Decontaminating Fukushima - Launched March 13, 2017 - Full multimedia experience: audio, stills, text and or video: Go to zReportage.com to see more - In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Some 488 thousand people evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture after the three-part disaster, in 2017, nearly 25% remain displaced. A massive effort is now underway to decontaminate towns in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. Thousands of laborers are cleaning or demolishing every building, and removing and incinerating all topsoil in inhabited areas. In the adjacent forests and mountains, radiation levels remain higher and will not be cleaned. Naraha, 12 miles south of the nuclear plant, was the first closed town to reopen after the disaster. Residents were allowed to return home full-time on Sept. 5, 2015. To date, an estimated 800 residents have returned, out of a pre-disaster population of 7,400. In March and April 2017, four more towns, Namie, Kawamata, Iitate and Tomioka will allow residents to return. Some areas closest to Fukushima Daiichi are too radioactive and may never reopen. Michael Forster Rothbart's reportage in Fukushima was funded by grants from NPPA and the International Center for Journalists.
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September 19, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - Two weeks after residents were allowed to move back to Naraha, a town in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, the town celebrated with a grand reopening of Tenjinmisaki, a seaside resort. Nearly two hundred dignitaries and former local residents came to the dedication ceremony including Naraha Mayor Yukiei Matsumoto but the street festival that followed was sparsely attended, and the hotel remained nearly vacant in the following weeks.
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October 2, 2015 - Tomioka, Fukushima, Japan - The full moon rises over tsumani-damaged trees adjacent to Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant. The town of Tomioka stretches along the Japanese coast between two nuclear plants, Fukushima Daini and Fukushima Daiichi, site of the 2011 meltdowns. Most developed areas of Tomioka have now been decontaminated and the town is set to reopen to residents on April 1, 2017. A portion of the town closest to Fukushima Daiichi is too radioactive and may never open.
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September 22, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - Near the Momogisawa evacuee housing compound in Iwaki, Fukushima prefecture, a mannequin head on a pole serves as a scarecrow, guarding a rice paddy. Many of the evacuees are former farmers who have been leaving here in small one-room apartments for over five years. Some grow crops and flowers outside their housing units but don't have agricultural space to grow rice.
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September 19, 2015 - Tomioka, Fukushima, Japan - The destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is visible from the bridge beside the Takigawa dam in Tomioka, about 7 miles southwest of the plant. A massive effort is now underway to decontaminate towns in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. In Tomioka, 5 to 8 miles from the nuclear plant, thousands of laborers are cleaning or demolishing every building, and removing and incinerating all topsoil in inhabited areas. In the adjacent forests and mountains, radiation levels remain higher and will not be cleaned.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire

Yamakiya, which I love and where I was born and lived until today, I worry how it's going to be here from now on.
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September 24, 2015 - Naraha, Japan - All vegetation has been cleared from the grounds of the junior high school in Naraha, Fukushima Prefecture, as part of decontamination. The school has been renovated after 2011 earthquake damage. It is set to reopen for one class of students in April 2017. However, so far only a handful of children are among the 800 residents who have returned to Naraha. In a 2016 survey, 17 percent of Naraha students said that they would return to school in Naraha but half hope to commute there, the Japanese newspaper Mainichi reported. Some evacuee parents say they are more likely to return when the school reopens, while others report that after six years of waiting, their children have adjusted to schools in other cities and they won't return.
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October 1, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - JUNICHI TANAKA is director of disaster prevention for the town of Naraha. As residents consider returning to Naraha, they usually have two primary concerns. The first worry ' is it safe? ' Tanaka has no doubts about it. Naraha has been decontaminated and radiation levels in the inhabited areas are close to normal, he asserts. As towns like Naraha get decontaminated, low-level radioactive contamination scraped topsoil, organic waste and debris from demolished buildings gets loaded into heavy-duty cubic-meter bags. These bags pile up on worksites and roadsides, then get moved to temporary storage fields. In Naraha, the floodplain beside the Kido River has been converted to waste storage. A typical field has meter bags stacked three high in pyramids of 192 bags; a total of 12,096 bags will occupy such a site when it is full. Eventually this low-level waste gets trucked to a special exhaust-free incinerator. Anything with higher contamination will get moved to a 'temporary' 30-year waste site, which everyone expects will eventually become a permanent disposal site. Former residents' second fear is whether it will be too difficult to live in a ghost town, and Tanaka can't answer them. At present Naraha has three convenience stores, two working gas stations and a few restaurants, but no supermarket, no banks (except for a temporary ATM on a truck) and no schools. All this infrastructure will return eventually, but it has not yet.
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October 5, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - As towns in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone get decontaminated, scraped topsoil, organic waste and debris from demolished buildings with low-level radioactive contamination get loaded into heavy-duty cubic-meter bags. These bags pile up on worksites, roadsides and temporary storage fields across the Exclusion Zone. This storage site by the Yamadahama neighborhood in Naraha has meter bags stacked three high in pyramids of 192 bags; a total of 12,096 bags will occupy this site when it is full, and the field is one of dozens filling the floodplain beside the Kido river.
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September 25, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - Naraha mayor YUKIEI MATSUMOTO was one of the first people to move back to Naraha over a year ago during decontamination and eight months before the town reopened to the public in September 2015. He has been a tireless proponent for his town. 'I hope Naraha will become a town where we can see many children's smiles,' the mayor says. He and his staff successfully fought a national government proposal to site a long-term nuclear waste dump in the town; instead they have looked for subsidies and other ways to bring new businesses here and have plans for a new 'compact town' urban development with commercial space and housing to replace homes lost in the tsunami. They hope to attract evacuees from towns closer to the nuclear plant who will never be able to return to their original homes. Still, despite his efforts to persuade residents and optimistic predictions of growth, he admits that he really doesn't know how many will return. 'First the elderly people are coming back, but our town cannot exist if the children do not come back here,' he says.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire

