Clasping her shoulders, Naomi Yonekawa crosses the street from her municipal housing unit in Naraha and gazes across the withered rice paddies left fallow until springtime.
Born and raised in Meguro, an upscale residential neighborhood in central Tokyo, she’d fallen in love with the area’s bucolic landscape in 2016 during a tour of Fukushima Prefecture’s coastal communities affected by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster.
That trip brought her to the town of Naraha, just 20 kilometers from the crippled reactors at the No.1 nuclear power plant. There she joined a workshop hosted by locals to sew up traditional Japanese sandals.