The Fukushima nuclear accident followed the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Reactor failures released radioactive material and forced evacuations from surrounding communities. The disaster linked earthquake, wave, technology, governance, and long-term contamination.

Fukushima renewed Japanese poetic traditions of disaster witness while adding nuclear anxiety to images of sea, rice fields, hometown, and ancestral graves. Poets wrote of invisible danger, evacuation, memory, and the difficulty of returning to a landscape that looks familiar but has changed.