Antinuclear

There are new professional baseball and basketball franchises in the region, too. They carry inspirational names like the Hopes and the Firebonds, the latter signifying the spirit of a team connecting to the community, said 21-year-old point guard Wataru Igari.

For an area with a growing interest in sports, the biggest boon came in March when the International Olympic Committee approved Fukushima to host baseball and softball games during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Yet Fukushima remains defined by tragedy.

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused meltdowns and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Devastation touched every corner of Fukushima Prefecture, which is about the size of Connecticut. Among the population of nearly two million residents, more than 160,000 near the power plant fled or evacuated, while an estimated 16,000 people died.

The disaster also damaged the Fukushima name. Tourism declined. The rest of Japan shunned produce or materials from Fukushima

Almost seven years later, pockets of the prefecture — mainly in its namesake capital city — are attempting to change its perception through sports……

Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium, the home park of the Hopes, hosts Olympic games in 2020. Iwamura sees in that another opportunity to inform the world about life beyond the disaster.

“When they go back to their country, they can tell their impression to the local people of their countries so it will bring more people to come for tourism,” he said.

The stadium is in the capital, about 90 minutes from Tokyo by high-speed train and 55 miles west of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The city did not receive extensive damage like other towns closer to the plant and the coast, which concerns critics who believe the conditions of more seriously affected areas will be ignored because of the Olympics.

Immediately after the announcement in March that Fukushima would host baseball, antinuclear activists denounced the move. They argued it created a facade that Fukushima had returned to normal and glossed over the remaining hardships faced by an estimated 120,000 residents who still cannot — and may never — return to their homes.

“The Japanese government wants to show the fake side of Fukushima,” said Hajime Matsukubo, secretary general for the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo. In his office, Matsukubo showed a copy of the Fukushima Minpo newspaper, which listed radiation levels of all the towns in Fukushima like box scores in a daily sports section.

Azby Brown, who works for Safecast, an organization that helps citizens independently measure environmental data like radiation levels, said Olympic visitors staying near the stadium for a week probably would not be exposed to higher than normal radiation. But he also disagreed with the government’s messaging about Fukushima.

“Communities have been destroyed, there has been no real accountability, the environmental contamination will persist for decades and will require vigilance and conscientious monitoring the entire time,” Brown wrote in an email. “People who accept the radiation measurements and make a rational decision to return still live with a nagging concern and doubt, as if they’re living in a haunted house.”

When Japan was awarded the 2020 Olympics in September 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assured the I.O.C. that “the situation is under control” in Fukushima.

Four years later, Brown said, public infrastructure projects in destroyed areas have been delayed because construction companies became too focused on gaining Olympic-related work around Tokyo…….

Large swaths of Fukushima remain uninhabitable, with cleanup at the plant estimated to take up to 40 years and cost almost $200 billion…….

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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/sports/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-tokyo-olympics.html