Ethan Chiang is a rising Notre Dame senior who is majoring in business analytics and global affairs.
In Futaba, Japan, a coastal town 150 miles north of Tokyo, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum stands in commemoration of the lives lost in the 2011 Fukushima triple disaster — a catastrophic sequence of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, 40-foot tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
Yet right next to this solemn monument sits a brand new commercial hotel, erected on the land of former residents forced to evacuate their hometown 15 years ago due to radiation. This jarring clash encapsulates a deep friction running through post-disaster Fukushima today, inviting a fundamental question: How can a community rebuild and revitalize after a disaster without erasing its history?
Traveling to Tokyo and Fukushima
With the support of the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies and the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, I had the opportunity to spend 10 days in Tokyo and in several towns in the Fukushima prefecture — just a 90-minute bullet train ride north — with an interdisciplinary group of Notre Dame students, staff and faculty, including Professors Jessica McManus Warnell and Noriko Hanabusa.
During our time in Japan we spoke with a diverse group of people including consultants at Deloitte Japan, new residents, local business owners and “returnees”— the original farmers and families who chose to come back to the land as evacuation orders began lifting in 2016.
The human dimension of disaster recovery
Many of the returnees, mostly senior citizens, expressed a deep-rooted, emotional connection to their land. From an octogenarian couple of flower farmers to the sole potter in the town of Namie to a small-business owner who salvages and resells abandoned items that families left behind, each conveyed a sense of “debt” to the land and ancestral tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation. This is the deeply human dimension of recovery, evidenced in a profound drive to reclaim their hometowns despite public perceptions of unsafe radiation and the enduring stigma of contamination. This cannot be captured by the technocratic measures of radiation levels, economic indicators, or infrastructure projects. It is found rather in the active, lived experience of the residents and their conception of a dignified life.
At the same time, however, a recurrent theme among returnees was the tension they’ve encountered with new residents — arriving both from other regions of Japan and internationally — who are focused on infrastructure-driven revitalization. For these newcomers, and the local government aligned with them, future-oriented recovery is critical to prove that Fukushima is a place of economic opportunity rather than a patchwork of dead towns frozen in time from 2011. However, this push for the “new” creates an undercurrent of exclusion, sometimes leaving original returnees feeling like strangers in their hometowns.
What does it mean for a community to ‘recover’ from disaster?
This friction forced me to realize that recovery is rarely singular, monolithic, or linear. When we ask how a community heals after a disaster, we must recognize that the very notion of recovery is plural and polyvalent. Even within a single square kilometer, neighbors may hold diametrically differing conceptions of what "building back" ought to entail. The project of recovery is thus inherently messy — a continuous negotiation between the preservation of memory and the endeavors of progress.
While staying at the Futabaya Ryokan, a traditional family-run inn in Odaka, Fukushima, I learned that a group of local residents has frequently traveled to Ukraine, even in the midst of the ongoing war. Their mission is one of profound empathy: to stand in solidarity with a nation bound to them by a unique, shared tragedy. Chernobyl and Fukushima remain the only two nuclear disasters in history rated as a Level 7, the maximum classification on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
Japan and Ukraine in solidarity
As the residents shared videos of their journeys, I witnessed a striking layer of cross-border solidarity. The footage showed Kyiv residents speaking in Ukrainian, answered by Fukushima residents in Japanese, while my Google Translate transcribed it into English on my phone. This moment embodied a distinct part of my global affairs education: witnessing how regular citizens can forge grassroots networks of global empathy through intentional proximity and encounter.
However, this global connection also highlighted a poignant contrast for local residents. They expressed concerns that while Ukrainian schools deeply memorialize Chernobyl, Japanese classrooms rarely engage in the same level of historical reflection regarding Fukushima. Fifteen years after the triple disaster, the memory remains an open wound for returnees, but there is a looming fear that the rest of the nation — especially the youth — is moving on.
As one local resident aptly remarked, "Fukushima’s challenges are Japan’s challenges." It is a modern frontier for rural decline, memory preservation and climate resilience. My fieldwork experience underscored that navigating these challenges requires an honest reckoning with the difficult lessons of a nation’s past.
Ultimately, a community’s recovery cannot be solely measured by improvements in quantitative metrics of safety or prosperity. Rather, it must account for the delicate balance between navigating modern progress and preserving local dignity and living memories rooted deeply in one’s home.