Finding Home
After Fallout
Finding Home
Fear and favor
Nuclear diaspora makes home a hard place to define
Written by Zachariah Bryan
Hisako Shiga spilled an envelope full of photographs onto the table. She flipped through them. Most are of her grandchildren. Baby picture after baby picture after baby picture. Then, she stopped. She pointed: Her old house in Naraha. Her home...
Waves of change
Moving forward while looking back at the 3.11 tsunami
Written by Rehana Asmi
Naofumi Otani biked into town as soon as the tsunami waters receded from his home on a hill. He saw no color and no sound on the familiar landscape.
“The devastation was like a war zone,” said the director of the library at Ishinomaki Senshu University. The sprawling coastal town of Ishinomaki was the hardest hit area by the tsunami of March 11, 2011. Thirteen percent of the town was flooded. Of the roughly 20,000 people who died in the earthquake and tsunami, 4,000 had lived here...
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Treasures
Video and text by Katy Spence
Eiichi Honma’s Ishinomaki home was swept away by the 2011 tsunami. Only this storehouse, built in 1897, remained. With support from the community, the storehouse was fully restored in November 2013.
Today, it is full of precious treasures: books, maps, ceramics, masks and music fill the space of the sturdy building, which is built like a safe....
Struck down but not swept away
The science that came back to save
Written by Jana Wiegand
When the Great East Japan Earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, it unleashed tsunami waves up to 130-feet high and triggered the meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. While the triple disaster led to the loss of over 20,000 lives, damaged over a million buildings and released enough radiation to force 400,000 people to evacuate their homes, the reconstruction efforts sparked a new period of scientific research in Japan...