Futaba, Fukushima Pref. –

Standing on a vacant lot surrounded by winter-browned fields, her black skirt stirring in the wind, Haruna Kambayashi gestures to where her family once lived. Her grandmother’s old house, her parents’ refurbished residence and a small workshop had filled the site.

Today, only weeds, stacks of garden stones from the demolition and a tiny shrine honoring the land’s guardian deity remain.

“We renovated our parents’ house the year before the disaster, so my father didn’t want to tear it down,” says the 43-year-old. “But with the deadline for demolition subsidies approaching, we decided to go through with it in 2020. The earthquake had left many cracks, and fixing them would have meant major repairs.”

For years after the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, triggered triple meltdowns at the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, Kambayashi returned to this spot with a camera, wearing a hazmat suit and carrying a Geiger counter.

At first she photographed the slow turn of the seasons. Later she documented collapsed roofs, animals reclaiming empty streets and the gradual disappearance of familiar landmarks. “I once found a giant wild boar dead inside our house,” she says, pulling up a photo of the carcass on her phone. What began as a private act of remembrance evolved into film work and, eventually, exhibitions chronicling a town that, for more than a decade, had no residents at all.

Late last year, she bought a house in the neighborhood, near the now-closed elementary school she attended. On Feb. 10, she transferred her jūminhyō, or certificate of residence, back to Futaba, formally rejoining a community that now numbers about 200.

“I’ve always wanted to return to Futaba,” says Kambayashi, a video director and mother of two. She divides her time between Futaba and Chiba Prefecture, and also keeps an office in Fukushima City. “But it’s hard to know what the future holds for this town.”

Fifteen years after the Great East Japan Earthquake killed nearly 20,000 people and set off a nuclear crisis, Futaba remains one of the starkest symbols of displacement. Once home to roughly 7,000 residents, the town began allowing them to return in August 2022, but very few have come back so far.

Across disaster-hit areas in northern Japan, patterns of return and relocation vary widely: Some towns and villages have seen former residents trickle back, while other displaced communities have forged new beginnings elsewhere.

About 80 kilometers north of Futaba, for example, in the Tamaura-nishi (West Tamaura) district of Iwanuma, Miyagi Prefecture, an entirely new community was built inland after the tsunami and is often cited as a relative success in postdisaster resettlement.

Together, these communities show how displacement has reshaped lives and landscapes as Japan prepares for the long-anticipated Nankai Trough megaquake, which could, in the government’s worst-case scenario, result in as many as 298,000 deaths nationwide and widespread destruction.

After high school, Kambayashi left Futaba to continue her studies. By the time the disaster struck in 2011, she was married and living in Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo. Meanwhile, in Futaba, home to part of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, evacuation orders emptied the town as decontamination efforts commenced.

Now, with her residence registered again in Futaba, Kambayashi’s commitment to the town is clear. While many former residents have rebuilt their lives elsewhere and face practical obstacles to returning — from limited housing and jobs to sparse services — she has chosen to anchor herself in a town still struggling to regain its footing. She also founded a small outfit called Futaba Peace and is involved in events marking the 15th anniversary of the disaster.

“I’d say about half of the people living here now are newcomers. The rest are longtime residents — mostly younger people who’ve come back,” she says in her two-story home, seated at a dinner table she salvaged from her family’s former house.

“There’s so much that can’t be preserved, no matter how hard we try, so there’s little point in clinging to the past. I’d rather entrust the town’s future to the newcomers and let them build something of their own.”

When the towns emptied

In the year after the March 2011 disaster, more than 41,000 residents left Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, the largest net outflow since 1970, when Japan’s postwar economic boom saw migrants from the north flock to Tokyo and other major cities. Populations plunged in tsunami-inundated districts and in neighborhoods evacuated after the nuclear accident; some communities effectively disappeared.

At the peak of displacement, an estimated 470,000 people were living as evacuees nationwide. In the years that followed, public disaster housing and reconstruction efforts gradually reduced that number. Even so, around 26,000 people remain away from their homes.

Even before the quake, the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan was aging and shrinking faster than the rest of the country. The disaster accelerated that trend. Along the Sanriku coast and in Fukushima, the loss of younger residents has pushed aging rates far above the national average.

