Masao Uchibori Governor of Fukushima on a video call speaks during a news conference at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ). Uchibori answered questions from journalists about the current situation of Fukushima 10 years after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster on March 11, 2011. He was Vice-Governor at the time of the tragedy and was elected Governor in 2014.
The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that shook northeast Japan on March 11, 2011, was the country’s strongest on record, unleashing a monster tsunami that devoured shorelines, wiped out towns and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. It left more than 20,000 people dead or missing and displacing hundreds of thousands from their homes at its peak.
This tragedy continues to leave its mark today. Farmers and fishermen fear the ‘Fukushima’ brand will forever be tainted. Towns that were once nuclear no-go zones are still shells of what they used to be. Decontamination efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continue to face problems – broken seismometers, worse-than-expected radiation levels, and a lack of storage space that could result in a substantial amount of contaminated water being dumped into the Pacific Ocean. And the earthquakes haven’t stopped. In February, the same region was rocked by a magnitude 7.1 “aftershock.”