The forms of risk communication in Japan changed drastically after the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. While the pre-Earthquake risk communication was based on the myth of zero-risk, the post-Earthquake risk communication has required a much higher level of fair and open information, which is now the main current of this field. At the same time, other theoretical and practical problems have recently been founded. Those problems include (1)the philosophy and value system underlying risk communication, (2)the causal relation between risk communication and credibility, (3)whether the citizen really want risk information or not, (4)whether citizen‘s risk perception is emotional or not, (5)the organizational climate as a factor in successful risk communication, (6)misunderstanding of the meaning of precautionary principle, (7)the skill of the risk communicator, (8)the importance of wording in risk communication, (9)how to construct good relations between risk agent and mass media , etc. The purpose of this paper is to integrate the notion of risk communication with the macro view (in both time and space), which used to be based on the idea of a one-shot and local solution to future disasters.

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The Society for Risk Analysis Japan organized a session in the symposium of Transdisciplinary Federation of Science and Technology 2008. Four papers were presented in the session on how we could utilize the risk conception for risk governance in the area of food safety, nuclear power technology, management of chemical substances and risk perception.

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Health risks of pesticide residues, contaminants, and additives in food have been evaluated nearly for 50 years by the experts of FAO/WHO. Principles of safety assessment and its method have been established internationally through this operation and the outputs have been used in the international society. Hazard identification, dose-response analysis, exposure assessment and risk characterization are the components in the health risk assessment for chemicals, and the probabilis-tic risk assessment method for microbial contaminations has been developed, too. On the other hand, while people are keen to personal and societal factors of foods such as taste and dietary culture other than safety in the case of foods, and are interested in information of healthy diet or gourmandise, they are also worrying about false labeling and illegal foods. Reliability of food safety system and the basic idea on foods are now under serious questions, despite of existing highly established safety management techniques in Japan.

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Organizational accidents have recurrently occurred since the 1990s in nuclear power industry of Japan. The regulator y authority, therefore, calls for utility companies to implement stringent risk management including establishing safety culture, quality assurance program and use of risk information derived from probabilistic safety assessment. Henceforth it is not just any technology management, societal risk management, so-called risk governance should be materialized for sustainable utilization of nuclear power technology.

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The risk-based decision-making is often hampered although the procedure of risk assessment and management seems to be established in the regulatory area. From the standpoint of governance, we point out that the industry sector not only plays a key role in promoting the risk-based approach, but also greatly benefits from the utilization of it. This is particularly evident in the case of manufactured nanomaterials.

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A risk management policy, which seems to be rational, is sometimes not acceptable to the public who see the risk from the individual viewpoint. This paper examines the disagreement between philosophy of societal risk management and the perception of individual risk based on the idea of two types of information processing. Implications of psychological studies concerning perceived risk for implementation of risk management policies are to be discussed.

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This study examined whether people take sample size information into consideration when judging the dietary effect and the side-effect risk of dietary food. Undergraduate students (N = 152) were required to read one of three passages, each with different sample size scenarios (2, 40, and 1000), describing the dietary effect and the side-effect risk of dietary food. After that, they were asked to judge the probability of the dietary effect and side-effect of the food to occur and to give the reason for that judgment. As a result, while sample size information did not influence dietary effect judgments, the increase in sample size from two to 40 significantly increased side-effect risk perception. In contrast, the increase in sample size from two to 1000 did not significantly increase risk perception. Detailed analysis of the reasons given to the judgments suggests that participants were not sensitive to large sample size information.

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We presented a statistical approach employing the hierarchical bayesian approach to analyze environmental monitoring data set containing non-detected observations. The advantages of the presented method are as follows: (1) the method is applicable to data set containing non-detected observations. (2) Uncertainties in parameter estimation are quantitatively analyzed based on posterior distributions. (3) Temporal and spatial variations in the environmental concentrations are separately analyzed and quantified. (4) Distribution of the environmental concentrations in a particular monitoring site in which few monitoring data are available can be predicted based on information from all monitoring sites. (5) Analysis can be implemented by a commonly-used freeware and a simple programming code.

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For the present study, a survey was conducted by mail in the autumn of 2004 to elicit public perceptions of food-related hazards using the psychometric paradigm following two provisional studies. The respondents (n=183) were asked to rate 15 potential food-related hazards on 18 risk characteristics with sevenpoint scales. Responses were examined via principal-component analysis to obtain a structural representation of risk perception with three dimensions labeled as ‘future societal problem’, ‘distinctiveness of damage’, and ‘self-controllability’. The results would contribute to ‘effective’ risk communication, giving suggestions to risk communication practitioners how the public constitute the concept of risk in food domain.

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