Review by Woodrow Phoenix
On 11 March 2011 a major earthquake in the sea off the shores of Japan created a fifteen-metre-high wall of water, a tsunami, which surged onto the coast at Fukushima. The massive flood disabled the power supply and cooling of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station, causing a nuclear accident when the three cores melted, releasing deadly radiation. Over 100,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding area. Journey to Tomioka is the story of two children, little brother Osamu and big sister Akiko, whose parents died in the tsunami. Now the siblings live in a refugee camp outside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, cared for by their grandmother, Bā-chan. But when she dies suddenly, Osamu is determined to follow tradition and return her ashes to her farm in Tomioka even though it it’s in the middle of the Exclusion Zone.
France has fifty nuclear power stations, which made writer Laurent Galandon particularly disturbed by what happened in Fukushima. He visited the area in 2023 to research conditions in and around the gradually reopened prefecture where only ten per cent of the original inhabitants have returned, and many formerly busy neighbourhoods are now silent and abandoned. The result of his investigations is this story about Osamu, an autistic boy who has no relationships outside his little family unit, but doesn’t need them because he is befriended by yōkai―spirits only he can see. Michaël Crouzat draws in a delicately pencilled, solidly constructed style of slight caricature for the people and naturalism for the settings. The colouring by Andrès Garrido Martin and Clara Patiño Bueno has a cel-shaded feel adding to the flavour of a Studio Ghibli-style adventure as the two children go on the run from their cousin Sanae and her husband Seiichi who want to take them to live in Tokyo.
In the desolate and overgrown suburbs the children wander through radiation levels high enough that nobody is allowed to live there, and a few surreal encounters with creatures give this book a kind of post-apocalyptic feel, although the ever-present tension is eased by Osamu’s visions. As they push further and further into the Exclusion Zone, Seiichi’s desperation to retrieve them with the help of the local police gets more acute. “I can’t bring irradiated children back to Tokyo!” he says, more than once. Can he get them out before it’s too late?
Journey to Tomioka is crafted for children in a style that allows magical phenomena and logical explanations to co-exist in a cleverly quiet way. The science around radiation and its effects on humans is just complex enough to allow for some leeway in what happens to Osamu and Akiko in the Exclusion Zone, and the ending should dispel any potential nightmares for young readers – or at least, nightmares about radiation anyway. The original French version of this book won the 2025 youth prize at the Angoulème International Festival.
