Japan's ghost towns laid bare by Google Street View She has only gone back once, a year ago, and for a few minutes. I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited I can take a look at those places that are so dear to me," said Naganuma. It would be hard, too. No one is going to be there. Namie Mayor Tamotsu Baba said memories came flooding back as he looked at the images shot by Google earlier this month. He spotted an area where an autumn festival used to be held and another of an elementary school that was once packed with schoolchildren. "Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children," he said in a post on his blog. We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Street View was started in 2007, and now provides images from more than 3,000 cities across 48 countries, as well as parts of the Arctic and Antarctica.