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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey and this is Against the Odds. It's been more than a decade since a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima region of Japan. The resulting nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant blanketed the surrounding cities and towns with toxic radiation, forcing 160,000 people to flee from their homes.
The cleanup could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and take 40 years. Since the evacuations, towns have reopened, but many residents haven't returned, and the region is still grappling with the environmental, economic, and emotional legacy of the disaster.
Joining us today is NPR reporter Kat Lonsdorff. For her radio series, Recovering Fukushima, Kat spent six weeks in Fukushima, meeting locals and hearing their stories nearly a decade after the disaster. Kat Lonsdorff, welcome to Against the Odds. Hey, thanks for having me. So how did you first find yourself in Fukushima in 2020?
I had been kind of watching Fukushima for a while. I love Japan. I grew up learning Japanese and being interested in Japan. And obviously when the tsunami and the big disaster happened in 2011, I paid a lot of attention to that. I think a lot of the world paid a lot of attention to that. But then, you know, I became a journalist. I joined NPR and...
And I remember in 2019, I saw just an AP story on the reopening of one of the towns right next to the Fukushima nuclear power plant, this town called Okuma. I think at that point had been eight years after the disaster. And I was like, what does that even mean? Like, what does it mean to reopen a nuclear ghost town? How does that work?
Did they just like invite people back into their old homes and like act like nothing happened? I mean, I figured that wasn't the case, but I had a lot of questions about how that actually works. And at the time in 2019, I pitched it. I work on all things considered our daily news show at NPR. And I pitched it in one of our like morning pitch meetings to see if we had a reporter who could go check it out.
And at that time, we didn't. So I kind of kept it in my back pocket until I applied for this fellowship a year later called the Above the Fray Fellowship. And it basically was created to send a young journalist into the world to report on an unsolved
an undercovered international story. One thing that I thought was kind of missing was the human stories of Fukushima and what it meant to reopen these tiny towns and what that really entailed. And it was actually an interesting time to go because...
It seems like forever ago now, this is we're talking pre-pandemic, but in 2020, that's when the Olympics were supposed to be in Tokyo, right? And those Olympics were going to be called essentially the Recovery Olympics and be focused on the entire kind of area around Fukushima where the tsunami hit and the earthquake hit. And to show the world that this part of Japan essentially more or less recovered from this horrible disaster. And
And that made me more interested in going, too, because I was like, wait, we're going to show the world that this area is recovered when, you know, there's no way it can be completely recovered after something so gigantic. So that's why I went. And and yeah, it was it was incredibly interesting. In our fast paced, screen filled world, it can be all too easy to lose that sense of imagination and wonder.
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I knew that people had moved back, and so I was mainly really interested in talking to the people who made this decision to move home after such a huge crisis and a huge disaster. I also was really interested in kind of the quieter effects of disasters. We tend to really focus on disasters right when they happen and the immediate aftermath.
But the reality is that trauma lingers for years and years and years. And the impacts of that trauma are very oftentimes quiet and harder to really notice than the immediate after facts. In Chernobyl as well, you think meltdown, explosion, but the death toll is not really that many in the beginning. But then...
That expands out over decades. And a lot of these things, they creep in and they can be much more devastating than the first original explosion or meltdown, can't they? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it is really tempting to quantify disasters in terms of death toll. The Fukushima nuclear disaster, essentially the death toll was zero.
No one died as a result of, you know, radiation poisoning. And so you can look at that and you can say, well, no one died. Like, must not have been that bad. Yeah.
And while that is one way to look at it, the, you know, lasting impacts, specifically in mental health, like I was saying, and trauma are huge. They're costing a lot of money. They're costing a lot of lives. There's been a lot of suicides in the years since, for example. Whether you could say that, you know, that's not a direct result of radiation, but it's definitely a result of the disaster, right? Definitely. Let's bring it back a little bit.
