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 in their structures the imprint of words of Latin origin, serving as clues to ancient interpretations of the world, preserved through the centuries because they remain active. This is the case with the word Humus, which designates the surface layer of soil. The etymology of the word is shared with the words Humanity, Human, and Humility. This undoubtedly means that the soil forms our nourishing ground, but also constitutes the matrix of humanity, our common resource without which we cannot develop our lives, socialize, or become human.
This Western approach coincides with Watsuji’s mesology and his concept of fūdosei (風土性), which asserts itself as an environmental ethic where human existence and its territory are intimately linked—a territory that bears the imprint of both human and animal existence, past and present, but also forms the matrix of sensibilities shaped by this specific context.
This care and careful transmission of soil knowledge from one generation to the next seems to have been broken today, in Japan as elsewhere. Our collective and individual attention has shifted away from the land. And this distraction has accompanied the intensive exploitation of soils and their widespread mistreatment, leading to the collapse of the ecosystemic balances necessary for the preservation of humanity and the habitability of the Earth.
The soils of the village of Litate are heavily contaminated by the radioactive trail dispersed by the winds from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011. This radioactivity is imperceptible to human bodies and probably also to animals. This invisibility is unsettling. One of the few visible signs of the health disaster lies in the very large number of residents who have left, abandoning their homes to continue their lives elsewhere. These empty houses bear witness to lives shattered at a specific moment in human societies. They now remain silent, withdrawn from daily life.
This is why we propose focusing on these uninhabited houses, transforming them into living memorials that embody the traumatic experience of 2011, so that we can pass it on to future generations. These spaces, where time seems suspended, removed from daily life, will thus become spaces for meditation and reflection.