The government has funneled resources into higher-ground relocations and industrial renewal through special reconstruction zones and grant programs. Recovery, however, has been uneven. While areas around Sendai, Miyagi’s prefectural capital and the largest city in the region, have regained stability, many coastal and nuclear-affected municipalities still number far less than their predisaster populations.

“Some argue the disaster accelerated depopulation by as much as 20 years,” says Satoru Masuda, a professor at Teikyo University and an expert on regional planning and disaster prevention engineering. “It sped up the exodus of those best able to work and earn a living in coastal areas, effectively driving out many of the most motivated residents. Even those who wanted to stay likely left when jobs failed to return.”

The sweeping relocation of entire communities also came at enormous cost — a price tag that raises difficult questions about whether Japan could afford a similar recovery after a future megaquake.

A Nankai Trough earthquake would likely prompt another reconstruction tax, Masuda says, similar to the one imposed after 2011. But overall expenditures would be on a far larger scale. The tsunami-affected areas were concentrated along the Pacific coast between Aomori and Chiba prefectures and accounted for less than 0.15% of Japan’s total land area. Even so, damage was estimated at about ¥16.9 trillion, with more than ¥30 trillion eventually allocated for reconstruction.

“By contrast, a Nankai Trough quake will strike the Taiheiyo (Pacific) industrial belt,” he says, referring to the densely populated corridor that stretches from the Tokyo metropolitan area through Nagoya and Osaka to northern Kyushu. “That could affect a far larger swath of the country.”

In such a scenario, Japan may not have the fiscal capacity to fund reconstruction on the scale such a disaster would demand. Last year, the Japan Society of Civil Engineers said damage from a massive Nankai Trough earthquake — estimated to have an 80% chance of occurring within the next 30 years — could reach ¥1.466 quadrillion in a worst-case scenario over the two decades following the disaster.

“The generous subsidies extended after 2011 would likely be off the table, forcing the government to narrow its focus and prioritize where it should intervene,” Masuda says.

In parts of the Pacific belt, including Hamamatsu and Osaka, reconstruction could lean more heavily on private-sector resources. But in rural areas such as the Kii Peninsula, Shikoku and mountainous regions, the question would again be how far the state is prepared to go, with policymakers likely compelled to rationalize the scope of aid.

“The response to the Noto Peninsula disaster suggests support may not be as expansive as in the past,” Shimada says, referring to the magnitude 7.6 quake that struck the northern tip of Ishikawa Prefecture on Jan. 1, 2024, killing more than 700 people. Recovery there has been marked by delays. “It’s an assumption future recovery plans will need to account for.”

Rebuilding from scratch

Around 20 kilometers south of Sendai, an island of new homes rises from a broad expanse of rice paddies, with its own post office, supermarket and drugstore. Known as Tamaura-nishi, the community in Iwanuma is home to about 900 people, most of them from coastal areas wiped out by the quake and tsunami, which claimed 181 lives in the city.

Hailed as a reconstruction front-runner, the neighborhood opened in 2015 and has since drawn visitors from Japan and overseas seeking lessons in postdisaster recovery. In February 2025, Ukrainian government officials toured the district for guidance on rebuilding territory ravaged by Russian attacks.

“When I first moved into my new house, I remember thinking how spacious and warm it felt,” says Masahiro Kikuchi, the 72-year-old chairman of the district’s community development council, whose home was destroyed by the tsunami. “I just wanted to get out of the temporary housing at the evacuation center. It was cramped and suffocating.”

After the waves flooded roughly half the city’s land, residents in the hardest-hit coastal districts began meeting within days and soon pushed for collective relocation. By May 2011, the first district had submitted formal requests to the mayor, and the communities ultimately chose to move together rather than disperse.

They selected Tamaura-nishi — farmland about 3 kilometers inland from the coast, near existing neighborhoods, schools and public facilities — allowing residents to remain in the same school district and preserve daily routines. Drawing on lessons from the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the city prioritized keeping neighborhoods intact, assigning evacuees to temporary housing and relocation sites by district.

The community development council launched in 2012 brought together local leaders, women, younger residents and outside experts. After 28 workshops, the council drew up a plan addressing land development, plot allocation and postrelocation governance, from neighborhood associations to park and waste management — an unusually participatory process.

