FUTABA, Fukushima Prefecture--Hiroyuki Endo walks down a street lined with shuttered shops and withered weeds and solemnly gazes at a sign overhead.
FUTABA, Fukushima Prefecture--Hiroyuki Endo walks down a street lined with shuttered shops and withered weeds and solemnly gazes at a sign overhead.
“Nuclear power, energy for a bright future,” the sign reads. On the reverse side are the words: “Nuclear power, for a rich life on correct understanding.”
"This signboard has become famous since the accident," Endo said. “I didn’t care a bit about it before the accident.”
The town of Futaba remains deserted two years after the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The situation is similar in Okuma, the other town that co-hosts the crippled plant.
More than 150,000 people in Fukushima Prefecture are still living away from their homes since the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami devastated the northeastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011. They include all 7,000 residents of Futaba who are now scattered across the nation because of high radiation levels caused by the nuclear accident.
Some evacuees, including Endo, returned briefly to their homes in Futaba and Okuma in early March.
In Futaba, quake-damaged wooden houses had collapsed on the streets.
Rust had formed on the pro-nuclear sign, which was installed in the 1980s with a subsidy from the central government.
“Every time I come back, I feel the town has lost its color," Endo, 47, said. "It will further deteriorate as time passes.”
A dosimeter in a car kept beeping after detecting radiation exceeding 1 microsievert per hour, showing that the levels in Futaba are still high.
The town is in a designated no-entry zone. Most parts of Futaba are expected to be reclassified as difficult-to-return zones, with annual radiation doses of more than 50 millisieverts.
Abandoned factories and office buildings stand on the ground of the Futaba industrial park, a possible site for an intermediate storage facility for radioactive soil collected in the decontamination process.
“The facility will probably be built after all these buildings are destroyed,” Endo said. “It will be easy to build the facility because this is higher ground.”
The exhaust stacks of the Fukushima No. 1 plant could be seen from Endo’s home, 2 kilometers northwest of the plant and near the industrial park.
“What can they do with these?” Endo asked, looking at the many rocks he had placed in his Japanese garden.
He said he had no idea if he will receive compensation for the garden rocks and trees he had purchased.
In a shed outside Endo’s house, barrels glistened in the light, apparently having been licked by cows left behind after the accident. His plastic greenhouse smelled like a cowshed.
Endo was born and raised in Futaba. He did maintenance work at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant but quit shortly before the meltdowns.
When he was about to start a new job, the accident occurred, forcing Endo and other townspeople to evacuate to Kawamata in the same prefecture.
Endo and his family later moved to Kagoshima Prefecture where an acquaintance lives.
He returned alone and worked amid the radioactive debris from the hydrogen explosions that rocked the Fukushima No. 1 plant in the early stages of the disaster.
“Looking at the buildings that had been blown apart by the explosions, I could only think, ‘Oh, no!’” he recalled.
He worked at the plant until June 2011.
One purpose of his latest visit to Futaba was to take photos of his daughter’s “hina” girls’ festival dolls, which he bought to celebrate her birth 15 years ago.
Endo picked up a large doll from a closet in a tatami-matted room.
Asked if he would bring the doll to his current residence, he muttered to himself: “How can I possibly do that? There is no room for this doll in our apartment in Kagoshima.”
He says he has little hope of returning permanently to his home, considering that the half-life of radioactive cesium-137 is about 30 years.
“It is too long. I doubt if I could see the end (of the crisis) while I am alive,” he said.
In Okuma, Kumika Takeuchi looked up at the many crows flying above a shopping district on March 10.
“I have no idea when they increased in number,” she said.
The 52-year-old returned with her husband, Kazushi Takeuchi, 59. The Takeuchi family ran a coffee shop in the town before they and the 11,500 other residents were forced to evacuate.
Tomomi, their 26-year-old daughter, showed the way to a grocery store next to the coffee shop. The glass on the entrance door was smeared white with bird droppings, making it difficult to see inside.
As we moved closer, rancid odor from rotten food filled the air, and a crow suddenly flew out through a narrow opening in the damaged entrance.
Tomomi screamed. Around five more crows then smashed into the glass as they tried to make their escape.
At Futaba Shoyo High School, where Tomomi had attended, at least 100 crows were roosting in branches of a 50-meter line of trees.
“I feel like I’m watching a horror movie,” Tomomi said. "I did not know that a place would become like this after the people are gone."
At the Takeuchis’ home, where the coffee shop was located, Kumika sighed at the sight of rodent droppings that left little room to step.
Mice had gnawed a 30-centimeter line on the stairs.
“When we were here last autumn, it just smelled musty,” she said.
As Kazushi offered incense sticks at the gravesite of the family’s ancestors, he said, “Now, the only purpose of a visit home is to pay respect to our ancestors.”
(This article was compiled from reports by Shunsuke Kimura and Noriyoshi Otsuki.)