Nearby at the baseball stadium, Little Leaguers from Fukushima were playing on the same field in Azuma Park that Olympians will patrol in two and half years. At Matsukawaundo Koen Ya Baseball Field, a children’s tournament was invigorated by a soundtrack of banging plastic megaphones, resembling a Japanese professional game.

As normal as these scenes may have felt for some residents, the specter from the 2011 disaster remained.

In a fenced-off area in Azuma Park, hundreds of giant black trash bags filled with decontaminated waste were being stored, stacked above eye-level and still not yet properly discarded. The city government is working with Japan’s ministry of the environment to remove them before the Olympics, but for now the area, which was big enough to hold another baseball field, instead resembled a junkyard.

At the baseball fields around the city, as children ran down the first base line or chased down fly balls in right field, they passed by ominous signs posting the day’s radiation levels — tallies with more serious implications than the runs on the scoreboard.

Although sports are helping some in Fukushima heal, they have not erased all doubts about the future — and perhaps they shouldn’t be expected to.

“The government needs to inform us of actual information with scientific proof,” said Michiaki Kakudate, who was watching his son, Keigo, 11, pitch at the children’s tournament. “They say it’s no problem, but that doesn’t convince people.”