Last Friday, we were fortunate to be visited by five residents of Futaba, the town in Fukushima prefecture that is closest to Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant for what turned out to be one of the best attended talks in recent memory!
In their talk, they initially spoke of what happened in 2011, when the area was hit by the world’s only triple disaster – an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power station incident. The disaster, which saw all 7,000 residents of Futaba evacuated from their homes, completely brought to an end a town which had prided itself on traditions and community.
However, they spoke of hope and how they are looking to regenerate the area. After a monumental decontamination effort (the nuclear incident is ranked as highly as Chernobyl on the INES scale), with meters of topsoil removed from a massive area, 15% of the town is now reopen. Since the evacuation orders were lifted in 2022, one hundred residents have returned (including sixty original Futaba residents), and they have once again started to build a community. They spoke about how they were trying to use tourism – ‘hope tourism’ – in order to get people to start thinking about the area and about the future it can have.
Touching on the issues they have overcome and what they hoped the future, it left everyone in attendance with a real sense that, in spite of everything, where there is hope anything is possible.