Can you tell us a bit about Fukushima pre-disaster and what the region was known for? Fukushima before the disaster was really known for agriculture and for a lot of farming, a lot of fishing. It provided a ton of the fruits, vegetables, rice, fish for the rest of the country. You know, it's north of Tokyo. So it was really known for a lot of these like very quaint kind of tiny villages and towns.
A lot of Japan would go to Fukushima for vacation, for hiking. There's big mountains that get a lot of snow and are very beautiful. It was really known as kind of one of the most beautiful parts of Japan, which is saying something because Japan is generally very beautiful. So kind of an idyllic place in a lot of ways, honestly. And then the power plant was built and it promised a big opportunity for the people, too.
Totally. I mean, Japan had this big kind of push to nuclear power pretty much after World War II. Japan has very little of its own homegrown energy sources, right? So it's a tiny island country generally. It doesn't have a lot of coal, a lot of gas, any of that kind of stuff. It's hard for it to harness a lot of wind or solar power in a lot of ways. And so the idea of nuclear power, this idea that Japan could build a
bunch of nuclear power plants and suddenly have access to its own homegrown energy source was incredibly tempting. And so, yeah, the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Daiichi, was built, you know, in between these two tiny towns, Futaba and Okuma. And the idea was that both of the towns could benefit from all of the subsidies and jobs that this power plant was going to provide. And in
And initially it did. It provided a ton of wealth for these tiny towns and a ton of jobs. And that played out all over Japan. There was all these tiny towns that benefited incredibly from having these nuclear power plants there.
It's funny. Maybe I'm the only one, but I think for many people growing up in North America, the first time I was, I was going to say exposed to, but maybe that's not the right choice of words. The first time I came across nuclear power was in the Simpsons when Homer Simpson drops the glowing green rod and the giant stacks with the smoke pouring out of the top. Of course, later you learn it's not smoke, it's actually steam, but you just know it's, the impression is that it's bad and dangerous. But on paper, it actually is
Isn't it? Because until something goes wrong or unless something goes wrong, there's zero emissions, very few emissions. And it can be for a country like Japan, a fantastic way to harness energy. Yeah. And I mean, I would argue that it can be a fantastic way for any country to harness energy in terms of what it can give us with such few greenhouse gas emissions and with their increasing need to get away from.
fossil fuels. I mean, it really is this spectacular invention in so many ways. And I think that is something that we all have to kind of think about. And when you did arrive in 2020, what were your first impressions of the cities and towns you saw? When you're in the nuclear exclusion area and kind of around the power plant,
I mean, it's gorgeous. It's right on the coast, right? Because nuclear power tends to need a lot of water. There's beautiful beaches. A lot of surfing used to happen there. Again, all these like tiny, quaint towns, you can kind of picture what they once looked like. But, you know, it is haunting to drive kind of you drive up this main highway, especially directly from Tokyo and see
You know, you have to remember that what happened in Fukushima was first a terrible earthquake that was one of the worst Japan's ever experienced. And then a terrible tsunami that was possibly one of the worst that Japan's ever experienced in its long history. But it was I mean, that tsunami was in some places, they say, over 30 stories tall. So just like think about what that looked like. Yeah.
So when you're driving up this coast, there's kind of nothing there still. Even all the trees and all the houses that used to be there, like they're generally still wiped away. And you start to see that life just isn't normal anymore. And then as you drive further and further in, there's all these decaying buildings. There's just like car dealerships that are like all the windows are broken. Like there's still cars like sitting outside that are just rotting. Everything's like starting to get overgrown. Like
And then it's just like building after building after building after building like that. There's still all of these areas that you aren't allowed to go that are still part of the exclusion zone. So there's all these accordion gates set up on like areas that you can't go. So you can only drive straight up the highway. So as you're driving, you're kind of constantly reminded that there are areas that aren't safe for humans.
But then, you know, you do start to see like little towns that have started to reopen where they've cleared off all the topsoil and they've made them, quote unquote, safe for human living. And so you start to see like little tiny signs that people are moving back in, that things are getting back to normal.
