15 years after Fukushima meltdown, an innkeeper makes radiation surveys to revitalize her hometown

ODAKA, Japan — Fifteen years after the 2011 nuclear disaster, color-coded radiation maps hang on the wall of Futabaya Ryokan, the family-run inn Tomoko Kobayashi operates in her near-deserted hometown in northeastern Fukushima.

Kobayashi conducted her own radiation surveys before reopening the inn in 2016. Now, she and other monitors share radiation data as part of efforts to rebuild this once-bustling textile town.

“These empty lots used to be filled with shops,” Kobayashi says of the pre-disaster town as she heads to a radiation monitoring lab, walking past a kindergarten she attended as a child. It’s now used as a museum because there are too few children since the nuclear crisis.

“There used to be businesses, community activity and children playing,” she says. “We used to live our ordinary daily lives here, and I hope to see that again.”

Only about one-third of Odaka’s pre-disaster population of 13,000 have returned over the past decade.

“The town was destroyed, and we need to rebuild it. It’s a time-consuming process that cannot be accomplished in just a couple of decades,” she said. “But I hope to see the progress, with new people and new development added to what this town used to be.”

When a magnitude 9.0 quake struck off Japan’s northeastern coast at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, Kobayashi was at the Futabaya inn. Despite the long, violent shaking, the inn’s walls didn’t fall. But about an hour later, a tsunami poured into the kitchen “like a river,” she said.

A much higher wave hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It destroyed key cooling systems and caused meltdowns at three reactors.

The No. 1 reactor building was damaged by a hydrogen explosion on March 12. Two days later the Unit 3 reactor building exploded, followed by the No. 4 reactor building, spewing radioactive particles that contaminated the surroundings and caused hundreds of thousands of residents to flee. Some areas remain unlivable today.

Kobayashi’s family first headed to a gymnasium in nearby Haramachi town, but it was full. Eventually they made it to Nagoya, where she and her husband stayed for a year.

In 2012, the couple returned to Fukushima to start measuring radiation while living in temporary housing near Odaka, which was still off-limits.

The town has recovered some since then. Her guests include students and others who want to learn about Fukushima, as well as people interested in opening new businesses.

“I had to understand what the nuclear accident was about. I thought someone had to go back and keep an eye out,” she said. As she kept measuring, she started seeing what used to be invisible to her and understanding radiation. “Now it has become my lifetime mission.”

Kobayashi and her comrades gather twice a year, spending two weeks each time measuring the air at hundreds of locations so they can produce the color-coded maps. They have also set up a lab to test local produce to determine what they can safely eat and serve.

“We are not professional scientists, but we can measure and show the data. What’s important is to keep measuring, because the government maintains that it’s safe, as if radiation no longer exists,” she says. “But we know for a fact that it’s still there.”

Their lab now sits next to a free folklore museum with paintings, sculptures, photographs and other artwork inspired by the Fukushima disaster.

Fifteen years ago, the plant looked like a bombed factory because of the hydrogen explosions at the reactor buildings where workers risked their lives to keep the crisis under control. Radiation levels have since come down significantly, and the plant has built enhanced seawalls designed to withstand another big tsunami. Now, for the first time since the disaster, all of the plant’s reactor buildings have their rooftops enclosed.

“Our decommissioning work at the plant is about how to reduce risks of radiation,” says Akira Ono, head of decommissioning at the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Holdings Company. Remote-controlled robotics, careful planning, and practice are key to keeping workers safe, he said.

At Unit 1, under its brand-new roof, top floor decontamination will begin ahead of the planned removal of spent fuel from the cooling pool.

The three reactors contain at least 880 tons of melted fuel debris with radiation levels still dangerously high and their details little known.

TEPCO successfully took tiny melted fuel samples last year from the Unit 2 reactor. To examine melted fuel inside the Unit 3 reactor, workers last week deployed micro-drones, a technology not quite realistic 15 years ago, Ono said.

TEPCO plans remote-controlled internal probes to analyze melted fuel and to develop robots for more fuel debris removal that experts say could take decades more.

Fukushima prefecture tests thousands of pre-distribution samples every year and says all farm, fisheries and dairy products in stores are safe.

Sale of some fruits, mushrooms, river fish and a number of other harvests in former no-go zones is still restricted.

“Radiation levels have come down significantly over the past 15 years, but I wouldn’t use the word ‘safe,’ just yet,” says Yukio Shirahige, a former decontamination and radiation survey worker at Fukushima Daiichi who now helps Kobayashi’s monitoring project.

When he tested wild boar meat recently, he found it was more than 100 times over the safety limit and could not be consumed.

In a major reversal after a decade of working to phase out nuclear technology, Japan in 2022 announced plans to accelerate reactor restarts and bolster nuclear power as a stable energy source.

Shirahige was at Fukushima Daiichi when the quake and tsunami struck in 2011. After evacuating his family, he returned in late March to help the emergency cleanup at the plant for six months.

Shirahige has received support and equipment from university researchers and is in charge of testing locally produced food and other samples.

Shirahige, now 76, says measuring radioactive material and sharing that data is his life’s work.

As the government pushes Fukushima’s safety and recovery, Shirahige says, “we are under growing pressure to be silent.”