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The Great Kanto Earthquake

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Japan’s society and geography has endured many tragic events within the last two hundred years, two of which play and integral part in shaping its society and moving it forward. These two events are natural disasters involving earthquakes, and tsunamis —and in a particular instance, a mix of both. Through the circumstances the Japanese found themselves in after these disasters, they had to rebuild with proper collaboration and communication. In terms of the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, communication was primarily through newspapers (Schencking 2013, 80). However, with the modern age came social media, and thus the Japanese communicated both during and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster known as 3/11 using social media. The day of and after 3/11, social …show more content…

I will then discuss the role of social media during 3/11 and how the exchanging, combining of information and the finding of relief services each minimized precarity and established solidarity. In this section, I use information from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a study on the functionality of social in the aftermath of the earthquake, and example tweets regarding relief services. Next, I will focus on the role of social media after 3/11, again analyzing how the exchanging, combining of information and the finding of relief services each minimized precarity and established solidarity differently than that of during it. To discuss social media role after 3/11, I will again used the United Nations as a source, in addition to the testimony of a writer from the popular newspaper Asahi Shimbun in Japan and a Bavarian writer’s research on the emotional effects of images in social

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