The town of Okuma is where the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is located, and following the accident, the area where ninety-six percent of the population lived has been designated as a "difficult-to-return" zone, prohibiting entry without special permission. For the two years after the accident, residents were allowed short returns to their houses once every three months only. The limit has been eased to fifteen times per year now, but stays must be under five hours leaving little time to search for loved ones.

  Kimura did not experience the tsunami firsthand and also left town the next day. This lead him to become detached from reality, unable to grasp the fact that Yuna and the others were really gone. "I have to go back, I can't give up". Despite the thoughts racing through his mind, with all the restrictions in place, even when he got the chance to return, he felt overwhelmed and would often leave without accomplishing anything.

  Meeting Takayuki Ueno, a resident of Minami-Soma, changed everything. Ueno had lost four members of his family, but banded together with his volunteer fire company comrades and other volunteers to form the group Fukko-Hamadan, and was continuing his search for missing people including his father and son. By listening to Ueno who had been involved in the search efforts from the immediate aftermath and seen the devastation with his own eyes, Kimura was finally able to understand what Yuna and the others must have experienced. Feeling the fright and despair they must have gone through, Kimura broke down in a hysteric fit of tears.

  "It's just wrong that you are left to suffer over something like this". The way Ueno reacted upon learning the difficulties to find his missing daughter gave Kimura hope. Since the autumn of 2013, Kimura has been participating along with the Fukko-Hamadan in the search efforts, and the monthly visits to Okuma have become something to almost look forward to. "When I come here, it feels like I'm with the other three. Kind of like soothing medication" Ueno says.

  But just when a sense of normalcy had seemed to have returned, as if to add insult to injury, a new problem arouse.
The government had come up with a new plan to build an interim storage facility to store the nuclear contaminated waste, and Kimura's house was within the planned area. "I have no intention of selling nor renting the land which will prevent us from continuing searches" Kimura declared at one of the briefing sessions held between the residents and the government. But the reply from the Ministry of Environment representative left him dumbfounded. "We weren't aware there were people still missing". These people were holding this meeting without even knowing that? Despite the residents' apprehension and protests, the project steadily progressed. In January this year, as soon as the municipalities of Fukushima prefecture, Okuma and Futaba town announced that they would accept the plan, the Ministry of Environment started negotiations with landowners. Then in March, although most of the negotiations were still ongoing, the government went ahead and started trucking waste into the limited areas where buyouts had been finished.