Skip to main content
Global Edition
Friday, March 29, 2024

A baseball star, a father and Fukushima dreams

Duration: 01:52s 0 shares 1 views

A baseball star, a father and Fukushima dreams
A baseball star, a father and Fukushima dreams

As Fukushima prepares to host baseball games for the Olympics this summer, a young baseball star and his father show that recovery from the 2011 nuclear disaster which became synonymous with Fukushima's name is far from over.

Gloria Tso reports.

A young man practices pitching his baseball into the net, again and again.

18-year-old Ryoma Ouchi is a star player from Iitate, a rural village in the Japanese prefacture of Fukushima.

This summer, Fukushima will play host to Olympic baseball games in what organizers have labeled Japan's "Reconstruction Olympics." Their mission - to repair the region's reputation on the world stage after Fukushima became synonymous with an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that devastated the area back in 2011.

It is a personal story for Ryoma, who was only nine when the triple disaster forced him and his family to leave their tiny hometown.

(SOUNDBITE) (Japanese) 18-YEAR-OLD BASEBALL PLAYER, RYOMA OUCHI, SAYING: "When the earthquake hit us, it was graduation season, and there were tables placed for the graduation ceremony so I hid under one of them.

While I was under the table, the gymnasium walls started to collapse and fell into pieces.

I ran outside when the shake subsided for a few seconds." The disaster ended up being a blessing in disguise for Ryoma, who got to move to a much bigger high school, where he blossomed as a baseball star.

But for his father Kazuo, the transition was much more difficult.

His parents had just bought cows to breed - but after the disaster no one wanted to buy food from Fukushima.

Kazuo had to leave behind the fields his family tended to for generations.

Those now-abandoned fields are where Kazuo used to teach Ryoma how to play baseball.

But now this field is just a dumping ground filled with hundreds of bags of contaminated soil and leaves.

Before the disaster, Iitate was recognized as one of the "most beautiful villages in Japan." Locals long for that name to be restored.

You might like