Hachioji, Japan — Seven months after an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear leakage struck northeastern Japan, life in this residential and university town in Tokyo’s western suburbs has returned to normal — almost but not quite.

Like dozens of towns outside of the devastated Tohoku coastal region, Hachioji suffered from two wounds on March 11, a crippling shortage of electricity and a deep-seated fear of radiation leaking from two badly damaged nuclear power plants 200 miles away in Fukushima Prefecture.

Lights went out all over Hachioji, traffic signals stopped working, elevators and escalators went dead, neon signs no longer flashed, and trains and subways in Japan’s pervasive public transport moved irregularly or ground to a halt.

“It was really depressing,” said the shift manager of a popular restaurant.

The fear of radiation, which some Japanese and foreign residents say bordered on the irrational, was the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986.

That was compounded by the inexperience of Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government, which had been in office only eight months and dithered when the crisis hit, and the failure of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, to respond with alacrity.

Said a veteran Japanese political observer: “The Kan cabinet was still thinking like an opposition party. They did not realize they are responsible now.” Mr. Kan stepped down in August to make way for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

Today, Hachioji after nightfall is a gaudy bauble of light and color and bustle. The manager of a GAIA pachinko parlor, one of the 17,000 pinball shops that are everywhere in Japan, said that until last month he had to close his shop for three days each month to save electricity but was now operating fully.

Asked whether his business had recovered, he cocked his head, drew in his breath, and said, “Well, it’s still a little bit down.” A glance at the empty seats in front of all but a dozen of the 50 machines in his shop confirmed that.

The shift manager at the Mother Leaf tea and waffle restaurant, where tea is served with a tiny three-minute sand glass to tell the guest when the tea is ready, also said that business was not quite back to normal.

Because of the fear of contamination by radiation, he said, “we make sure the customers know we don’t serve food that came from Tohoku,” which produces rice, vegetables, fish, and seafood. “If we did,” he said, “they would not come back.”

A sales clerk in the well-stocked Yurindo book store claimed the number of customers had returned to pre-crisis levels. But the few browsers wandering through the spacious aisles suggested that estimate might be optimistic. A trade association reported that supermarket sales were 3.6 percent less in September than a year ago.

A traveler’s hotel, the Hachioji Plaza, saw its bookings plummet when the crisis hit as Japanese and foreign business executives stayed away. Since then, said a staffer at the front desk, “it has been slowly picking up.” Nationally, foreign visitors were down 25 percent compared with last year, largely on anxiety over radiation.

A housewife in a neighboring town said she had sent her two children to western Japan to stay with her mother for two weeks in March because she was worried about radiation. She said she will send her daughter, who is to enter high school next year, to a school from which she can walk or bicycle home in a future crisis.

The caution among people in Hachioji appeared to reflect the uncertainty generated by the lack of forceful leadership in the national government, the Noda administration having shown not much more drive than the Kan regime. Some 70,000 people in Tohoku, for instance, remain in shelters to which they fled in March.

A onetime senior government official, Shinji Fukugawa, chided the Noda government last week, saying: “The government’s response to the 3/11 disasters is slow perhaps because of the politically complicated, time-consuming talks taking place between the ruling and the opposition parties.”

That was a polite way for the former vice-minister of the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry to say in an op-ed article that Japan’s politicians should stop dawdling and clean up the misery in front of them.

The English-language Japan Times was more direct—and perhaps less Japanese — in an editorial. Noting that parliament had reconvened, the newspaper said Mr. Noda “needs to send clear messages concerning what he wants to do to end the political and economic stagnation that has plagued the nation since the 3/11 disasters.”