“Several favorable conditions came together here,” says Kimio Kobayashi, a 78-year-old resident of Tamaura-nishi and an advisory member of the council. “The mayor of Iwanuma at the time was eager for the city to be seen as a front-runner, and although we lived by the coast, there was no port or fishing industry, which simplified relocation. We also avoided splitting existing settlements — something that caused divisions elsewhere.”

Kobayashi says that in other coastal regions, relocation was harder because there was little available land and fishing communities were divided between those who wanted to remain by the sea and those willing to move. “Here, many residents farmed part-time but relied primarily on salaried work for income, so leaving their original land was more feasible.”

Cherry blossom parties and summer festivals now fill the neighborhood’s parks, fostering the kind of everyday familiarity that turns new housing into a lived-in community. Yet for older residents such as Hiroshi Mori, the past is never far.

“When the tsunami hit, I was evacuating on a bridge and could see my own house being swept away,” the 77-year-old says. “I still take walks by the shore sometimes, though now there’s a seawall.”

Life behind the seawall

Across the region, seawalls now define the coast.

About 6 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 plant, the Futaba Business Incubation and Community Center stands in an open field beside a seawall, where a popular beach once drew crowds.

On the first floor is Penguin, a cafeteria run by Atsuko Yamamoto and her daughter that reopened in 2020. Each morning, they drive to Futaba from the neighboring city of Iwaki, where they live, to serve bento lunches, sandwiches and drinks to tourists, residents and reconstruction workers.

A town staple, Penguin was founded in 1982 by Yamamoto’s grandparents in one corner of a family-run gas station near Futaba Station, selling soft-serve ice cream and sherbet. Her grandmother and mother ran the shop, and Yamamoto, who was born in 1971, later helped out, serving students from nearby Futaba High School as the menu expanded to include doughnuts and hamburgers.

Kambayashi, the video director, recalls making stops at Penguin after school during her high school years. “Yamamoto-san’s family has been well known in the community,” she says.

In 2007, however, the shop closed after convenience stores and other competitors moved into the area and customer numbers fell. Four years later, the earthquake damaged Penguin, Yamamoto’s home and the family’s gas station, and the town was emptied. Yamamoto and her family spent time at an evacuation center set up at an indoor arena in Saitama City near Tokyo before moving into an apartment in Yokohama.

“I still went back to our house in Futaba from time to time to retrieve belongings,” Yamamoto says at the new Penguin, wearing a blue T-shirt with the shop logo. “I was also a board member of the local chamber of commerce, so I remained closely connected to the town.”

In 2017, her family’s gas station reopened. Yamamoto’s husband and brother took over the business, and she moved to Iwaki, about an hour by car from Futaba. Later, her brother learned that a new community center was being built and local restaurants were being sought for its food court.

“My brother raised his hand and said Penguin would do it,” Yamamoto says. “I kept thinking about it afterward, wondering what we’d gotten ourselves into. But if this center was opening, that meant people from Futaba would return, right? Rather than have a stranger do it, I figured I should.”

Futaba has sought to draw new residents and investment by tackling its most immediate constraints: housing and employment. The town is supporting construction of rental units to ease shortages that have deterred returnees and newcomers, while developing an industrial zone to spur business activity. Even so, dilapidated, long-abandoned homes remain scattered in parts of town despite years of demolition work.

“I think more people are saying they’d like to return someday. If hospitals, schools and basic infrastructure are in place, many probably would,” Yamamoto says. “But housing is the sticking point. Because the evacuation order was lifted later, many homes were demolished, and new ones are expensive.”

Futaba’s future remains uncertain. Community building is unfolding slowly, reflecting the scale of what was lost and the persistent challenges of displacement — and offering lessons for how Japan might respond to future disasters.

“It’s sad to see the old buildings disappear and the feeling of the place I knew fade,” Yamamoto says.

Memories linger of a town where the sea was always present and summer campsites and events filled the season. Penguin operated a temporary seaside stand where Yamamoto's mother sold hamburgers during the summer holidays.

“I remember carrying back the change from the day’s work every day as a high schooler,” she says. “The smell in the air, the chirping of birds, the evening song of cicadas are all vividly familiar — and that hasn’t changed.”

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