A Nuclear-Free Town Fades Away in Japan

BY CHESTER DAWSON

NIIGATA, Japan—In a mid-1990s, a tiny strand encampment of Maki was a singular difference in Japan, rejecting a nuclear-power plant offering to keep a city afloat, while identical villages embraced reactors as an mercantile growth tool. As Japan now halts chief development, Maki's predestine underscores a onslaught that dozens of other farming towns could unexpected face but those jobs or subsidies.

A few years after branch down a reactors, a encampment of Maki in northwestern Japan left in a partnership of several municipalities, all with timorous populations and taxation bases, formulating a sourness that lasts to this day—even post-Fukushima—about a ...