Return to Fukushima

Return to Fukushima captures the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, chronicling the resilience of displaced communities navigating life amidst radioactivity. Thomas Bass explores the transformative journey from desolation to revitalization, offering a survival guide to our atomic future.

Fukushima is an ongoing nuclear disaster. The four reactors that melted down and exploded in 2011 are still deadly, even to the robots that get burned up trying to explore them. Over a hundred thousand people remain displaced, their homes frozen in time, eerie ghost towns where slippers sit undisturbed at doorsteps and tables are set for absent guests. Wild animals have moved into the houses. Vines overgrow buildings surrendering to entropy. Visiting these places, we stare at the vacant world remaining after we have ended our brief tenure as overlords of the Anthropocene.

The world is dotted with nuclear exclusion zones. Atolls blown to smithereens. Test sites in the Mojave Desert. Disasters at Soviet bomb-making factories. The red forest around Chernobyl. These zones are growing in number and melding one into another. What if our future demands that we learn how to live in nuclear exclusion zones? Learn how to master the risks and develop resistant crops and other survival skills?

Nowhere is this future more evident than in Fukushima, where the Japanese government is pushing people to resettle in towns that are supposedly decontaminated. These attempts have largely failed. But what has not failed are the grassroots efforts at reviving Fukushima. This is propelled by the ingenuity of local farmers and entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, artists, and immigrants from around the world who are intrigued by starting new lives in the red zone.

In 2018 and again four and a half years later, Thomas Bass travelled to Fukushima. The difference was dramatic The place had been cleaned up and reopened, not fully, but little-by-little people are learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave set to wash over this seismically precarious part of the world. After six years of research, including travels to Chernobyl, Bass gives us a remarkable account of how Fukushima's argonauts of the anthropocene are guiding us into our atomic future.