Like most parents, it’s hard for him to believe that the boy in the picture is already 18 years old. “There’s Ryoma,” Ouchi says, pointing to a picture of a swaddled baby. In them, a cast of children, first toddlers, then teens and later young men in awkward tuxedos, smile from behind dusty plastic frames. In an upstairs room, dozens of photographs hang from the walls. Remnants of a hastily abandoned life are everywhere in the house. His two-story house has sat empty for nine years after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered meltdowns at a nuclear plant 30 miles away, spewing radiation into the air and forcing the entire village to evacuate. Ouchi is back in his hometown of Iitate, a village in Fukushima prefecture. “I shut off the electricity a while ago.” “Sorry about the dark,” Ouchi says, stepping over children’s toys. Ryoma Ouchi,18, who was an ace pitcher on the Fukushima Commercial High School baseball team, prepares for a workout at the clubhouse of the team in Fukushima, Japan, February 21, 2020.
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