Cross-Cultural Communication Challenges in Global Environmental Issues: Multilingual Topic Modeling of the Fukushima Contaminated Water Discharge

Fukushima contaminated water discharge is an international issue, while there are cross-cultural communication challenges in global environmental issues. In our study, we employed language as culture symbol and collected 835,577 YouTube user comments on Fukushima contaminated water in Korean, Chinese, Japanese and English. Through the application of topic modeling on the data to obtain topics, and with cross-cultural communication theory, we have identified three common topics in diverse cultural context using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, which are (1) Debate on the safety of contaminated water; (2) Criticism of governments and (3) Skepticism about IAEA. And there were three challenges in the cross-cultural communication of global environmental events: (1) The challenge of public opinion out of focus and cross-cultural bias; (2) Communication challenges between government and public; (3) Communication challenges between international scientific organization and the public. Then we proposed three communication strategies: (1) Utilizing effective communication on environmental issues to overcome political barriers; (2) Utilizing unified global discourse to mitigate communication misunderstandings; (3) Utilizing social media for timely and humanized information dissemination. This study provides cross-cultural communication strategies on global environmental issues.