Self-and Other-shaping Of Japan’s National Image In Tokyo Olympics Coverage Through The Perspective Of Critical Metaphors

The COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak erupted unexpectedly from 2020,paralyzing population movements,interrupting social relations,and postponing major sports events throughout the world.The world’s most expectes event,the Tokyo Olympic Games,was also postponed by a year,yet it continues to receive worldwide media interest as a global media event.Media coverage is one of the most significant methods to depict country’s national image,and there are two ways to shape national image:"self-portrayal"(shaped by the domestic media)and "other shaping"(shaped by the foreign media).Metaphor can reveal the author’s attitude and ideology and has a persuasive impact.Critical Metaphor Analysis integrates corpus linguistics,pragmatics,and cognitive linguistics expertise to study the functions of metaphors and the attitude.This study uses the Tokyo Olympics coverage texts of The Japan News,a mainstream English-language newspaper,and The Times,a mainstream British newspaper,to analyze the use of metaphors in the two newspapers from the perspective of critical metaphor analysis,using the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine and the semantic annotation tool Wmatrix.The study analyses the image of Japan,the host country of the Tokyo Olympics,constructed by the two newspapers,and summarizes the patterns of "self-shaping" by The Japan News and "other-shaping" by The Times.The two newspapers’portrayals of Japan as the host country of the Tokyo Olympics are summarized,as well as the similarities and differences between them,and the reasons why they portray different images of Japan.The study found that the metaphors used a lot were:the war metaphor(46.28%and 43.89%respectively)and the journey metaphor(20.43%and 19.81%respectively).The body metaphor,the money metaphor,the fire metaphor,and the architecture metaphor were also used to convey attitude and intentions and to create images of Japan.From the self-portrayal standpoint:The Japan Times’s coverage imply that Japan is "Medal chaser","Fighter of the pandemic" and "Manager of the country in search of recovery".From the other-portrayal standpoint:The Times’s coverage imply that Japan is the "Host of the Olympics that lost more than it won"and the "Victorious in the China-Japanese conflict." The reasons are,Japan hopes to use the Olympics to pull in popular support and economic revival,The Times,on the other hand,questioned the significance of hosting the Olympics based on the instability of the economy under the epidemic;due to the alignment of political interests and cultural similarities between the UK and Japan.Based on the above analysis,two suggestions are made for China’s future Olympic communication:making good use of metaphorical rhetoric to improve the communication power of the text;establishing a cross-cultural communication mindset to convey the image of cultural China.