Just months after Japan’s Tohoku region was devastated by a tsunami and earthquake, a boom in plant life has begun to appear around Fukushima, the country’s worst nuclear accident in history.
Japan’s Jiji Press news agency reports that large plant-based flowers have appeared just outside the port of Tamura and near the now-canceled facility of the nuclear company Fukushima Daiichi. Analysts and local residents say the flowers are most likely to be potted plants native to the area.
Tamura is a popular fishing town and the site of the world’s first nuclear power plant in 1957. The number of plant-based plants are thought to number in the hundreds, and locals are hoping that future generations will remember the nuclear disaster as the beginning of an era of green business in Tohoku.
“My hope is that when people visit now, they will not see the true image of Fukushima,” the mayor of Tamura, Hideo Katama, told Jiji. “We are at a turning point with the re-planting that we can show that it really is a nuclear disaster that can become an ecological disaster as well.”
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe celebrated the healthy outdoor life of the region with a trip to Fukushima Prefecture last week where he went up to the top of an underground dome housing radioactive material as well as one of its reactors. He also visited abandoned homes in the town of Namie, which were never repaired after the quake and tsunami of 2011.
Read the full story at Jiji Press.
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