THE ABADONED CARS OF FUKUSHIMA
We set out to find cars left behind by the 2011 nuclear disaster. What we found was far more sobering...
Stand perfectly still, close your eyes and you can feel it. The muddle of 8-bit sound effects, the chatter, the traffic streaming past outside and the fug of cigarette smoke hovering like a storm cloud over the gamblers. Open your eyes and you’re in the loneliest room in the world.
A bleached-out calendar hangs open on 11 March 2011; on the foor, plastic baskets and metal pachinko balls are scattered everywhere, forcing you to pick a careful path through the debris. The sense of loss and upheaval is palpable. You can taste it in the dank, cloying air. Outside the gambling parlour a kid’s bike lies on its side, now rusted through, perhaps in the same position it was tossed seven years ago when its owner dropped everything and bolted. Across the car park, a silver Audi A4 Avant – seemingly in perfect condition – is being consumed by the weeds, sucked back down into the earth from whence it came. This had started as a fairly last-minute, light-hearted idea. I was in Tokyo anyway, so why not ask Honda to lend us their silliest Kei car and take a three-hour roadtrip to the now partly open nuclear-exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station? There had been reports and shots from a few intrepid photographers of abandoned vehicles everywhere, and given the depth of car culture in Japan, there was bound to be some interesting stuf left behind in the mass exodus. Our motives weren’t sinister or discourteous, but born of curiosity. Exactly six years after a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake caused a series of tsunamis up to 39m high that pummelled Japan’s northeastern coastline, fooded an area of 217 square miles, killed 16,000 people and wiped out the cooling systems for three nuclear reactors, sending them into meltdown and spewing radiation into the surrounding area, the government’s evacuation order was lifted. That was in March 2017. Former residents, in all but a handful of towns closest to the reactors, where radiation levels are still deemed unsafe, are being encouraged to move back, and £151m has been set aside to restore the healthcare system and other essential facilities. Despite the removal of housing subsidies to evacuees, worth around £640 a month to them, only around 15 per cent have taken the government up on its ofer. The science says it’s now safe, but you would you send your kids back to school here? Would you drink the water?