September 18, 2015 - Tomioka, Fukushima, Japan - In Tomioka, Japan, buildings and cars destroyed by the March 11, 2011 tsunami remain standing in the neighborhood near the former Tomioka train station. In 2015, four and a half years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, tourists and former residents come to see the damage while laborers work nearby to decontaminate homes and commercial properties before demolition. Almost all developed properties in Tomioka are now getting cleaned or demolished.
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evacuees from the nuclear exclusion zone receive a lot of attention and a high amount of benefits, including free housing and compensation for their losses and 'mental anguish'; however, evacuees who lost homes directly from the natural disaster are neglected and receive almost no support.
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September 25, 2015 - Fukushima City, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - Nuclear scientist IKURO ANZAI and his dosimetry team measure radiation levels near Torikawa Nursery School in Fukushima City, and then report their findings to school director MIYOKO SATO. The school staff had mostly kept children inside for years, concerned about radiation on the roads and playground near the school where students used to walk and play. Anzai and his team determined that the outside levels were safe for recreation. 'The disaster destroyed people's trust in the government, in the industry, and in the experts,' he says. 'I would like to apologize to the people in Fukushima. That's why I go there every month to measure the radiation. I'll continue to do this until I die.
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September 26, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - Construction is underway to repair and build a new two-part breakwater seawall and levee all along the coast in Fukushima, Japan, including here between the mouths of the Kido and Ide rivers in Naraha. A massive effort is now underway to decontaminate towns in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. In Tomioka, 5 to 8 miles from the nuclear plant, thousands of laborers are cleaning or demolishing every building, and removing and incinerating all topsoil in inhabited areas. In the adjacent forests and mountains, radiation levels remain higher and will not be cleaned.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire

October 3, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - FUMIKO YOKOTA, a widow and retiree, was eager to return to Naraha after living as in temporary evacuee housing in Iwaki city for four years, but she doesn't think her neighbors will be so quick to return. 'Now maybe this is the twisted idea of an old lady, but I think for some young people the disaster was a stroke of luck,' she says. It gave them the opportunity to move from a rural village to a booming city, as youth have been eager to do for generations.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire

