Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from areas affected by Japan’s 2011 tsunami and the subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Some still haven’t gotten to come home — including the 21,000 residents of Namie-Machi, a Fukushima Prefecture town that was affected by the disaster. Namie-Machi is a ghost town now, full of empty streets and ruined buildings, and you can now see what that’s like with your own eyes (if not up close) using Google Street View.
Touring an uninhabited disaster site is less fun than walking around at the bottom of the ocean, the South Pole, the tops of the world’s highest peaks, or Mars. But it brings home the reality of what happened — and is still happening — thanks to natural and human-made disasters in Japan.
