The Fukushima Exclusion Zone & Reverse GTR - Juiceboxforyou

We wanted to head out to areas around Sendai and take a look at the coastline. We never really made it up this far on our last trip and figured it would be interesting to stop seeing how the locals have been coping with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami damage.

Our first stop was Soma, where the famous footage of the tsunami crashing through the trees took place. It’s hard to describe how eerie it is. This stunning slice of nature was ground zero to one of the most destructive catastrophic disasters of the last twenty years, but here it was looking incredibly peaceful and beautiful.

This area was once filled with houses and farmland, but it was all wiped off the map. They’ve built a new sea wall here
but it seems like more of an illusion of safety ten anything else.

We climbed up onto a cliff edge and looked out over the ocean. The bald trees stripped of their leaves indicated how high the tsunami hit and destroyed all of this stuff.

It was a 34 degrees day, and it was almost impossible to imagine a destructive force tearing this landscape apart. I guess that’s the unpredictability of nature. You could see signs of the tsunami everywhere we went and what it wiped away.

The government has been doing a great deal to clear the areas over the last ten years. A lot of farms by the coast are being replaced by what looked like solar panels. I’m sure many people will never return to these areas. I can’t begin to imagine the pain loss the locals endured.

Fields filled with radioactive soil.

We decided to stay off the highway and head back down towards the Nikko area for the night. Little did we know that route six is open to the public. For anyone that doesn’t know, route six is the road that goes right through the exclusion zone, right past the Daichi nuclear reactor, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. I was shocked to see that this road is now open to the public and that google maps casually brought us this direction as the fastest route.

We started to see Geiger counters and fields filled with radioactive topsoil; it was a chilling experience. Not long after that, we began to see the disaster of 2011 frozen in time. Many towns along the coastline around the Fukushima plant have remained abandoned, trapped in the exclusion zone and are too dangerous for locals to return. There was no way to turn off the road at this point, so we had to continue down along right past the reactor.

There was lots and lots of people here, surprisingly enough, many working to clear the areas of contamination and work on the reactor, heaps of dump trucks moving soil, and roads permanently blocked off to the public with guards.

We wanted to stop and take a look, but the radiation completely sketched us out, we had no Geiger counters, and we didn’t want to change our luck with this stuff.

We saw miles and miles of boarded up and overgrown buildings. Families and communities destroyed by the disaster, ten years on this and this place frozen in time.

I’ve recently read about a big push to clear the remaining areas, and the government hopes to repopulate and try to get people to move home. Whether this works or not is beyond me, I find it hard to believe many people will want to return to this area. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like having your whole life pulled from under you in a flash. This drive was such a surreal experience, seeing endless buildings, homes and businesses completely off-limits ruined from radiation.

Out of nowhere on the left side of the Van, less than one kilometre from us, was the reactor, surrounded by cranes, insane! I didn’t think we would end up here on our trip. The road signs had Geiger counters on display. The closer we got to the reactor, the higher the readings. It was starting to freak us out; there was one stirp which was terrible. Every single road and house front closed off.

After about twenty minutes, we were in the clear and incredibly relieved. What an insane experience! All those people’s lives, homes, communities have gone in an act that makes you very thankful for what you have in this world.

To lift our spirits, we spotted this shop off of the main road called Reverse. They had a GTR out front, which looked familiar, it was their primary time attack car used for competing at Tsukuba and Fuji, and you might have seen it on the Narita dogfight website and a few other media outlets over the years.

It looks like they peeled all the stickers off, not sure if it’s for sale too, but we had to call in for a look to lighten the mood after our somewhat rough start to the day.

This GTR was nice, loved the carbon wing extensions.

How tough is their time attack GTR?

The plan was to head to N-style and meet up with Nagashima San and say hello. He had invited us to the Battle Magazine cup, which was on the following morning. We would be staying in this area for the night, so we had to drop by the shop and say hello.

We followed two older guys in their s2000s out for a blast on the highway, which kept us entertained for a portion of the journey. So good to see people out enjoying this stuff at all ages, gave us some inspiration for when we headed back to Ireland. There’s never really an age to grow out of enjoying the car life. I’d much prefer to be the cool uncle in twenty years who’s still at it! And guys like this were a glimpse into that future.