According to ABC News, Internet search giant Google has - with the help of its Street View vehicle - started the digital mapping of the area closest to Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant; a move that comes two years after the country witnessed its worst nuclear disaster on March 12, 2011.

In an evident attempt to virtually bring back the Nuclear Exclusion Zone's displaced residents to their homes, Google has now dispatched its Street View vehicle to Namie, where nearly 21,000 residents were displaced because of the disaster.

Equipped with a specialized camera mounted on its top, the vehicle captured a 360 view of the damage that the nuclear disaster caused in Namie, by driving through the empty town, and steering around collapsed homes and broken roads.

Google's move to digitally map the devastated area is a notable one, especially since the desolation in areas closest to the Fukushima nuclear plant has largely been hidden from public view, with checkpoints having been set up for barricading the government-mandated Nuclear Exclusion Zone.

Revealing that the digital mapping process will take a number of weeks, with the Namie's Street View map to be finally unveiled by Google in a few months, product manager Kei Kawai said: "There's nothing that compares to actually coming in and seeing the damage for yourself. But we can at least show what these places are like, to the people who evacuated the city, to the world."