Global Food Terror in Japan: Media Shaping Risk Perception, the Nation, and Women

Abstract

This article traces the Japanese media's response to Chinese poison pot-stickers (gyoza) in Japan's food system as they debate and guide consumer-citizens' feelings of increasing vulnerability as individuals in the global market, the nation, and families. Global food becomes a key metaphor for threats to national borders and the need for national food, yet simultaneously for inevitable risk to globally attuned stomachs that can be controlled only by alert housewives and education of the young. Food terror effectively signals citizens' lack of protection in risk society, but leaves unsaid important differences among consumer-citizens to save themselves with scarce Japanese-made food.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• food
• risk
• nationalism
• Japan-China relations
• women

Notes

¹References in text are to mainstream newspapers: Asahi, Mainichi, Sankei, Tokyo, Yomiuri. All are widely read, although they vary from left to right politically: Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri, Sankei (Johnston 2007). The Japan Economic Newspaper is business-oriented but widely available (Nihon Keizai, here referred to as Nikkei). Several sports newspapers Nikkan Fuji, Nikkan Supootsu) are also used. Popular weekly news magazines are referenced in the bibliography: Aera, Shukan Asahi, Shukan Gendai, Shukan Posuto, Shukan Shincho, Yomiuri Weekly.