Fukushima was forever changed by one of the world’s biggest nuclear disasters nearly a decade ago. The Japanese government has poured billions of dollars into recovery efforts. But what does recovery really mean? The answer is a combination of resilience, reinvention and regret.
Earlier this spring, Kazuo Okawa stood on a seaside cliff on the edge of Japan’s Fukushima prefecture, looking over the Daiichi nuclear power plant in the distance. Waves crashed below, and wind swept through trees nearby. Okawa, 65, had been a maintenance man for the six reactors at Daiichi — until everything changed nine years ago.
“The tsunami, it came all the way up here and covered everything,” Okawa said in Japanese, “as far as you can see.”
In 2011, an offshore earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in the country, triggered a massive tsunami that barreled into Japan’s northern coast. The wave — over three stories tall in some places — washed over a mile inland, sweeping through neighborhoods and towns, taking thousands of houses, cars and nearly 20,000 people with it back to sea.
It also hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co., crashing through what little tsunami protection it had and flooding all backup generators. Without power, three reactors overheated and exploded, blanketing nearby communities with plumes of radioactive material and forcing more than 160,000 people to flee. The whole area was devastated.
Okawa used to fish from this cliff. Now, he needs a special permit to visit, and his radiation exposure levels are checked as he leaves. No one fishes from here anymore.
“This coastline, the sea, that power plant, they all look pretty much the same,” Okawa said. “But if you go in further, you see the aftermath. The ghost towns, the piles of nuclear waste.”
The Japanese government has worked to clean up Fukushima: clearing away radioactive soil, tearing down buildings, reopening towns and rebuilding a major train line. It all could end up costing over $700 billion over 40 years, by one estimate. Before they were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s Summer Olympics were even hailed as the Recovery Olympics, meant to champion the massive efforts to make this area livable again.
But for many of the people affected by the triple disaster in Fukushima, celebrating recovery here never felt quite right. Few have returned.
Homes and businesses sit abandoned, rotting and overgrown. The towns in Fukushima that once stood to gain the most from nuclear power have instead lost the most, residents and analysts say, as the disaster left Japan rethinking its nuclear dependence.
Okawa feels he paid a big price for nuclear power. He now lives hundreds of miles away with his wife, in a town where neither have roots, and they can’t find work. The government and TEPCO stopped sending him compensation three years ago, and he’s suing them for more pay.
“The moment I heard the explosion, I knew my life was going to change,” he said as he turned to the ocean. He took a deep breath and sighed. “I’ll never come back here.”
Okawa isn’t alone. Only a fraction of the 160,000 evacuees have returned, most of whom are elderly. Tens of thousands of others are stuck in limbo, residing elsewhere while still claiming residency in towns that sit largely abandoned and unlivable. Even as parts of this area reopen, most residents have decided to forget their old homes and start anew.
After the Daiichi explosions, officials scrambled to relocate the population, drawing a mandatory evacuation zone within a 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) radius.
Exclusion zone
But the wind carried clouds of radioactive material far beyond the initial evacuation zone. Radioactive elements seeped into the soil and mixed with the thick forests, leaving hot spots in difficult-to-reach places and settling in a somewhat random pattern. Radiation levels often varied by neighborhood, or even by street.
The government realized the evacuation zone needed to include the hardest-hit places outside the original radius. This whole area would become known as the exclusion zone. No residents would return for years.
Year by year, the government has deemed parts of towns safe for residents to return, lifting restrictions in an ad hoc manner that often means the only barrier separating a “safe” area from an “unsafe” one is an accordion gate set across a road to keep the public out. The exclusion zone has slowly shrunk.
Exclusion zone
Exclusion zone
Reopened for habitation since 2011
Exclusion zone
Reopened for habitation since 2017
Exclusion zone
Reopened for habitation since 2019
But even as restrictions are lifted, very few have returned.
About one-fifth of the original exclusion zone still remains behind gates, including much of the two towns that host Daiichi — Futaba to the north, and Okuma to the south. Residents can visit for hours at a time. Many say they feel a mix of nightmare and nostalgia when they do. And the towns themselves — once quaint and idyllic — sit stuck in time, home instead to wild boar and packs of wild dogs.
In early March of this year, about a week before Okawa stood at his old fishing spot north of Daiichi, the gate blocking the main road to his old hometown was unlocked and — finally — removed. It was the entrance to Futaba, the last town to be completely off-limits since the disaster.
Town limits near the Daiichi power plant
Journalists crowded to catch the moment the gate was opened. Officials lauded the opening as a major step in the area’s recovery.
In reality, downtown Futaba still looks much like it did right after the earthquake nine years ago.
Glass from broken windows litters the sidewalk. The entrance to a fallen temple lies toppled into the street. Goods from broken store shelves are strewn about, dusty and rotting.
This small corner of the town was opened mainly to inaugurate a bright, shiny new train station in time for the Olympic torch relay that had been set to take off just miles from here, before the pandemic halted those plans.
“No one can live here yet,” Masato Suzuki, the sole police officer assigned to the town, told NPR on the night the gate was opened. “There’s no electricity, no water, no basic infrastructure.” He said his biggest concern is the wild boar that roam the area at night.
