In Japan, Fukushima residents are frustrated but resigned

HISANOHAMA, JAPAN An air of permanence has settled over the supposedly temporary Seabreeze shopping arcade.

The Karasuya restaurant, serving big bowls of steaming noodle soup at the entrance to the arcade, is well established as a lunch spot for construction workers and a snack-and-homework joint for children from the neighboring school.

Striped poles twirl outside the barber shop, where retro chairs and basins await the next customer.

Between the two rows of prefabricated buildings that make up the arcade, too far inland to get much of the salty wind, snowman lights hang cheerfully above park benches. Tables offer instant coffee and photographic reminders of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated this area, part of Iwaki city on the Fukushima coast, on March 11, 2011.

There is nothing we can do but wait, but still, its frustrating, said Takami Endo, who runs the restaurant with her husband, Yoshiyasu Endo.

Fukushima prefecture, the third largest in Japan, will hold elections for governor on Sunday, the first since the disaster. The main issue in the race is reconstruction, which remains painfully slow.

About 90,000 people in three coastal prefectures still live in temporary housing complexes that almost make trailer parks look luxurious.

The Endos restaurant and home and the other stores occupying the sad little prefabs of the Seabreeze arcade were a block or so from the seafront in 2011. But they were wiped out by the tsunami, which also precipitated a triple meltdown at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Now the Endos live in public housing 15miles away, still dreaming of the day they can return to the location where Yoshiyasu Endos family operated the restaurant for about 50years.

My husband says we will go back, even if there is no one living there to come to our restaurant, Takami Endo said.

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In Japan, Fukushima residents are frustrated but resigned