Lost Places - Chornobyl Zone

December 26, 2011. Around 12 a.m. we come back from Iitate to Minamisoma and go to the local city hall, to meet with the Minamisoma decontamination project director Tokio Hayama.

December 26, at 7:00 we leave our hotel in Minamisoma and go to the mountain village of Iitate.

After the trip along the border of the evacuation zone together with Safecast volunteers we return to the city. We take up residence in the hotel Ohgiya (ホテル扇屋). The tiny size of rooms and plenty of aluminium and plastic in the decoration evoke the idea of a train compartment. On a small table in the room are bottles with iodine medicine.

It is not more than 80 km from the city of Iwaki to the city of Minamisoma, but that’s if you go straight by the coast through the 20-kilometre evacuation zone of Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant... We have no permit to enter the Fukushima’s “twenty”, so we will have to make a detour of about 180 km. December 25, 2011, at 5 a.m. we leave Iwaki and go to Minamisoma.