Around the neighborhood - part ???

 This is at the front of my condo complex. The red box is a mail box. Mail boxes in Japan are this bright red so they are very easy to spot. On the left is a telephone/electric pole but between them is an object at the top of a blue pole. This was not here the last time I noticed.

 This is a closeup of the object at the top of the pole. It is obviously some sort of meter ant it appears to recording some sort of accumulated statistic. I looked at it carefully but there was nothing on it to indicate its function. I tried goggling the various things printed on it and the best that I could find was that one of them is the designation for a transponder. Considering that their is a grade school very close to here, my best guess is that it is a radiation meter that is sending data to some researcher or government office. I will try to find someone who knows what it is.

This is one of the beautiful old trees that separates the parking lot at Seiyu from the road. The row of trees also keeps much of the noise from the parking lot away from our complex.

This is a little park at the corner where our road crosses the main road. The grass is uncut and getting very tall but some of the grade school kids still play here.

This is the front parking lot at Seiyu. They are working on the tower that rises above the entrance. We are still expecting that supermarket and a reduced version of the department store will reopen in July.

A week or so ago I posted a picture of this same spot. On the right is a closed restaurant on the second floor and a computer store on the first. I said that I could not remember what had been there before, but at the time it was being used as a parking lot. Now,

This is the sushi restaurant that is to the left of the last picture. I has posted the progress that they made in at first just protecting the roof with blue tarps and then actually repairing the missing tiles. That work has been done for a few weeks. Now, the home on the street behind the restaurant is getting its roof repairs. Although there is still a lot of damage visible, in most places the worst of the destruction has been repaired, at least temporarily, and they are beginning to get to the lessor damage. This is not true of the areas ravished by the tsunami. There work is still focused on removing the debris. However, on a local TV news show yesterday, they interviewed people at some stores in Kesennuma, one of the hardest hit cities. The stores and restaurants were being reopened even though the buildings were still just hollow shells. On store had their products lined up on boxes on the sidewalk. One restaurant was using a portable gas stove as the only source of heat, but they were trying to get everyone's life back to some resemblance of normal.

Changing the subject completely, my life has changed substantially. Yesterday the cable company came and installed our new TV/telephone/computer system. All the channels on the TV have new numbers and the remote has a large number of new features. Also there are a lot of new channels. My internet connection speed has been increase by 33% and any telephone calls we make to AU phones are now free anywhere in Japan. The whole package will cost us substantially less than we were paying before.