Walking along the Sendai ByPass road

 Look at the roof, wall, and window of the right side of the the building, particularly the part in the center of the picture. The roof line should be straight and the window is gone completely. It appears that the building was completely wrecked.

 This is the front of the building, which used to be a restaurant, but now is an empty shell. That is actually not true. Everything is still inside the building. The bay window on the right has no glass in it, by the way.

 This is the north side of the building. Notice that, although the building has just be left as-is, the signs have all been painted over.

 This is the next building. It, too, was a restaurant but it is now windowless.

 The roof was completely trashed, but the has only partially been painted over. They probably did not want to buy more paint.

The next building survived and was still in business. It is a noodle restaurant that sell a kind of noodles that come from Shikoku, so the picture is an Ohenro-san, a pilgrim in traditional dress. When I did the pilgrimage, I wore much less fancy clothing, but I did wear a white jacket over my regular clothes. The staff that I carried was simple wood with some kanji written on it. I did wear a straw hat but I did not have a white cloth under it. In other words, I went low budget.

Walking on the south bank of Nanakita River

 This is a large do-it-yourself store. In Japan these are often called 'home centers' and they carry a wide variety of things related to the home, to cleaning, and to repairs.

 This row of puddles shows how the center of the side walk sunk during the earthquakes.

 This is beside the new fire station near my home. The sidewalk is interesting in that it extends no farther than the end of the building, where it is completely blocked by a fence.

 Mixed in with the built up areas there are patches that contain functioning rice paddies.

 This is a game center that I have shown a number of times before. They are finally beginning to repair it. One of the big problems is that there are not enough trained workmen to do everything that needs to be done. In addition the factories are not able to produce enough to keep up with demand.

This is across the Bypass road from the game center. It is a large garden with an ever larger area of rice paddies behind it. In this part of Sendai you can go from urban to suburban in just a few paces.

Nanakita Park and then toward home

 This is a piece of sculpture that moves in the wind and glistens in the sunlight. It is always a pleasure to see it.

 There are flower beds like this scattered throughout the park.

 There are also quite a few sculptures.

 On my way home I found a paper hemisphere that had held some of the fireworks from the previous night.

 As I came up the hill to the levee top walkway, I could see the smoke from a fire in which the clean up crew was burning the trash left over from the festival.

The writing on the roofs of these two tents, the upright poles have already been removed, show that they belong to two different organizations. The nearest belongs to the local neighborhood committee and the other belongs to a nearby Shinto shrine, of a completely different sect.

Nanakita Park

 On my way for a walk in Nanakita Park, I saw three of the neighborhood women out for a morning walk. They went up to the top of the levee but I stayed down by the riverside.

In one area the riverside walkway was covered with small pieces of trash. I finally realized that this was the remains of last night's fireworks.

 The slope down to the water is becoming overground. I think that by this time of year it is usually cut. Maybe they are holding off to save money this year, freeing up more funds for disaster relief.

 Inside the park there is a small network of artificial streams, but this year they have nothing but rain water in them.

 I was very surprised to find that the rotten boards on this bridge had been replaced. They have been pretty bad for a couple of years so it was very nice to see. I wonder if they were able to include the cost in the disaster repair budget.

A while back I showed this pool when it had hardly any water in it and most of the bottom was visible. Now it has a lot of water, not as much as during a normal year, but enough to cover the bottom completely. It was surprising how much more pleasant the are felt with the water, rather than the concrete bottom.