Multifaceted Exploration of Perceptions on the Ukraine-Russia War in the Japanese Twitter Space

Social media became a primary means for individuals to share information and participate in social discourse in modern society. Analyzing tweets on Twitter provided a deep understanding of public opinion and reflected these insights in various policies. However, research on Japanese tweets related to the Ukraine-Russia war did not progress due to the lack of appropriate datasets and high API costs. In Japan, where pacifism is strong, exploring users' perceptions of this war provided crucial insights for future security policies. This study constructed a Japanese tweet dataset through meticulous preprocessing of a large multilingual tweet dataset from Kaggle. Multiple NLP techniques, including time-series analysis, co-occurrence analysis, LDA-based topic modeling, and BERT-based sentiment analysis, were applied to comprehensively analyze the war-related tweets. The analysis revealed that Japanese users showed a strong interest in the war, particularly concerning attacks on nuclear power plants and China's movements. Concerns about territorial issues and support for Ukraine indicated a recognition of national defense importance and potential involvement in an anti-Russia coalition. These insights provided critical perspectives for Japan's security policy planning. The need for stronger disinformation measures, attention to geopolitical risks, and emergency preparedness was highlighted. This study was one of the few data-driven studies that elucidated Japanese users' war perceptions. Future research should use broader data sources and advanced analytical methods to accurately capture national security trends from social media user interests.