At Ukedo Elementary School, time didn't freeze with the earth's tremor at 2:46 p.m., but with the ocean's agonizing pounding an hour later. The hands of the classroom clocks, connected to a centralized mechanism that ensured their synchronization, continued moving with mechanical indifference as the outside world crumbled. It wasn't the magnitude 9 earthquake, but the violent arrival of the first tsunami wave, between 3:37 p.m. and 3:38 p.m. on that March 11, 2011, that caused the final rupture. That exact instant, forever etched in the metal and glass of the stopped clocks, marks a point of no return: the moment when the force of nature decided to halt time for an entire town.

The Fukushima fifty, referring to the workers who remained inside the nuclear power plant after the March 2011 tsunami, were actually sixty-nine workers. The round number made for a more attractive headline. Fifteen years after that great catastrophe that caused more than twenty thousand deaths, a documentary pays tribute to that team. They acted convinced that risking their own lives was a debt they owed to the citizens. But the disappointment with Tepco's negligence meant that Japanese society did not perceive them as heroes.

At the entrance to the Fukushima headquarters, an unusual sign welcomes visitors: a digital sensor indicating the radiation level in microsieverts per hour. The figure displayed, 0.105 μSv/h, is similar to the radiation dose that can be received by eating a banana every hour. Beyond Tomioka, where beforenuclear accident after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, there were once farmland; now there is a vast expanse of vacant land interrupted only by a few fields filled with solar panels and eerily empty roads.