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Kana Ohashi, Tokyo Keizai University, JapanAbstract
The accident at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant following the Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011 resulted in the surrounding areas being designated as evacuation zones, forcing residents to evacuate to areas both within and outside Fukushima Prefecture. Fourteen years have passed since the accident, and while the lifting of evacuation orders has progressed, as of February 2025, 24,644 people remain evacuated1). While ‘major reconstruction’ centred on infrastructure restoration and the construction of ‘hard infrastructure’ has been promoted, ‘minor reconstruction’ encompassing the lives and psychological well-being of individual disaster victims and evacuees has yet to be realised, according to urban sociologist Naoki Yoshihara, who has continued research on-site2). In such a situation, an important research topic is to understand the ‘transitions (changes from one state to another)’ that the evacuation caused by the nuclear accident has brought about in people's life courses, and to study the transition experiences of those who have been evacuated for over 10 years. Based on this background, I have planned a four-year visual ethnographic study (from 2024 to 2027) to attempt to understand in detail the transitional experiences brought about by the evacuation due to the nuclear accident. In this paper, we describe how we selected the research participants, how we considered the research methods, and report on the progress of the first year of the study and future prospects.
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