In a public facility run by the town of Okuma in Fukushima Prefecture, located in a designated no-go zone, stacks of cardboard boxes slowly gather dust.
The boxes are filled with public documents detailing the March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and the evacuation that followed — outlining the ordeal Okuma and its residents have been through over the past decade.
Entry to the entire town was prohibited until April 2019, when restrictions were eased for parts of it. Since municipal office operations returned to Okuma from the city of Aizuwakamatsu, where they were relocated after the disaster, town officials have started to sift through the public documents.
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