Last man standing in Fukushima

No effort has been made to repair the facade of the Matsuya pharmacy on Tomioka's main street, while the glass and plastic panels from the game centre still lie shattered on its forecourt one year after the town was rocked by the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Weeds are growing through the pavement and telegraph poles are canted at odd angles across the road.

A few miles south, other communities on the coast of Fukushima Prefecture are making plans to rebuild.

But Tomioka is just eight miles from Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant - well within the 13-mile exclusion zone - and residents have long since fled.

Only Naoto Matsumura remains in Tomioka, without electricity and running water and braving the loneliness and the constant threat of exposure to elevated levels of radiation to feed a menagerie of animals - including an ostrich.

After a year, Mr Matsumura, 52, appears to prefer the company of his animals to humans. "I was working when the earthquake hit and we heard on the radio that a tsunami was on its way, so I waited a while before trying to get home," said Mr Matsumura, who used to operate road-laying machinery.

"The next day, I heard the explosion at the plant," he said. "I didn't need anyone to tell me what had happened because the 'boom' was huge."

Living with his mother and father and a couple of locals in the house, they heard more explosions. Finally, they decided to head south. "I knocked on the door of my aunt's house in Iwaki, but she wouldn't let any of us in because she said we were contaminated.

"So we went to a nearby shelter, but they wouldn't let us stay there either, so we went home," he says. In April, Mr Matsumura's mother was taken ill so the rest of the family went to stay with relatives outside the original 18-mile recommended exclusion zone.

"We couldn't take the animals with us, so I stayed behind," he says.

Initially, he was caring for about 60 pet dogs and 100 cats abandoned by their owners. There were also hundreds of ducks and geese on local farms that needed help, as well as cattle still locked in their pens. But Mr Matsumura was not able to get to all of them in time.

Many animals that were household pets have formed packs, leaving him with seven dogs - and their 14 puppies. Mr Matsumura's ark also has 60 cats, a half-boar-half-pig and the ostrich, the sole survivor of 30 birds on a farm.

The police that patrol the no-go zone called the ostrich Boss and it took Mr Matsumura a whole afternoon to coax the bird the five miles to his house after he found her foraging for food.

"I don't get bored," he says. "I am used to it, and anyway, there are lots of animals here so I'm never really alone."

Mr Matsumura drives his white pickup across a desolate landscape, looking for other animals to help. The only sounds are birds and the wind in the telephone wires. Cattle have learnt where he leaves feed and are waiting for him.

"The police tell me that I should leave, but that would mean there is no one to take care of these creatures," he said. He had a medical check at Tokyo University in October, which showed elevated ceasium 134 and 137, but Mr Matsumura says that was because he was eating vegetables he found growing in the village. He does not do that any more.

But Mr Matsumura's bigger fear is that the town where his family has lived for five generations will whither away. The government has said it might take 40 years to clean the area of radiation. "Tomioka will turn into a ghost town," he says. "The young people will not want to come back."

He has appealed to the authorities to do more, and they have told him it is "under consideration". "I told them to speed their consideration as we will all be dead before they reached a decision.

"I also asked them to give me food for the animals, but they wouldn't even do that," he said. "I'm on my own."