![]() ![]() Ishida, who is sixty-five, had returned to live in Okuma alone, without his family. We were standing near the entrance to the new town hall, a glass-and-cedar building next to a stubbly field that had once been rice paddies. “It’s been 2,956 days since 3/11,” Jin Ishida, Okuma’s vice-mayor, told me, referring to the date of the disaster. Many more people across Fukushima Prefecture-which is slightly larger than Connecticut-self-evacuated, afraid and uncertain about the danger the fallout posed. More than a hundred thousand people were ordered to leave their homes, with little sense of when, if ever, they would be able to return. The fallout contaminated Okuma and the surrounding towns. ![]() Radioactive water flowed into the sea, and plumes of radioactive particles spewed into the sky. In March, 2011-after a magnitude-nine earthquake, one of the most powerful in recorded history, triggered a twelve-story tsunami-the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant flooded and lost power, prompting three of the plant’s six reactors to partially melt down. They had gathered to celebrate the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening, just a few days earlier, of the town of Okuma itself. On a blustery Sunday in Okuma last spring, a crowd was seated under red-and-white tents awaiting the arrival of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. ![]()
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