It’s been two years since a tsunami battered Japan’s coast, but Namie is still a ghost town.
Google Street view cars trundled through the abandoned coastal town, invited in by Namie’s mayor, Tamotsu Baba, to capture sweeping 360-degree views of the devastation.
Around 16,000 people were allowed to return to towns along the perimeter of the evacuation zone, but many have chosen to stay away.
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The town’s 21,000 residents were forced to evacuate after the tsunami caused trouble at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The displaced population has scattered around Japan and is allowed back in just once a month to check on their homes, the New York Times reports.
“Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forebearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children,” Mayor Baba writes.
There’s not much left. Debris litters the town’s roads. Houses and shops have caved in on themselves. Some fishing boats were carried several miles inland by the 50-foot waves.
Experts have said that it might be decades before some towns inside the exclusion zone are inhabitable again, The New York Times reports.
One of Namie’s main streets used to fit 300 street stalls and 100,000 visitors during the town’s Ten Days of Autumn festival. But now, store windows are boarded up and the streets are eerily empty.
On Google’s Lat Long blog, Mayor Baba writes that the town has only been able to make “cursory” repairs during the past two years. He’s hoping that the new images will help future generations understand the effects of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. He also wants to raise awareness about the town’s plight.
Many of Namie’s stores have still not been repaired.
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“Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering,” Baba writes. “But in Namie-machi (town), time stands still.”
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