On a blustery Sunday in Okuma last spring, a crowd was seated under red-and-white tents awaiting the arrival of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. They had gathered to celebrate the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening, just a few days earlier, of the town of Okuma itself. In March, 2011—after a magnitude-nine earthquake, one of the most powerful in recorded history, triggered a twelve-story tsunami—the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant flooded and lost power, prompting three of the plant’s six reactors to partially melt down. Radioactive water flowed into the sea, and plumes of radioactive particles spewed into the sky. The fallout contaminated Okuma and the surrounding towns. More than a hundred thousand people were ordered to leave their homes, with little sense of when, if ever, they would be able to return. Many more people across Fukushima Prefecture—which is slightly larger than Connecticut—self-evacuated, afraid and uncertain about the danger the fallout posed.

“It’s been 2,956 days since 3/11,” Jin Ishida, Okuma’s vice-mayor, told me, referring to the date of the disaster. We were standing near the entrance to the new town hall, a glass-and-cedar building next to a stubbly field that had once been rice paddies. Ishida, who is sixty-five, had returned to live in Okuma alone, without his family. He had given the day’s opening speech, followed by a parade of officials, including Fukushima’s governor, a member of the national assembly, representatives from Japan’s Ministries of Environment and Economics, and the Okuma mayor. Abe, who was late, was coming from a nearby sports complex known as J-Village, which had, until recently, served as a logistics base for disaster-response workers. In 2020, the Japan leg of the Tokyo Olympic-torch relay will begin on its grounds, to celebrate the region’s recovery—at least, that is the hope.

After years of decontamination efforts, as well as the natural decay of certain radioactive isotopes, the Japanese government has gradually lifted the evacuation orders for the towns that were contaminated. Okuma was among the last towns to reopen, and, even so, only partially; some of its territory was still part of the so-called difficult-to-return zone, where radiation levels remained above acceptable limits. Cleanup efforts included the demolition of buildings with high radiation levels and the removal of the top metre of soil from what had once been highly productive farms and rice paddies throughout the region. By 2022, Ishida said, another 2,125 acres of topsoil—the nutrient-rich dirt that had been like gold for local farmers—would be removed. “Ideally,” Ishida said, “if it’s possible to totally clean up to pre-3/11 levels, we should.”

The unit of measurement for the impact of ionizing radiation on a person’s health is called a sievert. One sievert, absorbed at once, can make you very sick, and a few more will kill you. One millisievert—a thousandth of a sievert—will have no effect; a chest CAT scan, for example, delivers a dose of seven millisieverts. The concern is long-term exposure, and the science around how much low-dose exposure increases the risk of cancer and other illnesses is contentious. The lowest annual dose that has clearly shown a link to cancer is a hundred millisieverts. The Japanese government decided that once the radiation dose in evacuated areas got down below twenty millisieverts per year it would allow people to return. This was roughly the dose in the newly opened areas of Okuma.

There were other problems, though—in particular, meltdown fuel remained inside the power plant’s core reactor. “Another severe earthquake could happen tomorrow,” Ishida said. The reactor complex is built to be earthquake-proof, and its owner, Tokyo Electric, which is in the process of decommissioning the Daiichi plant, has built structures to contain the spent fuel and contaminated water, but such measures cannot entirely eliminate the risk. The radioactive waste will likely sit around the plant for generations to come.

Around one per cent of the former population, which was nearly twelve thousand, have registered to live in Okuma. Most of the people I spoke to at the opening ceremony were visiting from other cities, where they planned to stay. Some feared that the region was still not safe; others believed that life would be too difficult and lonely here—there is no good grocery store, for instance, and aggressive wild boar are on the prowl. “There are many evacuees who want to come back, mostly elders,” Masumi Kowata, the only woman on Okuma’s twelve-member town council, told me. “Two children will come back this month.” They were, as far as she knew, the only two children.

Kowata, who is sixty-four, with a pixie haircut and a youthful face, had lived most of her life in Okuma, where she previously ran a tutoring program. But, she told me, she would not be returning, either; her house remained in the difficult-to-return zone. She lived in Aizu now, the mountainous western swath of Fukushima Prefecture, beyond the contamination. “I’m a second-generation radiation victim,” she said. Her father, who died in 2015, told her in their last conversation that he had worked as a medical aide in Hiroshima after the United States dropped the atomic bomb. At thirty-three, Kowata got lung cancer, which she now believes was the result of her father’s radiation exposure; she survived thanks to surgery.

Kowata was elected to the town council the year that her father died. She is anti-nuclear, and her campaign was motivated by a feeling that local officials had not sufficiently communicated townspeople’s anxieties to the national government. Abe’s party, the Liberal Democratic Party, or L.D.P., is decidedly pro-nuclear power. As Abe’s motorcade finally pulled up, Kowata told us that residents had prepared soup and rice, made with some local ingredients, for the officials, including the Prime Minister. “It’s very ironic,” she said, smiling. He was pushing for people to return, emphasizing that it was safe. “But will he eat our food?”

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to Okuma to celebrate the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening of the town of Okuma itself. Photograph from The Asahi Shimbun / Getty

A few minutes later, Abe emerged from a tent, wearing a gold tie and a red ribbon on his gray suit jacket. He bowed before the Japanese and Okuma flags, then took his place behind a lectern. “During prolonged evacuation,” the people of Okuma had “retained their passion to return,” he said. “Now is the time of a new beginning.” The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games would have great significance for Fukushima, he went on. The evacuation order near the local train station was expected to be lifted soon. “We’ll continue doing our best until the day when the reconstruction and revitalization in Okuma town will outshine the time before the earthquake,” he said.

After the speech, the crowd moved to the entrance of the town hall, where there was a red carpet, a red ribbon, and a glittery gold sphere. Men in suits lined up, with Abe at the center. A woman passed out scissors to each man, and an excited command came over the loudspeaker. They cut, the ribbon fell, and the gold sphere opened in half, sending down a flurry of confetti and a banner congratulating Okuma on its new town-hall building. Abe smiled for the cameras, scissors still awkwardly in hand. Later, as I walked back to where the food was being served, the governor of Fukushima stopped to shake my hand. “We’ve had a very tough time since the disaster on 3/11,” he said, in English. “I would like to express sincere appreciation and gratitude for the world’s friendship and solidarity. Thank you for being here today.” I was surprised and touched, but, before I could respond, he was gone.