This study examined the factors affecting public acceptance of the designation of areas in the Recycling Demonstration Project for Soil Generated from Decontamination Activities. The designated areas are requested to receive the soil collected after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. This introduces what typically known as a Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) issue, which dominates around the inequitable allocation of a given burden and hinders the building of consensus. This study assumed that allocating the burden to multiple locations instead of only one location would increase acceptance. An experiment was conducted which presented a scenario manipulating the burden allocation amongst a sample of adults requited from all over Japan. The results revealed that participants who were allocated to the multiple-locations condition evaluated the situation as having less inequity, fewer risks and stigma, and a fairer procedure, as well as being more acceptable than those who were allocated to the one-place condition.

The right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale has been associated with prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict. This study developed Japanese versions of the RWA scale and examined their validity. Although it is a well-established assessment tool to measure authoritarian dispositions, none of the RWA scales translated into Japanese were standardized. In this study, we translated the RWA scale items into Japanese using the back translation method and verified their reliability and construct validity. Results revealed that Japanese versions of the RWA scale comprised two factors with a method factor and had adequate reliability and construct validity. This study provides new insights into the structure of authoritarian personalities in the Japanese population.