Namie, Fukushima

The auction bell at Ukedo fishing port rang again in spring 2020, after years of silence. Boxes of fish moved across the floor of the market in the early morning, the rhythm of trade resuming with deliberate care. Namie, the coastal town in Futaba District where the Ukedo River meets the Pacific, carries this quality throughout — a resumption, careful and incomplete, of things that were interrupted.

The evacuation order that emptied the entire town in 2011 left traces that have not been smoothed over. The Fukushima Prefectural Memorial Park, due to open in 2026, will preserve the footprints of inundated settlements rather than erase them. Meanwhile, Miomiya Shrine — an ancient listed shrine that lost its building to the tsunami — holds the Anba Festival each February in a rebuilt hall, the ritual calendar maintained even as the congregation remains small. Along the former Rikuzen-Hama Kaido road corridor near Takasegawa Gorge, the old highway geography is still legible.

What has returned carries its own texture. The workshop inside the Namie Skills and Livelihoods Hall produces Obori Soma ware, the stoneware tradition that began in the Edo period: the double-wall construction, the celadon glaze, the running-horse motif. At Michi-no-Eki Namie, opened in 2020, a shelf of Obori Soma pieces sits near stacks of Kujuuri kabocha. Namie yakisoba, the thick-noodle dish associated with the town, is served nearby. These are not reconstructed symbols — they are the ordinary goods of a place that is, haltingly, still here.