Silent Witnesses: Fukushima 2011–2026 by Takeshi Yamamoto

Silent Witnesses: Fukushima 2011–2026 is a long-term photographic project documenting the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster over fifteen years.

Since 2011, I have continued to return to Fukushima, photographing places where the effects of the disaster remain visible, invisible, or gradually transformed. Rather than focusing on the immediate destruction, the project examines how time accumulates within landscapes marked by displacement, contamination, reconstruction, and forgetting.

Abandoned schools, empty train stations, contaminated soil storage sites, radiation monitoring systems, and newly developed infrastructures reveal a complex relationship between memory and recovery. While the disaster has largely disappeared from international headlines, its consequences continue to shape the environment and everyday life.

Radiation cannot be seen directly. Yet its presence remains embedded in policies, landscapes, and human decisions. Through long-term observation, Silent Witnesses explores how photography can bear witness to a disaster whose most enduring effects often exist beyond ordinary visibility.

The project is not only about what was lost. It is also about what remains, what changes, and what continues to exist quietly after public attention has moved elsewhere.

Over fifteen years, Fukushima has become a place where absence, adaptation, recovery, and uncertainty coexist. These photographs attempt to record that ongoing reality.

Takeshi Yamamoto

Takeshi Yamamoto is a Japanese documentary photographer whose work explores memory, landscape, and the long-term social and environmental consequences of historical events.

Since 2011, he has documented the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster through his ongoing project Silent Witnesses: Fukushima 2011–2026. His practice focuses on the accumulation of time within landscapes shaped by disaster, recovery, and collective memory.

Yamamoto received the 9th Natori Yonosuke Photography Award and an Honorable Mention in the Contemporary Category of the WMPO World Masters of Photography Award 2026. His work has been shortlisted for Earth Photo and recognized among the top 24% of submissions to the PhMuseum Photography Grant 2026.

His photographs have been exhibited internationally and continue to examine how photography can function as a form of witnessing across extended periods of time.

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