Japan’s Olympic soccer teams are to train for the Tokyo 2020 Games at a complex currently being used as a base for thousands of workers cleaning up the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
The Japan Football Association (JFA) yesterday said that the Japanese men’s and women’s teams would hold their training camps at J-Village, once the country’s center of excellence until it was taken over by plant operators following the 2011 nuclear disaster.
“The teams will use the J-Village facility as a training base,” JFA communications chief Takato Maruyama told reporters.
“It is something the JFA had been talking about, but a timeline hadn’t been formally approved by the executive board, until now,” Maruyama said.
J-Village is on the fringes of the old 20km exclusion zone around the stricken plant, which suffered a triple reactor meltdown after a giant tsunami slammed into it in March 2011, causing massive radiation leaks and forcing the evacuation of more than 150,000 people.
As the nuclear crisis raged, J-Village became the front line in the fight to control the situation, with helipads, a medical center and dormitories hastily erected for workers filing in and out of the plant in their protective suits and masks.
Following the removal of the no-entry zone in September last year, the sprawling site located in the sleepy town of Naraha is to undergo large-scale reconstruction, with a view to a partial reopening by July 2018.
“Obviously, the complex will need some refurbishment, but that is the time frame we have heard from TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Co] and J-Village,” Maruyama said.
Japanese officials plan to reopen the facility to serve as a symbol of recovery for the Tokyo Olympics. Venues in the tsunami-ravaged northeastern Tohoku region also hope to be involved in the Games.
“J-Village has always been an important venue and it has a large role to play in the recovering of Fukushima,” JFA director Eiji Ueda told local media.
Despite the symbolic value of training at the complex, the JFA insisted that safety was of the utmost importance.
“We can’t make any specific comment on radiation, but clearly you can’t play football in places where it isn’t safe for people to go,” Maruyama said.
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