The world has been given a rare glimpse into one of Japan’s eerie ghost towns that remain deserted two years after the country’s triple disaster.
Google Street View has released new pictures inside the 12-mile exclusion zone around Namie that was devastated in 2011 by the earthquake and tsunami.
The natural disasters sparked the Fukushima nuclear disaster that left the area uninhabitable.
The stark pictures were captured this month after Namie town mayor Tamotsu Baba invited Google into his town.
They show a town abandoned in a hurry as thousands of residents fled to safety.
Within the no-go area lies a ship stranded on a stretch of dirt flattened when the tsunami hit the coastline.
Concrete rubble is strewn across the roads and shops lie empty and cars abandoned in fields.
Google Street View pieces together digital images captured by Google’s fleet of camera-equipped vehicles and allows viewers to take virtual tours of locations around the world.
The technology has revealed to the world what Namie’s 21,000 residents left behind and what many will never see again in person.
They have not been able to return since they fled the radiation spewing from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant two years ago.
Koto Naganuma, 32, who lost her home in the tsunami, said some people will find it too painful to see the places that were so familiar but cannot return to.
A year ago she returned for just a few minutes to her former home town.
She said: ‘I’m looking forward to it. I’m excited I can take a look at those places that are so dear to me. It would be hard, too. No one is going to be there.’
Mayor Baba invited Google into the town earlier this month.
He said memories came flooding back as he saw the pictures and he hopes they will act as a permanent reminder of what residents lost.
He spotted an area where an autumn festival used to be held and another of an elementary school that was once packed with schoolchildren.
‘Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children,’ he said in a post on his blog.
He wrote: ‘We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.’
In total about 160,000 people fled the evacuation zone and are still living in temporary housing.
Google said in a statement quoted by The Guardian: ‘By capturing and publishing this imagery, we hope to allow people in Namie, in Japan and all around the world to see what the town currently looks like.
‘We also hope that this will keep alive memories of the disaster for future generations.’
The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has promised to speed up the construction of homes for displaced tsunami survivors and nuclear evacuees.
The images will be made available on Google Maps, Google Earth and the Memories for the Future site, according to The Guardian.
Street View was started in 2007, and now provides images from more than 3,000 cities across 48 countries, as well as parts of the Arctic and Antarctica.
Read more: Daily Mail UK
Leave a reply