James A. Foley was an ALT in Iwaki, Fukushima-ken from 2007-2010. He taught elementary school at Taira 3rd, Taira 1st and Kawamei Shou-gakkou.
Iwaki is a large, sub-rural city. Many coastal sections of Iwaki were ravaged by the March 11 tsunami. The city itself is one of the largest in Japan in terms of land area. The northern city limits are on the cusp of the mandated 20km evacuation radius surrounding the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant.
After JET, James assumed a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, living in swaths of America, Europe, India and far eastern Asia for months at a time. He holds a journalism degree from the University of Kansas and currently maintains a small writing enterprise out of his apartment somewhere in central California. His writings on this return trip to to his adopted hometown in Japan were featured on IndependentTraveler.com. The article is titled After the Quake: Return to Fukushima, James also has articles in Japan Today: Traveling to the edge: Why tourism in Fukushima makes more sense than ever, CNN: Journeys to the edge: Tourism in Fukushima makes more sense now and he was recently featured on San Fransisco’s KTSF Channel 26 news.
James had some technical difficulties during his trip to Japan (laptop crashed), but is working on transcribing his notes onto the portion of his blog (The Japan Record) dedicated to this trip. We’ll continue to make them available as James gets them posted.
