Self-Responsibility of the Japanese Hostages in Iraq: Discourse Analysis of Japanese Daily Newspapers Concerning the Self-Responsibility Discussion in April 2004

Two successive Japanese hostage cases in Iraq in April 2004, where hostage-takers demanded the withdrawal of the Self Defence Forces in return for release of the hostages, turned into a discussion about ‘self-responsibility’.

This paper concentrates on an analysis of the discursive representation of ‘self-responsibility’. The aim is to explain how the media discourse on the hostage crisis and the hostages’ ‘self-responsibility’ is regulating and determining social structures with respect to which tasks self-responsibility has to take over, on the basis of the critical discourse analysis proposed by Norman Fairclough

The argument is that the principle of self-responsibility has come to replace the hitherto valid responsibility of the state to protect its citizens. This is happening in favour of the newly emerging principle of not accepting terrorism and of fulfilling one’s duty as an international state.