As artists-in-residence at the ZUTTOSOKO Art Center during May 2025, we discovered Litate, a village located between the city of Fukushima and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a rural Japan of great beauty where numerous rice paddies shape the landscape. The plots are tiny, quite similar to those of oyster farmers on the Atlantic coast, who also open and close sluice gates to maintain the necessary water supply. During our initial conversations with our partners Tao Yoichi and Jun Yano from the ZUTTOSOKO Art Center, the situation appeared precarious, as the challenge for this rural community is to cultivate soils that are now highly radioactive.
As a reminder, the radioactive components released into the atmosphere during the disaster do not all have the same half-lives. Cesium-134 loses half its radioactivity in two years, meaning its radioactivity is now negligible, while cesium-137 loses half its radioactivity in 30 years, meaning its radioactivity is still very high in Litate today. This is why the Japanese government and the power company responsible for the nuclear power plant chose to bulldoze the soil to remove the topsoil, about 5 centimeters deep, and then bury this soil or pack it into enormous sealed bags placed like pieces on a chessboard across the landscape.
To compensate for this removed soil, agricultural land has often been covered with soil taken from the mountain’s undergrowth. However, this cumbersome method has not resulted in fertile soil. The farmers, who relied on highly refined know-how accumulated by generations of rice paddy cultivators, seem discouraged and are no longer farming much. A new phase of engineering now involves supporting farmers by encouraging them to develop soilless agriculture. The rural landscape is thus becoming covered with greenhouses, photovoltaic panels, and, more rarely, crops grown using an infrastructure combining lighting, drip irrigation, and chemical inputs.
These Fukushima landscapes are punctuated by rather discreet Shinto shrines, highlighting a remarkable tree, a spring, or an extraordinary rock with a few standing stones, often very old and engraved with a few words or sometimes a human figure or an animal. These animistic markers add depth to the landscape, reminding us how here, the signs offered by nature have been relentlessly examined and interpreted since ancient times.
The amnesia of the decision-makers who chose to build the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in a tsunami-prone area seems all the more outlandish. The consequences of this negligence are now omnipresent, as the future of this Japanese province rests on its ability to cultivate soils that are now radioactive. The technostructure responsible for the disaster proposes transforming previous agricultural practices through soilless engineering that combines topsoil stripping, artificial substrates, chemical inputs, drip irrigation, and computer technology.
Yet few residents have chosen to return home, and it is only slowly that we realize most of the houses are empty. Nature risks quickly suffocating this now-wasteland. The promises of this devastated land are indeed tentative.
Problem Statement
Most European languages retain the imprint of Latin-derived words within their structures—clues to ancient ways of interpreting the world that have endured because they remain active today. This is true of the word *humus*, denoting the top layer of soil. It shares the same etymological roots as *humanity*, *human*, and *humility*. This implies that soil is not merely our nourishing substrate but also the matrix of humanity—a shared resource without which we could not unfold our lives, socialize, or become truly human.
This Western perspective aligns with Watsuji’s mesology and his concept of *fûdosei* (風土性)—an environmental ethic in which human existence and territory are intimately linked. This territory bears the imprint of human and animal lives, both past and present, while also serving as the matrix for sensibilities shaped by that specific context.
Today, however, the stewardship of the soil and its careful transmission from one generation to the next appear to have been severed, in Japan and elsewhere. Our collective and individual attention has drifted away from the soil. This detachment has gone hand in hand with intensive exploitation and widespread mistreatment of the land, leading to the collapse of the ecosystemic balances essential for the preservation of humanity and the habitability of our planet.
The soil in the village of Litate is heavily contaminated by the radioactive plume carried by the winds from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011; this radioactivity is imperceptible to human bodies—and likely to animals as well. This invisibility is unsettling. One of the few tangible signs of this health crisis is the large number of residents who have left the area, abandoning their homes to rebuild their lives elsewhere. These empty houses bear witness to lives shattered at a specific moment in the history of human society. They now stand silent, removed from daily life.
That is why we have chosen to focus on these uninhabited houses, turning them into markers that encapsulate the violent experience of 2011, so that it may be passed on to future generations. These spaces—where time seems to stand still, apart from everyday life—will thus become places for reflection and awareness.
It might be a house abandoned by its former residents. Such a house could host a solo artist or a group of artists. It would be used “as is”—preserving the furniture and household objects if they remain, or utilizing the empty spaces.
Alternatively, it could be the vacant site of a house destroyed under the national policy accompanying the evacuation order; this policy provided for the free demolition—up until 2019—of houses where residents no longer wished to resettle. In this case, the artistic approach would involve mapping and staging the abandoned site.
By repeating this process year after year with artists from around the world—each bringing their own cultural perspectives on the land—ZUTTOSOKO aims to create a unique, new kind of heritage: one rooted in the site’s specific history yet universal in its significance.