Kosuke Okahara’s Fukushima Impressions

Last Friday, an unidentified worker at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, in Japan, was killed in a mudslide, the first accidental fatality in the ongoing effort to decommission the plant after a tsunami caused meltdowns and explosions there in 2011. Kosuke Okahara, a thirty-three-year-old photographer from Tokyo, first visited Fukushima a few weeks after the explosions, which led to levels of radioactive contamination surpassed only by the disaster in Chernobyl in 1986. He has returned to the prefecture nearly every month for the past three years to document the aftermath of the incident. “There are some farmers and fishermen whom I kept seeing,” Okahara has written. “Their life hasn’t changed, much like the nature and landscape in Fukushima. As I went back to see them, I felt it was very important to keep documenting how the life of people remained unchanged too.”

Above is a selection of iPhone photos that Okahara took during his visit to Fukushima last month. Last month, Amber Terranova introduced Alejandro Chaskielberg’s photographs of Japanese residents displaced by the tsunami.

All photographs by Kosuke Okahara.