Fukushima: How baseball and Tokyo 2020 are helping the region recover from 2011 disaster

[Torrent Disney]

This is my home," he says pointing. "But I can never go back there. The army turned up wearing protective masks and told us all to leave."

The photos are all Mr Kumagami has to remind him of where he lived for 40 years. He is one of nearly 165,000 people who were forced to evacuate in March 2011 when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck.

At magnitude 9.0 it was the most powerful quake ever experienced by a country well used to earthquakes. An hour after the first tremor, tsunami waves hit all along 670km of Japan's north-east Pacific coastline. Up to 18,000 people were killed.

The tsunami is also responsible for the resulting catastrophic event at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Okuma town on the Fukushima coast.

At a height of around 15m, the rolling wall of seawater breached the plant's protective defences and disabled the generator for the reactor's cooling system.

The reactor went into meltdown. The accident was deemed on a par with Chernobyl, albeit releasing less radioactive material.

Nevertheless, radiation did spread in the wind, and Mr Kumagami's hometown of Namie lay just 10km to the north-east of the reactor