Okuma, Fukushima

Ōno Station reopened in 2020, after years of silence on the JR Jōban Line. Trains stop again, but the surrounding town of Ōkuma still carries the weight of what happened in March 2011, when the earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster emptied this stretch of Hamadōri coast almost entirely. The station itself is a kind of marker — not a terminus, not quite a beginning, but a place where the act of arrival still means something.

Before the evacuation, this was agricultural and coastal land: pear orchards, kiwi fruit grown at farms like Fruitgarden Sekimoto, and flatfish brought in from the small fishing harbor at Kumacho. The kiwi wine called Midori no Shizuku was made here. The Yonomori neighborhood was known for its tunnel of cherry trees and, separately, for azaleas that drew attention across the region. The Kumakawa Chigo Shikashimai, a traditional deer dance performed by children, belonged to the festival calendar that once structured the year.

What is visible now is the texture of reconstruction — literal and social. The integrated school facility Manabiya Yume no Mori moved into a new building in 2023, bringing children back to a town still in the process of deciding what it will become. The Ōkuma Interchange on the Jōban Expressway opened in 2019, a piece of infrastructure laid down before the residents fully returned. History already ran through this land as a boundary zone between competing domains; it runs through it again now, differently, in the form of decommissioning work and the slow return of ordinary life.