And you were present for the reopening of the city of Futaba, right? So you were there, the gates opened, and you got to roam around. Yeah. What was that like? It was a weird, weird time. So there's a bunch of little cities and little towns in what was the nuclear exclusion zone and kind of still is. And Futaba was the last...
that hadn't been opened at all. And for some reason, and this is probably because of Japanese bureaucracy, but they decided to open the town right at midnight on the date that they said that they were going to open it because it was like, it's going to be open on this day. And so they had to do it right at like the strike of when the clock struck midnight. I think they couldn't have picked like a creepier way to do it.
It's like pitch black. You know, it's it is midnight. It's freezing cold. And like it's just a bunch of reporters basically there waiting for the police to like pull back this gate. And they do it right at midnight. They pull back this giant gate and then they're just like, OK, go ahead. Go on in.
Enjoy Grand Open.
Right as you walk in, there's like a temple that had been toppled over and it was just like in the middle of the street still. All the shop windows were broken and there was like stuff strewn from the shop shelves that were still sitting there and had been sitting there for nine years. Everything's overgrown. You're like stepping over broken glass that has been sitting there for almost a decade.
It was like very confusing in terms of like, what does this reopening really signify? Because it's not like anyone could live there. You know, when they've reopened other towns, they've reopened them with infrastructure. This was like mainly this last town, I think, was mainly reopened to maintain this like 2020 Olympic schedule that then ended up getting canceled.
Postponed because of the pandemic anyway. So, yeah, that was one of the weirder experiences of my life, to be honest, is walking around this like ghost town that no one had been in at midnight. There's videos of people who jump the fence and explored these cities. Yeah.
In most abandoned towns, you don't see like the food still on the counter and the television still there. It gets looted or people come in and mess it up. But it was like a time machine. It was really quite wild, wasn't it? One of the other things I did is I went back with a woman who,
was going to say kind of goodbye to her family home for the last time. She moved south in Japan, but she went back to Fukushima to basically hand over the keys to the local government. And I went with her. And
And, again, it was such a time capsule, like you're saying, like she hadn't been in it essentially since the disaster. And it was left kind of exactly as it was that morning when the tsunami hit, essentially. And...
I remember walking through her family home with her and like, you know, obviously the calendars are still on March 2011. There's like two coffee cups sitting on the kitchen table. And if you walked up to her daughter's bedroom and like her school uniform is sitting out on her bed still, like ready for her to go to school that day. All kinds of stuff like that. And so it was just kind of like she walked around a little bit, said goodbye to some stuff and then,
handed over the keys and walked away. What sort of things was she saying when she was walking around? How did she feel? I did see her get choked up when she walked upstairs to, you know, the bedroom that her and her husband had shared because in the time since her husband had died and he worked at the nuclear power plant. He died of, I think, a brain aneurysm, but there was a lot of questions around whether
It had happened because of potentially radiation effects, but you can never really prove that. So who knows? You know, one thing I remember watching and just noticing as she was coming up to the house is she was doing a lot of these like absent-minded things that you would do to your home that you still live in. She was like walking up the driveway and kind of pulling weeds that had accumulated along the driveway. And she checked the mail, you know, just these little things that
were probably just, you know, the daily routine of her life. And she like stood on this balcony that looks right at the nuclear power plant because they lived right by it and was talking to me a little bit about how that plant just changed her entire life and how much in a lot of ways she regrets it. Right. Well, I had read that people felt betrayed by nuclear power. Betrayed is a very strong word.
Yeah, it is. It is. And I think, but I think that that feeling is really, really, really common there. They were sold this thing that was supposed to be a great, you know, boon to their community, that was supposed to completely change their lives in a lot of ways it did. But, you know, at the time they were sold this idea that nuclear power was 100% safe. That's what they were always told. And that nothing, nothing bad would happen and it would only be good for the community, right? And...
I mean, the problem is that nuclear power generally, it is very safe. I mean, disasters like this don't happen very often. But when they do, I mean, look how bad it can be. People lost everything. And so, yeah, there was a sense of betrayal because, you know, you could argue that they were lied to in some ways.
