Echoes of Fukushima

In March 2011, a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated Japan’s northeastern coast. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered catastrophic meltdowns, releasing radioactive material into the environment and forcing more than 150,000 people to evacuate. Entire towns, some just a few kilometres from the plant, were left deserted in a matter of hours. The evacuation was meant to be temporary for many, yet years later, places like Futaba and Namie remain largely uninhabited, trapped in the shadow of that day. I’ve visited Fukushima twice, first in 2012 and again in 2018, and each time the weight of the Daiichi nuclear disaster was palpable.

Walking through Futaba and Namie feels like stepping into a moment sealed off from time. These once-bustling towns, evacuated after the Daiichi nuclear disaster, now sit in uneasy silence, their streets empty yet heavy with memory. Nature is slowly reclaiming the roads, but beyond the overgrown verges, interiors remain startlingly intact, as if the people who once lived here simply vanished mid-sentence.

Inside homes and shops, calendars are still pinned to walls, their dates forever frozen in 2011. School bags hang on hooks, magazines lie open on coffee tables, and vending machines, long powered down, stand like relics of an everyday life that will never return. Dust and decay have softened the sharp edges of the past, but each room carries an unsettling immediacy, a lingering sense of presence.

What struck me most was the tension between familiarity and absence. There’s an intimacy to these spaces - the personal touches, the small tokens of daily life, yet they’re locked in a state of permanent suspension. Futaba and Namie aren’t just abandoned towns, they’re archives of a sudden, catastrophic rupture, places where time stopped and never restarted. Walking through them, you can’t help but feel like an intruder in a world that still belongs to the people who had to leave it behind.