Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss how foreign views on Japan have been shaped bymedia coverage. The March 11 Japan earthquake was significant in terms of the foreign media coverage on Japan and its people. Especially, the foreign media attempted to describe aspects of Japanese culture through their reports on the devastated disaster. This paper examines evaluations of words employed by the foreign media reports on the March 11 Japan earthquake. Corpus-based analysis is applied in extracting research words. Media evaluation measures are also taken to analyze the research words in target sentences, using sentiment scores derived from lexical resources. In conclusion, it is asserted that words used in the foreign media coverage on the March 11 Japan earthquake have an impact on shaping positive and negative views on Japan, and which stems from cultural distinction in Japan and English-speaking countries as environmental factors.