Case Study 8.1: How NHK News Covered, and Learned From, the 2011 Japan Earthquake Takashi Ōtsuki is deputy chief of the Disaster and Meteorological Center at the NHK News1 Department, where he is in charge of large-scale disaster preparedness and coverage planning. Previously, he worked at the outlet’s regional branches, the TV News Department and the City News Department, covering various types of natural disasters including the eruption of Mount Oyama on Miyake Island, Mount Usu in the northern part of Japan and the 1999 İzmit earthquake in Turkey. When a massive earthquake struck Japan the afternoon of March 11, 2011, NHK, Japan’s only public broadcaster, was broadcasting a live debate on its main channel. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued an alert 30 seconds after the quake was detected, and NHK reacted by immediately inserting a ticker with a map (seen below). It displayed the quake’s epicenter and indicated areas that could expect to experience tremors; the graphic was also accompanied by an audio warning. (The JMA issues alerts and warnings based on data from seismometers placed all over Japan.) A minute after JMA’s alert, all of NHK’s TV and radio programs switched to live studio coverage about the earthquake, and the related tsunami warning. 92