outside of a country are in parallel with previous research (Lehotský et al., 2019). In this study, differences in the media coverage are largely due to the nature of the media: coverage as a one-shot article, coverage as a series. Readers outside Japan are not necessarily interested in local traditional practices of an island nation. In the context of climate change, news value is naturally placed on the risk of disruption of the long history that is written in a single article.

Media coverage of climate change is volatile and short-lived, often reported with major events such as political conflicts or extreme weather (Schmidt et al., 2013). Anderson (2009) referred to Down’s issue-attention cycle to explain how soon media attention fades if the dramatic value decreases. To maintain news value, journalists have made efforts to frame climate issues in conjunction with culture and society (Boykoff, 2008; Lyytimäki & Tapio, 2009). Seeing the omiwatari case from outside Japan has dramatic news value: climate risk on the continuity of long tradition. It focused on the past and future of the omiwatari ritual whose destiny is threatened by climate change. The dramatization norms in addition to the novelty of the story contribute to the increase in the global media coverage of climate change.

On the contrary, the Japanese local media utilize the personalization norm to keep reporting the seasonal event for a specific period to meet readers’ demands. Writing a series of articles with a single case in line with invisible climate change is almost impossible. Journalists consequently focus on changes that are visible in everyday life. For the local journalists, the dramatic news value is placed on the morning observation practice and the changing ice condition (Fig. 3), with the priest as the protagonist.

Personalization can make people feel closer to the climate change issues that are often considered ‘distant and cloudy’ (Crabbé & Robin, 2006; Measham et al., 2011). The approach focuses on the challenges and predicament of individuals so that the story attracts readers’ attention. The foreign articles utilize the personalization norms in the context of climate change, featuring the priest and his history and destiny. On the other hand, the local journalists primarily focus on the shrine and the people who have now struggled to continue the traditional practice. The observation of this research revealed that the purpose of the Japanese local media coverage was partly to encourage the practitioners of the morning observation. The personalization norm can make people feel closer to the current tribulation of the priest. From the local media’s perspective, the disappearing tradition can be the practitioners’ challenge, not a climate change issue.

Another reason for the Japanese local journalists’ framing can be attributed to authorization norm. Journalists need authorized or official sources for media coverage (Anderson, 2009; Boykoff & Boykoff, 2007). The IPCC, which is the authoritative body regarding climate science, concluded in its Sixth Risk Assessment Report that economic or non-economic damages of cultural losses have not been fully studied, although climate risks to the human dimension can cause severe impacts for cultural heritages (Ara Begum et al., 2022). Similarly in Japan, climate impact on culture has only minimally been assessed due to a lack of scientific evidence (Ministry of the Environment, 2020). Moreover, the priest did not relate the absence of ice and climate change, at least during this research. Without his comments, the journalists cannot report the tradition in line with climate change. The absence of reliable sources for media coverage can hamper reporting climate risks in local culture.

In addition to the lack of supportive information, reporting the climate risk of local tradition may be a risk for local media, particularly if the culture involves myth or religion. Schmidt et al. (2013) note that journalists judge what is appealing to readers. These criteria can influence key topics in local media coverage, particularly when subscriptions to newspapers are decreasing in Japan (Villi & Hayashi, 2017). The intrusion by outsiders into cultural spaces that have been nurtured and appreciated by a community over centuries is troublesome for the practitioners and the community (George, 2010). As media coverage requires local community appeal, de-framing climate issues can be part of risk management for the local media.

Finally, this paper would like to discuss what enables local media to report climate risks in local culture. The interview revealed that a local journalist reported omiwatari in the context of climate change even though the priority of climate change issues in the newspaper company to which the journalist belongs is low. What makes this journalist different from the other journalists is his birthplace is in the prefecture where Lake Suwa locates. The local journalist and the community share the same value of omiwatari and its historical background. The intentions of the journalist’s reporting include local myth and ancestor contributions to omiwatari. The local journalist oneself is a stakeholder in the local culture, not an outsider. Seeing the value of the local culture and its climate risks, the journalistic norm of raising awareness may suppress other norms.

The limitation of this study is the very small sample. Climate change impacts on the World Cultural Heritage have been only minimally studied, let alone local cultures that are not inscribed on the World Cultural Heritage list. Further research on media coverage that contributes to agenda setting for safeguarding local culture is an imminent issue as climate change has rapidly altered climatic conditions in which local culture has been established.

This study has argued that local media bears a critical role in safeguarding local culture from climate change. Local culture serves as a source of identity. People have transmitted their belief system for generations and are proud of being part of the culture. Local newspapers are involved in terms of sharing the value of the local culture within the community. Local media, however, do not always contribute to safeguarding local culture from climate change partly because media coverage does not take part in decision-making on climate risks.

This study conducted a content analysis of media coverage on a Japanese local culture, which was created based on ice and transmitted for more than five centuries. The comparative analysis of foreign online media articles and Japanese local newspapers explained the different natures of media one-shot and article series: the one-shot piece focuses on climate risks of the continuity of the local culture as a part of the broader frame of global climate change issues whereas the series needs to emphasize changes in daily observation of the local practice as a journalistic norm to meet local community demand. The result was confirmed by focus group interviews with local journalists.

This study explains how the journalistic norms of personalization and authoritative-order hamper local journalists from reporting climate risks to the local culture. In addition, avoiding climate risk reporting may be a risk management for journalists. Local readers do not want to read about the discontinuity of local culture due to climate change, to which the foreign media does because they do not share the value of the local culture.

Local media, however, have a critical role in raising the awareness of climate risks as local culture has drawn little attention from governments or organizations such as UNESCO. As local culture has been exclusively transmitted and nurtured by the local community, few studies have explored the climate risks. The IPCC and UNESCO have jointly started climate risk assessment of the World Cultural Heritage. What makes Japanese society colorful is the diverse local culture, and local media is involved in that cultural transmission. Future research could provide a larger perspective of local media that contribute to safeguarding local culture.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Kiyoshi Miyasaka, the priest of Yatsurugi shrine, for generously allowing me to access his valuable historical records. My heartfelt gratitude also goes to the journalists who answered my interview request.

Funding: This work is funded by the project of Support for Pioneering Research Initiated by the Next Generation (SPRING).

Competing Interests: The author declares that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability: All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article (and its supplementary information files).

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Listen to the story of disappearing ice: Japanese local media not reporting climate risks to intangible culture and the journalistic norms

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