Futaba was once home to over 7,000 people. After the disaster, many of them lived in an old high school near Tokyo for years, hoping they could soon return home.
Daiichi straddles two towns: Futaba and Okuma.
Town limits near the Daiichi power plant
Okuma partially reopened in 2019, with a brand new town hall overlooking a planned community of identical one-story homes, all built on former rice fields left useless after the disaster.
But it’s only faring slightly better than Futaba. Less than 2% of the population has returned, mostly elderly, and life is far from ideal. Any hospital, school or grocery store is miles away, and once-familiar roads are blocked by gates and radioactive soil is piled nearby.
“I’ll be heading up to heaven soon,” said Masaaki Sato, 98, with a chuckle, sitting in his new living room. “My old home is rotting behind gates, full of wild animals. This is the closest I could get.”
He was born and raised in Okuma and now spends his time tracing his family tree. He’s trying to find more than 200 relatives who once lived in this area but are scattered throughout Japan after the disaster. A kitchen shelf is stacked with letters that have been returned to sender.
Sato remembers that when he was a child, his family used candles and lanterns for light. Nuclear power made a huge difference, he says — there was finally electricity. “If you don’t have an accident, nuclear power is very cost-effective, it’s great,” he said. “But if you do, it’s catastrophic.”
The construction company he owned helped build several Daiichi reactors. He nodded sadly about his role in building them. “Nuclear power came at a big price,” he said.
About 2 miles from Sato’s new home, the old downtown Okuma sits behind an accordion gate. Rusted shop signs clank in the breeze and a car is parked outside a store, almost as if someone had run in to buy something and never returned.
There are school crossing signs along the road, a reminder that children once lived here, too. If you squint, you can picture just how vibrant it once was, and how different it is now from the new Okuma.
Daiichi was built in the 1960s and ’70s, and for decades, Futaba and Okuma shared the wealth that was promised from the nuclear plant — huge subsidies for infrastructure projects and tax revenue that was sometimes triple the towns’ normal budget. It was welcome money for the fishing and farming communities, especially as young people moved to cities for school and work.
“This was a lifeline for them, getting that money every year,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, a professor at Northeastern University who has studied the benefits. He says Japan followed a pattern of offering more money than the rural communities that hosted the plants had ever seen while convincing residents the facilities were safe.
It was risky, but experts stressed the safety of nuclear power and said Japan needed to fulfill energy demands while addressing climate concerns. By the early 2000s, over a quarter of the country’s electricity was nuclear and Japan was one of the top energy consumers in the world.
The Fukushima disaster in March 2011 made Japan take a hard look at its nuclear choice, though. In the months after, the government put new safety regulations in place and every nuclear reactor in the country was taken offline. It would be years until any restarted.
Today, only nine are producing any power, and the country has mostly filled the gap with imported coal and natural gas instead.
Many reactors are slated for decommissioning, including all six at Daiichi. Every day, over 4,000 workers cycle in and out of the plant, carefully approaching high-stakes challenges, like what to do with hundreds of gallons of contaminated water or how to get melted fuel out of the damaged reactors. It’s estimated the process at Daiichi alone will take over 40 years and around $200 billion.
Beyond Fukushima, dozens of other offline reactors still need staff to keep them cool and functioning properly.
Public support for bringing reactors back online has dwindled since the disaster. During his time in office, outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his party have pushed for a nuclear restart, needing to bring down energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet the country’s climate goals.
“The government and the utilities keep saying that nuclear power is the cheapest power source, but people don’t trust it anymore,” said Tatsu Suzuki, a former nuclear engineer and now professor at Nagasaki University. “It’s impossible to think that nuclear power is the cheapest, if you include the cost of decommissioning, the cost of Fukushima.”
It’s not just the economic concerns. Fukushima made people rethink the risks in broader terms, too.
“It is a social and ethical issue,” Suzuki said. “The cost of separating families, losing their land, losing their jobs … how do you measure all these impacts?”
Idogawa, 71, now lives hundreds of miles from Futaba. He’s retired and has become fixated on documenting what happened to his town — not just after the disaster, but before it, too, as the prosperity from nuclear power faded.
Idogawa is suing TEPCO and the Japanese government for what happened to Futaba. Dozens of similar suits have been advancing through the courts since the disaster. Many civil suits have been successful, although a Japanese court acquitted three TEPCO executives of criminal negligence last year.
He has turned an old camera store into an makeshift office, its walls lined with binders of meticulously cataloged files.
He often sleeps there to work longer hours. His wife no longer lives with him. His grown children have moved away. He doesn’t consider this new town his home, but he will never return to Futaba either.
Idogawa grew up in Futaba. He says sometimes he can close his eyes and still feel the first days of spring there, when the leaves were just starting to turn green.
“I miss everything. If I start talking about what I miss, it will take too long. I took that life for granted. I lost it all,” he said.
On one wall is an old picture of the main street from before 2011. The photo shows a huge welcome sign that reads “Nuclear Energy For A Bright Future,” which became a kind of tagline for the town in the 1980s. That sign was quietly removed after the disaster.
Idogawa looked at the photo and sighed. “I feel so much remorse.”