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And in most cases, I would say a majority of the population that's come back has been elderly people who honestly directly told me in a lot of cases that they came back essentially to live out the rest of their lives in their hometown. Fukushima and a lot of Japan is one of those places where generations and generations of people have lived kind of on the same land or in the same area. And so there's this big kind of tie to the land and the tie to like being where your ancestors were.
are from and are buried. And so, you know, a lot of elderly people felt like, well, I'm just going to go back and that's where I want to live out my final days if I can. But yeah, tens of thousands of other people have either moved on or are kind of still stuck in this kind of limbo waiting to see if they can return someday. And this ancestral tie to the land and sea people had when they did come back, did they still have that or did they feel like everything had changed? A lot of people, if they returned, they
did feel this like happiness at being back on this land. It's just a totally different life than you were living before. A lot of people in Fukushima enjoyed hiking, enjoyed foraging for food. It was like a huge connection to the land that people had. And those activities are pretty much, you can't do them anymore. You know, you can't,
I guess you can go for like a stroll, but like these radioactive particles sink into the soil, right? That's where they collect. And so the idea of like digging in the dirt or pulling up
wild mushrooms to collect them for your dinner or whatever. Like that's on the list of like big no-nos. You shouldn't do that in this part of the country, in this part of the world. And so it made people really scared of the land that they live on in a lot of ways, especially because, you know, you don't really know where the radiation is. You can't see it. And it just totally changes the
the way you interact with the world around you, this world that you once saw as safe and as beautiful. And I think that was one thing that people were really mourning too, was this connection to the land that they loved. Continuing on that, not exactly knowing what's safe and what's not safe.
If we talk about the recovery after the disaster, one of your radio stories I loved, and it was about two grandparents. I think one was an accountant and the other an innkeeper who became professional radiation testers, like citizen scientists. Can you tell us a bit about this story? Citizen science has become a huge thing in Fukushima. You know,
In the weeks after the disaster, there was really limited information in regards to radiation levels and kind of distrust in the government was at an all-time high. People felt like they weren't being told the truth and they weren't being told the information that they needed to make real decisions about whether to leave or stay or where to go. And
A lot of people kind of took it upon themselves to learn everything they could about radiation, to learn how to test for it. And so you see all these like little ad hoc labs that popped up, which now, you know, nine, 10 years later, I've become these actual like real labs and real organizations in a lot of ways. And so these two grandparents that I ended up spending a lot of time with who are just lovely, lovely people had started one of these kind of ad hoc lab things and had asked for help
different scientists from around the world to help train them and help, you know, donate equipment and teach them how to use it. And they had gotten together with a couple other grandparents around them because the idea was they—
knew that their grandchildren and their kids were not going to come back. And so their idea was like, OK, before I bring my grandkids back here to visit me, I want to know that everything is completely safe, that like the ground around my house is safe so they can go play outside so that, you know, I know that the food I'm growing in my garden is safe so I can feed it to them.
And it got more and more complicated as the years wore on in terms of like they were going out and mapping whole areas of the region, radiation levels, and they created these very amazing maps that they had hung on the wall showing how radiation levels were decreasing over time throughout the area that they lived in. But yeah, that was just one example of people taking the situation into their own hands and trying to feel some sense of control in this situation.
you know, world that they had just completely lost all control whatsoever in, right? Well, when the plant was open in the 70s and there was probably a little bit of concern, but the government was like, oh, it's fine. Don't worry. It's fine. And then probably after the disaster as well, like, oh, don't worry. It's fine. Probably they're just like, let's check ourselves. Absolutely. Yeah, totally. And you can understand that too, right? Totally. Totally.
And has their inn reopened to guests? Yeah, it's an awesome little inn. I stayed there for like a couple weeks at least. And it's this cute little bed and breakfast where Tomoko, the woman, makes all the meals. And she's just one of the loveliest people I've ever met. And it's this beautiful little inn that actually her grandmother started and she has kept alive. And she left temporarily after the accident, but she's
Her and her husband were some of the first people to come back to the area after the accident and just kind of like made it their goal to bring life back to their community and to really dig their heels in and recover from the accident. So she was a really inspiring woman. She was lovely.
