Under a brilliant, cloudless sky, a half-dozen cows and a pony wander freely, batting the flies off their ears and chewing on fresh green sprouts. A pair of friendly Shiba dogs – cautious for just a moment – trot up and wag their tails, expectantly awaiting scraps of food. At the entrance to Main Street is a sign with the town’s motto: “Nuclear Power is the Energy of a Bright Tomorrow.”

But a block down, an old house has collapsed. Its roof sits in the middle of the road like an odd little pagoda.

Someone should be doing something about that.

Someone should be doing something.

It is three o’clock in the afternoon. There should be children laughing as they walk home from school, and young mothers chatting as they savor those last minutes of leisure before their sons and daughters return to be fed snacks and hustled off to after-school judo lessons, or soccer games, or dentist’s appointments. There should be shop owners inside the tea houses and inns. There should be old people sitting outside enjoying the warm sunshine.

There should be people, but everyone is gone.

In the distance, rising above the hilltops, above the bamboo groves and the power lines, the exhaust stacks of the nuclear plant – the reason why no there is no one here – poke at the sky. Gray and shimmering, they appear to be just another unremarkable part of the scenery in this rural Anytown, Japan.

Strangely still from afar, the plant was the epicenter of life here. It was a paycheck, a golden goose of tax revenue, a place where lunches were eaten, turbines adjusted, paperwork filed. It was the pride of the town, tiny Futaba’s contribution to the national grid, the powerhouse that kept the escalators and vending machines running in far-off Tokyo.

But the plant no longer belongs to Futaba.

It is now the world-famous Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear power station, a battleground for soldiers and police and engineers in full-body radiation gear, goggles and gas masks. It has become as alien and foreboding as Mars, the fountain of an invisible poison that wafts into the air, seeps into the soil, creeps into people’s heads.

It has changed.

And it has changed everything.

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