What Makes Affected Workers Return to Their Workplace?: Nuclear Disaster and Occupational Attitude in a Restaurant Enterprise

Abstract

The Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in March 2011, provoking the critical accidents at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The strictest type of evacuation zone was established, legally banning lives, enterprises, and labor inside the border. A hundred thousand residents and workers, who left the area just after the accident, were not allowed to return. In a few months, however, some of them returned to the area around the zone and worked for the local company that had employed them previously. Why did the workers return to their workplace? Based on interviews with employees in a restaurant corporation, this paper finds that their living conditions as well as social ties helped reorganize the workers’ occupational attitude, encouraging them to “return and continue working.”