And do you know if their grandchildren have come back to visit yet? I think they have. They have a couple times, yeah. And to be fair, the area they live in that this inn is in is, by all counts, very safe. And radiation levels were relatively low. And so it really is a beautiful part of Fukushima with a lot of cherry blossom trees and really idyllic. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I guess nature can take over these places after people leave. And there was another piece of yours that I love talking about certain kinds of nature causing some problems in the streets. I'd love if you could tell that story to our audience. Yeah, this was monkeys. I'm assuming that's what you're talking about. Monkeys, wild boar. Yeah, all kinds of nature, honestly. So, yeah, the monkeys were probably the most mischievous. But, yeah, there's all kinds of examples of nature taking over.
Wild Bork roam the streets. There's a lot of wild dogs I've been told about. And then also macaw monkeys, you know, these like kind of little mischievous monkeys that roam in packs. They're around in Fukushima, but they didn't used to be in any of the towns or villages. They tended to kind of stay away from people.
But when the disaster happened and people fled for four or five, six years at a time, their gardens were often still growing. So people have these elaborate gardens in Fukushima. Cherries, apples, everything. Buffet, monkey buffet. A monkey buffet. Exactly. And so, you know, they wouldn't go in and they just had free range over this kind of like smorgasbord of food. And so then when these towns started to reopen for people to
come back, the monkeys weren't going to change their behavior. They had been having, you know, the time of their life for the last couple of years, eating as much as they possibly could. They're like, this is our turf now. Exactly. There's been a bit of a war I've heard, too. Yeah. So the monkeys are basically like, it's cute that you guys came back, but we're going to keep on eating whatever you plant.
And I spent a couple of days with this old man. At the time, he was 79. So now he's, you know, in his 80s. But he had kind of taken it upon himself to fight back against the monkeys, not in any way to hurt them.
He wanted to be clear, but he was trying to scare them away. So I'm not sure exactly if he got this idea or if someone else gave him this idea, but he managed to convince the local town council to start buying him firecrackers, essentially. Boxes of boxes of firecrackers would get delivered to his house. Like the giant sticks, you know, that make a really loud boom noise. And he would go around and distribute these fireworks to his other elderly neighbors and
And they would all be like loaded with these Roman candles where basically whenever they saw the monkeys around their area, they would just shoot off one of these fireworks to make a really loud bang and the monkeys will scatter and they'll run away. But it only keeps them away for like five or six days. And essentially like clockwork, they come back. And so...
This man, Shuichi was his name, he would just go around on what he called monkey patrol and he would have on his little cap and he would drive around in his pickup truck and
And he would always have this like little tiny smile on his face because I think he like definitely was annoyed by the monkeys. But I think he like secretly kind of loved that this is what his life had become. Like, I think it's kind of like a retirement dream. And so he would sneak out with his little Roman candle and he would light it. And then they would just boom, boom, boom. And all the monkeys would just run and he would just like start cracking up. Yeah.
And then he would, of course, run around to like each of his neighbor's houses and knock on their door and be like, just so you know, I just saved your garden back there. Just want you to know. And they'd be like, thank you so much. Basically a superhero. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're also sold this idea that monkeys are these cute little things that eat bananas and ride skateboards in a suit. But
I think is what they have there. And they are little fierce dudes. And they're the ones that will steal your sunglasses in Bali, for example, and the same ones that will lunge at you if you're holding a banana yourself. So it must be a little bit like a war. Yeah, exactly. I mean, these monkeys, they'll steal everything. They have no qualms. They're not afraid of you. They'll lunge at you. They'll bear their fangs. So, yeah, it's not all fun and games.
