Earthquake Diary 75

 This is the Kaminari (Thunder and lightning) Shinto Shrine. It is hidden behind some trees and large advertising signs at the intersection of the main east/west road that runs near my home and Route 4, the Sendai bypass road. The shrine is quite typical, a ceramic model of a full sized shrine that contains some religious objects inside. There did not seem to be any damage other than the roof being displaced to the left.

 This is two workers surveying the area between a manhole into the sewer system and the river. They have been building a temporary chemical purification site about 50 meters to the left. I can not figure out for sure what they are going to do, but it seems likely that when the sewer system gets overwhelmed they will put a large hose, or flexible pipe, from here to the processing site. It appears that they will only use this if the system overflows because of the damage to the permanent processing plants..

 The wall that used to be on top of the stone facing has fallen and id laying at the foot of the facing. You can see a bit of the original wall on the right.

 I found this to be a bit amusing. In Japan roadside drainage ditches are often covered by rows of reinforced concrete slabs. Here one of the slabs broke during the quake and some one has covered the hole with two bicycles. Actually it is quite effective as a way to prevent people from getting hurt.

 This is a small barber shop where a section of the wall has fallen off.

The flowers on this cherry tree were just beginning to bloom.

One sign of how things are beginning to return to some thing near normal appeared in our newspaper this morning: there were half a dozen advertising inserts compared to the one or two that have been included for the last couple of weeks.

In many ways I think that we may be better off than people in the parts of the country supposedly unaffected by the disaster. We are getting back to normal, but there are scheduled power outages in Tokyo and many stores have bare shelves because people are hoarding, especially bottled water and paper goods like toilet paper and diapers.