The tourism company Knot World Co., based in Tokyo, designed the tour from a desire to encourage more people to "hear the local voices and see the area's damage and recovery" after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
International tourists are signing up for a tour in English to former evacuation zones in the northeastern Japan prefecture of Fukushima where a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 triggered a nuclear disaster.
The tourism company Knot World Co., based in Tokyo, designed the tour from a desire to encourage more people to "hear the local voices and see the area's damage and recovery" after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
"More people are becoming interested in going on the tour that can deepen their knowledge," an official at the Japan National Tourism Organisation told Japanese news agency, Kyodo News.
Since the tour's launch in February last year, some 200 people from 23 countries have participated, according to the company.
Fukushima Prefecture says 96,000 foreign tourists stayed at hotels and inns in the prefecture in 2017, which is four times the number in 2011.
In February this year, an organisation that promotes the prefecture's products and tourism launched a three-day tour with English translation in areas including Naraha, another town in the vicinity of the crippled nuclear plant, to aid recovery.
The Fukushima Daiichi plant released a massive amount of radioactive materials following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that flooded the facility on March 11, 2011.
Following the crisis, which equalled the severity of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, some 160,000 people were evacuated and more than 32,000 people remained evacuated in other prefectures as of January this year.
Source: Kyodo News