Still headed for Izumi Chuo

 The last time I came by there this building contained a restaurant specializing in yakiniku. At a yakiniku restaurant they bring plates of raw meat and vegetables to your table and you cook them yourself on a grill that is usually gas and embedded in the table. Now it is called Earth Support and is a center for home helpers, people who go to homes to assist the elderly and the sick.

Down the street there is a gas station, where regular gas was selling for 149 yen per liter, or US$ 6.88 a gallon. Since the disaster, the supply chain for gas has been restored and there are no longer any shortages, at least in Sendai. I do not know what the situation is like in the areas destroyed by the tsunami.

A little closer to Izumi Chuo, I saw a woman working in a rice paddy. She was planting rice in the spots that had been missed by the automatic planter.

The paddy is fairly big by Japanese standards. You can see the gas station in the distance on the right. Rice paddies are generally pretty small and there are absolutely no huge operations like you find in California or some other parts of the US. After WW2, Japan limited the size of farms to insure that everyone would be able to support themselves. I believe that a nuclear family was limited to 2 1/2 acres, but I could be wrong. There has been some relaxation of the laws and people can and do rent paddies, but the farms are still relatively small.

Turning and looking across the street, you can see a large hospital. This is the one that I went to when I had a kidney stone attack and they refused to see me because it was early morning and the one doctor on duty was already waiting for an ambulance that was bringing an emergency patient.

I was now in the built up area to the west of the Izumi Chuo subway station. The content of this imitation brick (real bricks collapse in earthquakes so they are seldom used) building is actually quite unusual. The building contains a coffee shop called Kenzo. Compared to Nagoya there are very few coffee shops in Sendai. That is one of the reasons that I like Starbucks so much. There are a number of shops in places that I commonly go and I like the coffee.

This place, with the red and yellow flags in front of it, is a curry shop. It is part of a chain that is cheap but good tasting. On TV I have seen blind taste tests where people have chosen this curry over real Indian curry. Since it is on the west side of the station, I never seem to remember it when I eat in Izumi Chuo. I really should keep it in mind.

This truck is a Coop truck, the Coop being the supermarket that I show a couple of days ago. The woman in the yellow T-shirt is delivering orders to the people who live in the apartment house whose shadow you can see on the sidewalk. The man in the helmet is a delivery person who came on a motorcycle that is out of the picture. As I walked up the two were talking so I assumed that they knew each other.