Covered in a layer of dust, pencils and books lie scattered across the small desks of Kumamachi Elementary School in Okuma. One of these seats once belonged to Yuna Kimura. Fifteen years ago, on March 11, 2011, her class attended this school for the last time.

On that afternoon, the magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck off the country's northeastern coast. The massive tsunami devastated entire towns along the Pacific coastline and led to power outages and the failure of the cooling systems at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. As a result, three hydrogen explosions occurred, three reactor meltdowns followed and significant amounts of radioactive material were released. Around 470,000 people were evacuated due to the triple disaster.

Even today, approximately 27,000 people are still unable to return to their hometowns, most of them from Fukushima Prefecture, excluding so-called “voluntary evacuees” who lived outside the official exclusion zones. More than 20,000 people lost their lives as a result of the compound disaster. Among them were Yuna, her mother and her grandfather.

© The Japan Times