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Since the meltdown, Japan has shifted away from nuclear power. Understandably, I guess. So where is Japan getting its power from now? Generally speaking, a huge amount of Japan's power comes from imported coal and imported natural gas. There have been coal plants opening in Japan in the years since. Just in recent years, there's been quite a few. And this is as Japan has...
you know, pledge to curb greenhouse gas emissions and pledge to curb its coal use. But, you know, it says one thing and kind of does the other because at the end of the day, Japan is also the third biggest energy consumer in the world, I believe. And they need power. Of course. And but it's a hard place to be in, I guess. There's a soft spot there. So what do you do? You know, after the Fukushima disaster, they shut down every single reactor in Japan. And
And then they created these new standards and they've been trying. I think nine nuclear reactors are back online and they've been pushing to put more and more reactors back online throughout the country because you have to remember that there are just all of these nuclear reactors that are sitting unused essentially around the country now.
But an unused nuclear reactor doesn't mean that they just turn the switch off and everyone goes home and it's sitting there in the dark. It requires a bunch of personnel to keep it cool. There has to be water pumping through them and they have to, you know, if they aren't kept cold, that's when they have a meltdown.
Same with Chernobyl as well. There's still people there all the time maintaining it. We think it's, oh, it's all over, but no, it's still very much an active place. Yeah, exactly. I thought that was super interesting just even about the Fukushima Daiichi plant. There are still thousands of people there every single day on 24-hour shifts working to, A, clean up the disaster still, but also, B, to keep it from melting down again, essentially. And it's...
it would in a lot of ways save Japan a ton of money to just restart these nuclear reactors and actually have them producing power and not be importing coal and natural gas. But
The pressure, the public pressure in Japan is to not restart them. No one wants to take the risk anymore. Everyone looks at what happened in Fukushima and said, we're not doing it again. That can't happen again. And people just don't trust the government and they don't trust nuclear power anymore. Then it gets complicated. So then is a drop of poison a day? Let's call that coal and false. Is that better than the small chance of downing the whole bottle? I don't know.
I don't know if there's not. It's a hard question to ask. It's a great way to put it. And it's something that like definitely got me thinking a lot while I was there. And, you know, in the months afterwards, we are going to have to pay prices no matter what energy we're
source we choose and we have to start thinking about, okay, what price are we willing to pay and what risk are we willing to take? Because we just cannot rely on fossil fuels anymore. You're right. I mean, fossil fuels aren't the future. And maybe it's much easy for us to say on the other side of the planet that, you know, nuclear does make sense.
But oh, my God, maybe more time has to pass or things have to change a little bit. But there is a really cool story about solar being used in Fukushima particularly, right? Yeah. If you drive through Fukushima, you'll just see tons and tons of solar panels now. And obviously, this was not the case before.
a decade ago. Fukushima was really like a haven for nuclear power a decade ago in a lot of ways. But since the disaster, the local population and local corporations have really embraced solar power as a potential way to use the land there, for one, because like I said, there's the tsunami came through, there's all this open land.
And not only that, but one of the ways that they're cleaning up from the disaster is scraping all the topsoil off huge swaths of land there, because that's one of the ways that you can clean up these radioactive particles. And when you scrape the topsoil off, you can't use the land for farming anymore. Really, it's where all the nutrients are.
And so farmers there have been converting a lot of their land into solar panels. Like they've been leasing their land essentially to power companies to put solar panels on. So it's totally changed the landscape around Fukushima where you just see solar panels everywhere. Every house has solar panels because also people want to be able to produce their own power. People like that kind of autonomy that they get from having solar panels. And so you'll see that everywhere.
And it's interesting because Fukushima was already set up to have a lot of the nuclear power run straight through like this main line into the grid for Japan into Tokyo there. And since they took the nuclear power offline, it kind of created this perfect storm to hook up a lot of solar panels and have...
have it easily hook up into the grid in a lot of ways there to be able to produce power. So that's maybe one of the silver linings, if you wanted to look at it that way, that has created this kind of neat experiment in making solar power work that hasn't necessarily played out all over Japan, but at least in Fukushima, you're seeing it there. What do you think is the legacy of the Fukushima disaster?
