LIVE: Japan Remembers 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster on Anniversary | Top News

(Mar. 10) 2011年3月11日の東日本大震災から10年、被災地の復興への歩みは続く。

It's been 10 years since Japan's Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, but the rebuilding efforts continue. We take a look at how residents are faring in their long road to recovery as the struggles and pain live on.

As the country marks the 10th anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disaster, parts of Fukushima are still off limits and the prefecture remains a laggard in recovery. Its future is clouded by the 30 to 40 years it may take to decommission the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, near which millions of gallons of treated radioactive water are in storage.

Laid waste by a nuclear disaster a decade ago, Japan’s Fukushima is still struggling to recover, even as the government tries to bring people and jobs back to former ghost towns by pouring in billions of dollars to decontaminate and rebuild.

But reconstruction efforts from the mundane -- supermarkets and transport infrastructure -- to a cutting-edge hydrogen energy plant have yet to entice more than a small fraction of the former population to return.

Fukushima prefecture saw its population shrink by 10% to 1.8 million in the past decade, compared with a fall of only about 2.5% in neighboring Miyagi. Fukushima’s economy grew by 8.1% between 2010 and 2018, the latest year for which data is available, compared with 19% for Miyagi.

The return of Fukushima’s manufacturing capacity has lagged behind others, according to economist Yutaro Suzuki at Daiwa Institute of Research Holdings. While neighbors Iwate and Miyagi prefectures recovered manufacturing output to pre-disaster levels in 2012 and 2013 respectively, it took Fukushima until 2017 to get there stably, Suzuki wrote in a report ahead of the anniversary. The tourism industry, which had inched back to almost pre-disaster levels, has been crushed again by the pandemic.

More than 160,000 people were evacuated from the region surrounding the plant after the magnitude 9 earthquake, the biggest ever recorded to hit Japan, caused a massive tsunami that overwhelmed the facility, shut off power to cooling systems and led to meltdowns of three reactor cores. The disaster left about 20,000 people missing or dead.

While areas further north that were worse hit by the tsunami could get to work quickly on rebuilding, the lingering radioactive contamination in Fukushima means some areas have yet to reach the start line.

Shipments of manufactured goods from the Futaba area around the plant were still at a quarter of pre-disaster levels in 2018, while the once-bustling fishing port of Ukedo remains half-deserted as many consumers avoid food from Fukushima, despite extensive testing.

Trucks rumble continuously across the coastal area, transporting plastic sacks full of topsoil and vegetation still being removed from residential areas. The cleanup drive is meant to allow people to eventually return to their former homes, but, tired of waiting, many of them have put down roots elsewhere.

“It’s important for the recovery that we press ahead simultaneously with policies to restore everyday life, and those that look ahead to a new future,” Masao Uchibori, governor of Fukushima prefecture, told reporters Wednesday.

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