The J-Village sports complex in Japan’s Fukushima was once a staging ground for battling the 2011 nuclear disaster, but next year it will host Olympic teams and the torch relay, sending a message of recovery.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic torch relay will begin at the center, and Olympic softball and baseball matches will be played elsewhere in Fukushima, as part of efforts that officials and residents hope will help repair the reputation of a region now synonymous with the nuclear meltdown.
“The torch relay is a golden opportunity to send a message about our reconstruction to the world,” said Yusuke Takana, a 32-year-old official at the J-Village, from where the Olympic torch will set off on March 26, 2020.
“The J-Village overcame the disaster and has been revived in its original form as a sports training center,” Takana said.
Built in 1997 as a fully fledged sport training complex, the J-Village was radically transformed by the nuclear meltdown.
Thousands of workers wearing radiation protection suits, gas masks and dosimeters were dispatched every day to the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from the sports center, located just on the edge of the initial 20-kilometer no-go zone.
The complex clean-up at the nuclear plant continues, but the J-Village’s role as a staging center diminished over time and it reopened fully as a sports center in April.
More than 160,000 people were evacuated after the nuclear meltdown caused when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a massive tsunami on March 11, 2011. Some areas affected by the meltdown remain off-limits, and some 43,000 residents have yet to return home.
Levels of radiation in areas directly around the plant remain extremely high, hampering a decommissioning process that is expected to take decades.
On Saturday, children from 13 countries gathered at the Azuma Sports Park that will host the Olympic matches for a baseball tournament.
“I hope that when these children go back home they will tell people that Fukushima was good,” said Sadaharu Oh, Japan’s retired home-run king, who helped organize the tournament.
Yi-Yu Tseng, a 10-year-old pitcher from Taiwan, acknowledged the history of the nuclear disaster made the prospect of visiting “a little bit scary.”
“But I’m feeling less scared now,” he said. “I want to come back to Fukushima.”