This really upended so many people's lives. And aside from upending their lives, it's just their entire sense of control in the world and their entire sense of kind of safety. These things that we really don't realize how awesome it is to feel those things until it's taken away, right? That's a lot of what trauma is. And the ways in which you see this trauma that they all experienced playing out, you know, nine, ten years later is
with everyone still trying to find answers and everyone still kind of trying to reconcile the way in which their life was just totally turned upside down in the blink of an eye and kind of who to blame for that and who can, you know, help write it in some way. When I think, you know, the answer is generally like, I
I'm not sure we'll ever find the exact person to blame and I'm not sure anyone can write it. But this kind of constant search that it felt like a lot of the people that I talked to were on to figure out some way to make sense of what had happened.
Well, we're just going to wrap this up shortly. And I wanted to change the conversation to something a little bit different. So when you were in Fukushima, you went to a town and you found something that exemplifies life goes on, even after tragedy. I want you to talk about the karaoke bar.
What you saw there. Yeah, I was in this tiny town called Namie, which is one of the towns right near the power plant. And it was closed for many, many years and recently kind of started to reopen. And there's a ton of building going on during the day, tearing down, you know, rotting houses and making way for new power lines and all this kind of stuff. They really are trying to pour energy.
pour money back into the tiny town. But at night, it's just completely quiet, completely dead because very few people have actually moved back. It's all just construction workers that work there during the day. So when you walk around at night, it's just like complete silence. There's very few lights on. And I was out walking around there with the photographer I was working with, Claire Harbage, and we were kind of just walking around and we just started to hear this like little jingle of a tambourine.
And like we had looked around on like Google Maps and we had seen that there was a karaoke bar there, but we weren't really sure if it was like actually open. And so we were kind of just like following the sound of the faint music a little bit and like looking on Google Maps and like trying to find it and just like wove our way down this tiny little alleyway and like opened up a door.
And there's this tiny little karaoke bar in full swing with, you know, it's not jam-packed at all. There's not enough people there to have it be jam-packed. But it was, you know, the two women who ran it and 10 people in there just like singing ABBA at the top of their lungs. Yeah.
Everyone had a little tambourine and there was like, you know, beer and different little snacks floating around. And it was this really cute and like lovely scene of just trying to pump back life into this area in a very Japanese way.
And it was this woman had opened this tiny little karaoke bar, you know, since the disaster as part of a way to bring community back to the place and create kind of a gathering spot because there are very few of those in this part of Fukushima and create a place where people could kind of unwind because it's not an easy life there if you choose to move back. And so it was this very like...
hopeful scene of people just being people. And you find that a lot there. I mean, I think it's easy to think that the exclusion zone is all doom and gloom. And in a lot of ways, it is depressing to wander around. But there are a lot of people that are trying really hard to make these areas livable again and are trying to make them communities again. And, you know, that's kind of the human experience, right? Yeah.
Right. And very important question to finish this off. What is your go-to karaoke song? Oh, God. For me, it's Lionel Richie, All Night Long. All night long. Oh, nice. You had to sing karaoke right now. Or what did you sing then? What was it? Oh, the Uptown Funk You Up. Uptown Funk You Up. Oh, Bruno Mars. Yes. Yes, it does. Uptown. Yeah, yeah. I love it.
I sang that both while I was in Tokyo on that trip and while I was at this little karaoke bar because I think it's like impressive, like because it has a lot of like fast English words in it. And it's fun. Yeah, and it's super fun. And like every time I would bust it out, people would just be like, oh, she knows all the words. I didn't think about it being my go-to karaoke song, but I would highly recommend busting that one out if you find yourself in Japan, especially because it was a crowd pleaser. Yeah.
I love it. So a little hot travel tip there at the end. Yes. Kat, thank you so much. It was a pleasure and I appreciate your time today. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much. This is the final episode of our series Meltdown at Fukushima. If you'd like to learn more about Fukushima today, we recommend Kat Lonsdorf's NPR series, Recovering Fukushima, available at npr.org.
I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Peter Arcuni. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our series producers are Matt Almos and Emily Frost. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis. For Wondery...
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