Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is significant in the novel not as the setting of a directly depicted scene, but as the source of the radiation crisis that sends people from areas near the plant into voluntary evacuation. Its aftermath brings Kido into legal work with displaced families and connects disaster, state records, and fragile family ties.

The disaster and voluntary evacuation

After the earthquake and tsunami, the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant left residents in areas with elevated radiation levels facing decisions about whether to leave. Some evacuees were not from places the government had designated as mandatory evacuation zones. Their movement therefore fell into a difficult gap between personal judgments about risk and official categories of emergency.

The distinction had practical consequences for families seeking temporary housing. Under the Disaster Relief Act, evacuees could receive designated temporary accommodation free of charge, but changing that accommodation could cost them assistance unless they met strict conditions, such as facing a marked danger or being asked to leave by a landlord. Some subsidized apartments were dilapidated, neighbors were disruptive, or evacuees experienced harassment. The support system could thus leave people caught between unsuitable housing and the risk of losing coverage if they moved.

Kido’s legal work

The disaster draws Kido into legal support for affected people. Working with Nakakita and other partners at the firm, he volunteers to advise evacuees, including those trying to change their assigned housing. His cases show how relief depends not only on need but on whether a person’s circumstances satisfy administrative rules.

Kido also encounters the isolation that can follow evacuation. Some mothers leave their husbands behind after disagreements about radiation risks and whether the family must give up jobs and homes. They settle into austere lives with their children while hoping the family will reunite, either through a husband joining them or a wife returning home. In some cases Kido handles, that hope gives way to divorce. The plant’s aftermath therefore reaches beyond relocation: the crisis can reorganize households and put intimate relationships under prolonged pressure.

Records, recognition, and aftermath

Kido’s work with evacuees sits alongside the novel’s concern with people whom official systems fail to recognize. Through Nakakita, he hears about tsunami victims whose existence the government could not account for because they lacked family registers. The narrative explains that children born within 300 days of a divorce could legally be assigned to the former husband; some mothers, including women who had left abusive marriages, did not register births with a new partner. Such children could live without being represented in the family-register system, leaving the state unable to count them among those killed by the tsunami.

The plant’s role in the novel is thus indirect but consequential. Its meltdown helps establish the conditions behind voluntary evacuation, Kido’s advocacy, and disputes over what institutions recognize as danger, family, and even a person’s existence. The disaster’s effects are not limited to a single catastrophe: they continue through housing decisions, divided households, legal classifications, and the struggle to make lived experience legible to the state.