It is a nuclear-era Mary Celeste, a town left virtually untouched since its 21,000 residents fled two years ago.
Rubble and roof tiles still litter the streets from the huge earthquake that dislodged them on 11 March, 2011.
A ship lies beached beside a main road, washed up by the tsunami that pummeled the coastline less than an hour later.
Homes and schools sit empty and abandoned, poisoned by the invisible radioactive payload from the nearby Daiichi nuclear plant that settled over everything here in the days after the Fukushima meltdown began.
Namie in Fukushima Prefecture will always be synonymous with the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Like the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, it is a nuclear ghost town, gradually being reclaimed by nature.
After the tsunami, bodies lay here undiscovered for a month because nobody could be found to retrieve them. Government officials concealed the spread of radioactivity, leaving the town’s citizens to be poisoned. Today, Tomotsu Baba, its mayor, serves a population that has been scattered across Japan, driven out by contamination. “Many want to know the current state of the disaster area,” he says. “They wonder what’s become of it and feel a great need to see it for themselves.”
Now they can. Google Street View is giving Namie’s nuclear refugees a virtual tour of their uninhabitable streets and homes.
The company responded to the mayor’s request by sending its camera-equipped cars to the town to create a panorama of stitched digital images. For the first time since the disaster began, the town’s residents can see what they left behind – most have only been allowed back under police escort for a few minutes since March 2011 to pick up vital belongings.
“It’s wonderful but scary at the same time,” says Yukiko Kameya, from the nearby ghost town of Futaba. “Some of us want to put that part of our lives out of our minds, but there are many who need to stay in touch.”
Google had to get permission to enter the 20-km no-go zone around the ruined hulk of the Daiichi plant. Police checkpoints guard the entry and exit points to the area. Most of the roughly 120,000 people who once lived inside the zone believe it will be years, perhaps decades before they can return.
Mayor Baba hopes the images will serve another purpose. “I imagine there are people around the world who also want to see the tragic aftermath of the nuclear accident,” he says in a video released to mark the Google project, translated by Japanese news blog RocketNews 24. “So I hope these images reach the rest of the world through Street View.
He says he wants the imagery to become “a permanent record of what happened” to his town. "Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children.”
“The townspeople are scattered all around the country,” he said. “This way they can remember, and maybe hold on to some hope of returning.”
In a blog post accompanying several images taken from Street View, he said he wanted the world to understand the impact of the nuclear accident. “Here is one of Namie-machi’s main streets, which we often used for outdoor events like our big Ten Days of Autumn festival,” he wrote under a shot of a deserted road lined with shuttered businesses, one of its lanes blocked by a collapsed wooden building.
“Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering,” he added. “But in Namie-machi time stands still.”
Google’s technology and ubiquitous approach to documenting the world have made it a widely used source of disaster-related information. Google Earth satellite photos showed how the earthquake transformed Japan’s northern Pacific coastline, and environmental activists used Google Maps to track radiation hotspots.
Parts of Namie will become accessible again next month under a revision of the evacuation order. But residents will be able to return only for a few hours at a time, a consequence of still-elevated radiation levels, and prospects for permanent resettlement are dim.
Other Fukushima towns are trying to preserve what local ties they can among evacuated residents. Tomioka, a town south of Namie known for its cherry blossoms, is inviting residents back for spring blossom-viewing parties after its evacuation order was partially relaxed this month.
Few doubt that keeping residents from drifting away permanently will be difficult, however. While Mr Baba said he was hopeful that some would return to Namie one day, his description of the Street View project suggested its purpose was at least partly to serve as a memorial.
“Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forebears, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children,” he wrote in the blog. To the FT he said: “We hope young people who have left will remember their home town and return sometimes, even if it’s only to tend to their ancestors’ graves.”
Click here for photos of the deserted town
Thursday 28 March 2013
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/google-street-view-sends-cameras-into-namie-an-abandoned-town-in-fukushima-where-once-21000-people-lived-8552039.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/54f2d386-96c5-11e2-8950-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2OpQFPWEm
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