When the people of Tomioka were finally allowed short visits back to their homes after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, one of the first things they did was to prune the mountain town’s languishing cherry trees. After years of intermittent tending, the century-old trees just 10 km from the destroyed nuclear plant returned to full glory. Kiyonori Watanabe, who has lived nearby his entire life, stops his car in front of a metal barricade and pulls up a photo on his phone: clouds of delicate, pink “sakura” blossoms.
This is as far as he can go. Nine years after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the street lined by the trees is still uninhabitable. Other neighborhoods deemed safe now have only a fraction of their former population. “Some elderly people have returned home, but their children and grandchildren have refused to do so because of radiation concerns,” says Watanabe, who oversees renewable energy in the region as director of Fukushima Electric Power Co. Ltd.