午夜剧场

This book introduces basic discussions about risk from a psychological perspective, using risk communication as a keyword.

The motivation for writing this book was a long, handwritten request for a manuscript that I received by mail from an editor at Chikuma Shobo. Since receiving a handwritten letter is such a rare experience, I accepted immediately.

I decide on the structure of everything I write, including academic papers, before I start writing. Therefore, I spent a lot of time discussing the structure. In an academic paper, one tends to start with definitions, such as "What is risk communication?" Instead, I am truly grateful to the editor who gave me careful advice on things like whether a certain chapter structure would work better.

I kept two points in mind while writing. The first, which I proposed and received approval for from the editor, was to avoid including recent cases like COVID-19 as much as possible. If I were to use recent examples, they might be easy to understand now, but there is a high possibility that the details will be forgotten in a few years. Instead, even if the stories were old, I actively introduced cases where similar things are likely to happen in the future. For example, many cases of pollution and drug-induced health disasters require a long time for the certification of aftereffects and for court trials. Similar things can happen even with events occurring in real-time.

Secondly, since 2016, I had written an intermittent series of about five essays on crisis management for Iwanami Shoten's magazine "Kagaku" (Science), as well as two separate essays related to COVID-19. Therefore, the thing I was most careful about was ensuring the content did not overlap with those works.

However, I couldn't strictly follow my own rules mentioned above; bits of COVID-19 talk appear here and there, and there is some slight overlap with "Kagaku." Regarding this point, I can only hope that readers will be forgiving.

I have received an evaluation from a friend who is incapable of flattery, saying that this is the best book currently available in this field, so I would definitely like to encourage everyone to purchase it.

Just between us, I have included subtle "ikezu" (wicked or sarcastic) expressions here and there that I acquired during my approximately 20 years of living in Kyoto. I would be even happier if you could add the discovery of these expressions through careful reading to your enjoyment of the book.

Toshiko Kikkawa

Chikuma Shinsho

240 pages, 946 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of the magazine's publication.