JAPAN. FUKUSHIMA Prefecture. At the edge of the 20km exclusion zone around the damaged nuclear power station at Fukushima Daiichi, inside which no one is allowed to live or enter without a government permit.
Iitate has been heavily affected by radoiactive pollution from the nuclear accident even though it is outside the exclusion zone. So much so that all of the village has been evacuated and contract workers are attempting to clean an area around the primary school, as a test project to assess eficiency. The cleaning involves trying to collect all of the leaves on the forest floor, an impossible task.
a decontamination cost estimate on Sept 28 of 322.4 billion yen ($3.8 billion ) is for the village only.