This book tells the story of how residents of Iitate village and volunteers from across Japan came together to address the many complex issues that followed the Fukushima nuclear disaster.It outlines challenges faced by every rural village: producing the food and energy needed by unsustainable, increasingly disaster-prone cities; maintaining their rich cultures despite depopulation and aging, and having the autonomy of their communities removed by the centralisation of power in capital regions, especially in the wake of crisis. The disaster caused an unprecedented situation, never experienced in Fukushima, Japan or anywhere else. There were no real experts anywhere in the world with experience in such a revitalization project – and official successes were limited. Responsibility fell to the people, who independently initiated collaborative efforts to address not only issues of contamination monitoring and decontamination, but also complex issues of healthcare, agriculture, forestry, trade, business innovation, and ultimately the revitalization of livelihoods and the village community. The book takes a practical, every day, scientific and human approach to discuss how humans might once again co-exist with nature in the context of fundamental shifts in human civilization, learning from Iitate village. It serves as a model for 21st century local revitalization movements, pioneering ways to create new public spaces for action, to overcome problems of modernity and to move toward coexistence with nature. The work will appeal to disaster management experts, and students and scholars in disaster studies, city planning, environmental science, nuclear energy, Japan studies, international relations and sociology.

Yoichi Tao saw the light of the atomic bomb at the age of four while he was evacuated to a suburb of Hiroshima. He specialised in high-energy physics and contributed to the construction of an early particle accelerator in Japan. He left academia and established an IT company, developing communication and internet security systems. He retired in 2006. Since March 2011, he has worked to revitalize Iitate village, where he now lives. In Japanese, he has published a textbook on quantitative analysis, and translated Petr Beckmann’s A History of Pi (St. Martin's Press). He has authored numerous scientific papers on radiation measurement and practical decontamination methods, including the journal Radioisotopes, and presented at international fora, such as the Georgetown University Nuclear Security Summit and the Agricultural and Rural Engineering Association. Most recently, he published Revitalizing Fukushima after the Nuclear Disaster: Coexisting with Nature in Iitate village (Chikuma Shobo, 2020).

Sam Bamkin is the author of Enacting Moral Education: Between State Policy and School Practice (2023); co-editor of Japan’s School Curriculum for the 2020s: Politics, Policy, Practice (2022); and translation editor of Utagawa Hiroshige: Seeing Landscape through his Eyes (2023). He is currently based at the University of Tokyo Center for Global Education, and is affiliated with the University of Tokyo Institute for Advanced Study on Asia.