In mid-December, dry winter winds swept across rice paddies stretching over a corner of the Kanto Plain in Kazo, Saitama Prefecture. It was here that Kazuhiro Shibuya, who had evacuated from Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, devoted himself to rice farming.

Shibuya, 78, is among the Futaba residents who were ordered to leave their hometown immediately after the March 2011 meltdown accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings¡¯ Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. After the residents took refuge in temporary shelters, the city of Kazo accommodated the mass evacuation and assumed the functions of the Futaba town hall.

Shibuya sought farmland in Kazo in 2012 and resumed farming. Though he struggled at first with differences in climate and soil, he worked desperately to get his business back on track. Today, he grows rice on about 8 hectares of land, some of it borrowed from acquaintances.

Determined to make his living as a farmer in Kazo, Shibuya faced a difficult decision over whether to move his resident registration to the city.

In 2022, 11 years after leaving Futaba, he turned to JA Hokusai, the agricultural cooperative serving Kazo, to gain sales channels for his business expansion and get technical guidance for improving his rice quality.

However, one requirement for membership was having a resident registration within the cooperative¡¯s jurisdiction.

Transferring his resident registration to Kazo was not an easy decision for Shibuya because of his strong emotional attachment to Futaba, where he was born and raised. He said he felt as if he would no longer be a person of Futaba, but that the transfer was unavoidable if he were to survive as a rice farmer in Kazo. ¡°It was a heartbreaking decision to change my registered address,¡± he said.

The number of people evacuated due to the nuclear accident peaked at about 164,000 in May 2012. Even now, roughly 23,700 evacuees live in and outside of Fukushima Prefecture. As many such people have rebuilt their lives in host municipalities, a significant number of them have relinquished their hometown resident registrations.

In the case of Futaba, where the evacuation order was lifted in 2020 ¡ª the last among the affected municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture ¡ª around 1,300 residents had officially moved their resident registrations elsewhere as of October last year, out of about 7,000 residents at the time of the accident.

Nearly 15 years after the disaster, only about 15% of land in the town is habitable, such as areas around JR Futaba Station. With access to shopping and medical services still inadequate, only a small proportion of the resident population has returned.

Faced with the harsh realities of his hometown, Shibuya chose to officially become a Kazo resident....