ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the study of atmospheric pollution, allegedly crossing the territorial boundaries of the Japanese state from China to illuminate the processes, implementation and immediacy of Japan's response. It identifies the roles played by the media in the process of risk communication, mediation and the allocation of responsibility among the state, market and society under a set of specific parameters of actions, actors and the sources of cross-border air pollution. The chapter argues that the Japanese state responds to the risks and potential harms posed by cross-border atmospheric pollution by mitigating the potential state-citizen conflict over climate change through a process of policy communication, mediation and implementation using the media. It delineates the concept of the Japanese government's 'adaptation policy' and spells out the hypotheses and analytical methods deployed in the empirical analyses. These analytical methods include correspondence analysis, multidimensional scaling, co-occurrence network, critical discourse analysis and coding-rules method.
