A commercial facility housing nine stores and eateries has opened in the Ogawara district of Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture.
An evacuation order for the district was issued due to the accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, but was rescinded two years ago. Before the nuclear accident, farmland stretched through the district.
A new building for the Okuma town government has been built, and about 100 units of public housing for people affected by the accident. In February, a clinic run by the town government opened.
The Okuma government is aiming to have the evacuation order lifted in spring next year for an area, once the central part of the town, that was the base of reconstruction efforts.
The new commercial facility was built by the public sector and is being managed privately. It is a wooden one-story building with a total of about 1,400 square meters of floor space.
Businesses accommodated in the facility include eateries, a convenience store, a grocery shop and a beauty parlor. There is also a laundromat open around the clock, which workers involved in decommissioning nuclear reactors and reconstruction efforts are expected to use.
The nuclear power plant is partly located in the town. About 48 square kilometers of acreage, accounting for about 60% of the town, is designated as a difficult-to-return zone.
As of March 1, the town had 285 residents, less than 3% of the 11,505 people who lived there before the Great East Japan Earthquake.
The commercial facility is also home to Kissa Reinbo, a coffee shop that stood next to the previous town government building for more than 30 years. The coffee shop has reopened in Okuma for the first time in 10 years.
Kissa Reinbo was loved by residents for the British rock albums collected by owner Kazushi Takeuchi, 67, and for the cups of coffee he enthusiastically brewed with siphons.
About a half-year after the nuclear accident, Takeuchi reopened the coffee shop in Aizu-Wakamatsu in the prefecture, where he lived as an evacuee.
But his goal was to reopen the shop in Okuma. Takeuchi closed his operation in Aizu-Wakamatsu about three years later, and waited for the day he could resume business in his home town.
On the day of the reopening, people who were frequent customers before the accident came one after another.
Takeuchi said, "I want to continue managing this business even if it's on a small scale, so that this can be a place of rest for town residents."
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