Yuriko wants to move back to Naraha to reopen the guesthouse; her son has forbid it. He fears that her health is too frail to survive the stress and work of returning. She has had two heart attacks since the tsunami.
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September 30, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - Fukushima evacuee HISAO YANAI stands for a portrait after returning home to his native town. When the tsunami hit, Hisao Yanai was head of the local Yakuza (Japanese mafia) in Naraha. He says the disaster changed him; he decided to leave the mafia and dedicate himself to helping people. He now owns a Japanese pub in Naraha, but kept many symbols of his former status, including a taxi-yellow Hummer and the stuffed polar bear in the foyer of his sprawling house.
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October 4, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - TOKUO HAYAKAWA has been an anti-nuclear activist for 45 years and chief monk of the Hyokoji temple in Naraha for 40 years. He opposed the Fukushima Daiichi plant when it opened in 1971, and the 2011 disaster proved what he feared all along, that 'nuclear power plants and people can not peacefully coexist.' Hayakawa had no qualms about returning to the temple, even though his community has not. Out of 100 families involved in the temple, only five or six have returned, and he is pessimistic that Naraha can ever be a viable town again. Nevertheless, he says he can't abandon the temple, founded in 1395, despite feeling certain he will be the last head monk here. He had hoped his grandson would take over the temple someday, but now rules out that possibility. 'I am definitely the last one. It's clear that Naraha isn't a place to live anymore,' he says. 'Japan is a small island, we can't just close an area off. But it's never been tried before, to bring a whole city back'.
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the soil is contaminated but the wind blows clean. 'I still collect mushrooms but the radiation is too high, we can not eat them,' he says. 'I worry a little about the nuclear power plant but more I worry, will my son come home? He's 28 years old. I worry ' will I have good health to keep working?'
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September 21, 2015 - Kawauchi, Fukushima, Japan - TAMAKI SUNAGUCHI is a decontamination laborer working in Tomioka. He was working in the forest division ' clearing all underbrush and topsoil in the first 20 meters of any woodland, mostly by hand, and bagging it for incineration. (Forests more than 20 meters from developed areas are left untouched, regardless of radiation levels). Now Sunaguchi has been transferred to a road decontamination crew. 'Sometimes we work in highly contaminated areas,' he says. 'I worry about health, but I'll be home after a year of this.' For now, he's living in the mountains in Kawauchi, in a worker hotel constructed out of a double-high stack of shipping containers converted to dorm rooms. There's a complex maze of contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors that have divied up the government contracts for remediation work. Sunaguchi is employed by Marubeni, a subcontractor for Obayashi, which is in turn one of three corporations decontaminating Tomioka. Some lower-tier subcontractors have been criticized for underpaying workers and withholding high amounts for housing and transportation, but there has been little governmental oversight.
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'I worry a little about the nuclear power plant but more I worry, will my son come home? He's 28 years old. I worry ' will I have good health to keep working?' Takaaki takes me to see a windmill farm on the mountaintop above their farm. This is the energy future for Fukushima, he tells me ' the soil is contaminated but the wind blows clean.
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'Since I am not good at talking, I am worrying if my story helped you or not. After the disaster, I lost the ability to believe people. So many things happened and I was about to have depression. I thought I would be spoiled at this rate, so that I decided to go out and work. I decided to smile all the time in order not to worry others around me. Even though the steps are very small, I now feel like being able to overcome the problem of distrusting others.
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September 25, 2015 - Fukushima City, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - MIYOKO SATO, director of Torikawa Nursery School in Fukushima City, has been concerned about radiation on the roads and playground near the school where students walk and play. She invited nuclear scientist Ikuro Anzai and his team to measure radiation levels in the neighborhood.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire

October 5, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - In Japan, the brief-blooming cherry blossom is seen as a symbol of how precious but precarious life is. When YUMIKO NISHIMOTO returned to Naraha, she saw the devastation caused up and down the coast by the tsunami, and thought of cherry trees. She founded the non-profit Sakura Project, which is working to plant 20,000 cherry trees spanning the entire 83-mile length of Fukushima Prefecture. Almost every week, volunteers now arrive from across the country to participate in tree-plantings. 'Even now, there are people who are not able to return to their hometowns and suffer from many problems including the effects of radiation. We have established the Sakura Project as a symbol of the restoration and determination to create a community,' she writes. 'We would like to pass the memory of this disaster to future generations. We intend to create a bright future with hope for children to come back to this place. That is why we are moving forward.' Someday, Nishimoto hopes, the trees will bloom every few meters along Route 6, the coastal highway that cuts through the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. She considers the trees as a testament to lives lost that will also encourage locals and tourists to return here.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire

September 26, 2015 - Naraha, Fukushima, Japan - SATO MIYUKI SHINEKI portrait at the Takechan diner. In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Some 488 thousand people evacuated from the three-part disaster; in 2015, nearly 25% remain displaced.
© Michael Forster Rothbart/zReportage.com/ZUMA Wire