The man in the middle is the president of the company that donated the canned bread and other stuff that was shown in the last post. He had spent a year in the US as a college student and had excellent English. He had brought the truck load of supplies from a distant prefecture and was offering them for free to this group of evacuees. I should point out that both Japanese culture and Buddhism (maybe they are the same thing) stress the value of 'giving'. In our neighborhood house wives are constantly giving dishes of freshed cooked food to each other. Luckily there are some excellent cooks around here.
Also in the upper left corner you can see a pole with some things that look like banners. Actually these are
koinobori, long cloth tubes that have colorful koi, or carp, drawn on them. They are hung outside people's homes and other places where there are young boys as a decoration for Boy's Day.
This group of women are preparing cups of sake that the are distributing to people as fast as they can get ready.
The scheduled called for the place to open at 10 a.m. and for food to be served from 11. However, by 9:30 there were a lot of people there and more arriving all the time.
They did not wait until the scheduled time for serving the food, but in a very unJapanese manner started handing out food as soon as it was ready. Here some one had gotten food but was off some place. The cardboard box contains the canned bread and other stuff that was being given out.
These people are getting bowls of noodles. Eventually I had a bowl of sobs, buckwheat noodles, with tempura vegetables.
For the kids they had popcorn and cotton candy. After I took this picture, the woman who is mostly out of the picture on the left came over to me and insisted that I take a bog of popcorn. It tasted good!
On the far side of the field two barbers were giving women hair cuts and shampoos - for free.
Here a tub of hot water was prepared for people to put their feet in. This is a very popular feature at hot springs where people take off their shoes and socks and soak their feet. It really feels good. Today there was a special treat, as the people sat there, they were given a shoulder message,
The box of brown stuff is dirt and beside the box are a little containers that the Japanese use for keeping bugs as pets. In grade school, children study about different kinds of insects, so many children search for interesting ones and then keep them as pets.
I never found out the name of the restaurant but these cooks and the food came from a restaurant and, when I took this picture at about 11 a.m., they were getting charcoal fires going in two large grills. I never saw what they were preparing but I would guess that they would have prepared seafood and some beef plus possibly so sausages.
Here a woman is giving cups of sake. They also had a lot of iced beer. This must have been a treat for the people living in the shelters because alcohol is not allowed inside them.
A little after 11 there were some speeches and a minute of silence and then the shindig began officially, although some people had been partying for an hour and a half already. There was nothing special for us to do so we hung around talking to people until about 12:30 and then quietly left.
Keith and I walked from the site to the nearest bus stop. I had forgotten my camera and had to take all these pictures with my cell phone, so I could not get a good picture of this. The building in the center, the one with a second story section, has no tiles at all on the roof. There was not too much damage in this area but it was easy to see that there had been a strong earthquake.
We got off the bus and walked back toward a subway station. Keith lives very near it and I could use it to get home. The areas we walked through had many very old one story buildings, probably dating from soon after WW2. This was extremely surprising. I have never seen a building that was held together by ropes. I got home about 2 p.m. and spent the rest of the day relaxing and working on my new computer.
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