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Fukushima: No Place Like Home

Categories: East Asia, Japan, Switzerland, Citizen Media, Digital Activism, Disaster, Environment, Media & Journalism, Refugees, Technology

No Time for Anger [1] [de]’, a visualization journal by a team of Swiss media reporter and designers, illustrates Fukushima two years after the triple catastrophe of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami followed by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011. Fearing radiation, some residents sought evacuation [2] to other areas in Japan, but the data visualization [3]by the team shows the majority of people who fled actually stayed within the region of Fukushima:

We received data sets from the prefecture of Fukushima on the number of refugees and their current location for the years 2011 and 2012. We imagined that since this was a nuclear catastrophe people would flee from the region and wish to be as far away as possible. Yet, the numbers from the prefecture of Fukushima backed by researchers at the University of Gunma showed that the reality was quite different. The majority of people who fled actually stayed within the region of Fukushima.