Behind Abandoned Tombstones, a Massive Facility at Large Taxpayer’s Expense…Futaba Town, Fukushima Prefecture “Heartbreaking Reality” Reflected by Deserted Graves

About 2 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which began discharging treated water for the second time on October 5, there is a place where a large number of fallen gravestones are abandoned. Weeds as tall as a man grow overgrown, while two magnificent buildings stand in the background. Muneosuke Yamamoto, the photojournalist who took this photograph, said, “This is a place in Futaba-machi, Fukushima Prefecture, where the rough terrain of the town has been destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami.

This is a wasteland in Futaba-machi, Fukushima Prefecture. I am curious about it and take pictures of it regularly. The gravestones must have been washed away by the tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The prefectural government and the town have built two ‘boxes’ nearby, but I wonder who they are for.”

The “Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Legacy Museum” (above right) and the “Futaba Town Industrial Exchange Center” (above left), which stand across the wasteland, were opened in 2008 with reconstruction budgets of approximately 5.3 billion yen and 3.5 billion yen, respectively. Why have the gravestones been left unattended near the facilities where a large amount of taxpayer money was invested? When we asked the Community Development Promotion Division of the Public Works Department of Fukushima Prefecture, the answer was as follows.

The graves whose owners are known were relocated in June of this year. （We don’t know who owns the gravestones (that were left unattended), so we have reported them to the police as lost property. If we find the owner, we will return it, and if not, we will consider what to do about it. There was no maintenance plan for the area because it was a zone prepared for the lifting of the evacuation order, but now construction has started to create the Fukushima Reconstruction Prayer Park.”

Akira Imai, a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Local Government, points out that the reconstruction budget is not being spent from the perspective of the disaster victims.

If the “reconstruction” work proceeds without any trace of the original town, evacuees will lose the will to return to their homes,” he said. In areas that have been designated as difficult-to-return zones, houses have begun to collapse and fields have become wilderness. The reconstruction budget that is being spent on “boxes” should first be used to restore the environment to what it was before the nuclear accident.

A group of gravestones abandoned near a huge structure built with taxpayer money. …… The photo above shows the “heartbreaking reality” of the disaster area.

From the October 27, 2023 issue of FRIDAY