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Friday, March 11, 2011: An earthquake triggers a huge tsunami in the Fukushima region in northeastern Japan.
14 meter high waves destroy villages and towns - as well as the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Large amounts of radioactive material are released and contaminate the soil, air and water.
The SPIEGEL correspondent at the time, Wieland Wagner, lived and worked in Tokyo for many years.
On the weekend after the disaster, he travels from Beijing to report.
Wieland Wagner, DER SPIEGEL:
I think this is the darkest Sunday I've ever seen in Japan and Tokyo. Tokyo is a very lively, colorful city, especially on Sundays. Neon signs sparkle and glitter everywhere. But that day everything was dark, because of power outages. And there were constant aftershocks too. Even in the following weeks, so that the atmosphere was completely different. And yet there was a certain amount of uncertainty because no clear information was given by the government. // Now it was clear above all from abroad that the atomic cloud could possibly also move towards Tokyo, so the editorial team instructed me to leave Tokyo as soon as possible.
Wagner drives southwest from Tokyo.
The right decision.
Because in the Japanese capital, which is around 250 kilometers south of the destroyed nuclear power plant, radioactive precipitation will be measured in the coming weeks.
At this point in time, the government only decreed an evacuation radius of 20 kilometers around the nuclear power plant.
Organizations like Greenpeace demand at least 40 kilometers.
Over 160,000 people have to flee from the Fukushima region at times and leave their homes behind.
Wieland Wagner, DER SPIEGEL:
It was the first time I met refugees from the village of Futaba right at the nuclear power plant, and then I met them on the outskirts of Tokyo. And those were people who hadn't realized at the time that they had actually lost everything. And this realization gradually took hold and I met these people very often over the years. And what bothered me the most was the fact that entire families were torn apart.
Women and children flee as far away as possible, while the men mostly return to the contaminated region to look after the house.
Many farmers in the region are losing their farms.
Village communities are being torn apart.
For many people, the loss of their home is hard to cope with emotionally.
Wieland Wagner, DER SPIEGEL:
There have been many suicides. I remember a farmer in Fukushima Prefecture who doused herself with gasoline. In her own beloved flower garden and vegetable garden. You have to know that Fukushima is actually a very idyllic, beautiful landscape. I often went on vacation there with my own family, especially in the Pacific in the summer. It is wonderful. Wonderful beaches and rice fields and so on. And this whole area is actually branded forever by the disaster.
Until now, almost all of the elderly have returned voluntarily.
The village of Iitate, about 40 kilometers northwest of the nuclear power plant, became a political test laboratory in 2018.
Wieland Wagner, DER SPIEGEL:
There is a school there that has since been evacuated. The children and teachers had to be the first to return. Because the government wanted to use the example of this school to demonstrate that life can go on normally even after a nuclear disaster. And then teachers and students were brought every day in school buses from the safe city to this formerly contaminated village of Iitate. The school yard had been decontaminated and many other areas in the village, but in the mountains the atomic radiation, the radioactive radiation, is still quite high.
Politicians want a quick return to everyday life.
The traces of the disaster should disappear as quickly as possible.
A comprehensive decontamination of the contaminated country will begin as early as 2012.
Wieland Wagner, DER SPIEGEL:
Then
the soil was removed in a certain area around the houses and the houses themselves were hosed down with water jets and the water then ran somewhere next river or stream.
And this soil and the undergrowth were then packed in black sacks.
And you can see that everywhere now.
In the whole area, whole valleys have been turned into landfills, so to speak, and these black sacks are stored everywhere on the terraced fields.
Even 10 years after the devastating tsunami, garbage bags are piling up in Fukushima Prefecture.
Japan's government wants to recycle the excavated, contaminated soil in the country in the long term, for example by paving it under asphalt when building roads.
But most Japanese communities reject it.
According to surveys, the majority of the Japanese population is now against the construction of new reactors.
But Japan's anti-nuclear movement is an extremely small protest movement - despite the nuclear disasters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Wieland Wagner, DER SPIEGEL:
It was thought that Japan should actually learn from this crisis now. // But it has just been shown that this so-called »atomic village«, as it is called in Japan, this clique, this nuclear lobby made up of atomic operators, bureaucrats, politicians, scientists and journalists. It is a huge group of interests that it is so strong and powerful that it has also prevented a discussion about the future of energy policy in Japan.
Ten years after the reactor accident, the future of the nuclear ruin is also uncertain. Plans to filter the radioactive water in the reactor and dispose of it in the Pacific have so far met with resistance from neighboring South Korea. And the fear of further accidents remains - in this earthquake-plagued country.