This January, Prof. Aya Goto, Professor of the Practice of International Community Health and faculty director of Takemi Program in International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is leading a cohort of fifteen graduate students on an immersive tour of Fukushima Prefecture. Part of the winter session course GHP 549 “Field Trip to Fukushima,” this trip aims to introduce students to the lived experiences and revitalization efforts of communities after major disasters, through first-hand study of Fukushima and the triple disasters of March 11, 2011.

Accompanied by Prof. Andrew Gordon (Director of Japan Disasters Digital Archive Project) and Ryo Morimoto (former JDA Project Manager and current faculty at Princeton University), Prof. Goto’s group visited the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum (Denshokan) in Futaba, a town within the exclusion zone near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. During the visit, they were given a tour of the exhibition rooms and a special lecture by Dr. Noboru Takamura, Museum Director and Nagasaki University professor and physician specializing in treatment of radiation exposure and contamination. In his lecture, Dr. Takamura shared his experiences providing medical care to areas affected by the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disasters and facilitated discussion about supporting recovery efforts through medicine. This visit was followed by a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

This trip was covered by the Fukushima Minpo newspaper and on the Denshokan homepage.