Odds and ends again

 This is the construction at the bridge. They have reached the landscaping phase. In the background you can see the bridge, Izumi Chuo being to the right and Yaotome to the left. Behind the bridge is the soccer stadium and behind that is Izumigadake, the nearest mountain.

 This is a little garden with a Shinto shrine. The walkway on the right is Suisen Dori, Daffodil Road, a pedestrian way that leads to Izumi Chuo

 This shows that not everyone throws their trash and cigarette butts on the ground.

 This is on the first floor of the building in which I have my art lessons. I am very curious as to what they actually do.

 This is on the first floor of a large department store. They are selling cakes and other small sweets.

To get home, I took the subway from this platform. The subway stations are very grey and a bit depressing. I wish they would decorate them like they used to do in the USSR. A few years ago I visited Tashkent and their subway stations are beautiful, each one differently but artistically decorated.

Going downtown to a JALT meeting

 I left home during the late morning on Sunday. It was obvious that few people had been out and about because there were only a couple of sets of footprints in the snow along the levee.

 In front of the apartment building between mine and the bridge, someone had made a snowman.

 At the shrine that were footprints from three or four people who had visited since the storm last night.

 I was surprised on the bridge because someone had removed a lot of the snow. The surface here becomes very slippery because of the lack of insulation under the bridge.

 A little further on I realized that the bridge had been shoveled by the men in the fire station.

I took the subway downtown and the tracks between Yaotome and the entrance to the underground were covered with snow.

Construction in my neighborhood

 Here they are beginning work on the destruction of the building. It is directly in front of our apartment complex and a long time ago was a driving school. Then it became a practice area for the police department. The rumors are that they are going to build a junior high school here, but all I know for sure is that all the buildings are coming down and the roads are coming up.

 This is also the beginning of the destruction of a building. This house is on the riverside and is finally being replaced after being severely damaged in the quakes. On the first floor you can see that they have already removed the siding. It is a huge house by Japanese standards, ten rooms. The owner said that they are replacing it with a much smaller house.

 There is also construction going on along the river. They are replacing the river bank where it was damaged in the quakes or by flooding after one of the summer taiphoons. The are building a coffer dam so that the new concrete siding, like what you can see in the foreground, can extend a meter or more underground. I took the picture from the bridge to Yaotome.

 Here is a view that shows the way they are moving dirt around on the levee. The place where the cars are parked is the flat area where the summer festival takes place.

 This is Futakashira Jinja, Two Pillar Shrine, where we visit on New Years. The man is a priest and he is raking the leaves that have started to fall in volumes.

This shows some really weird plants. I have never seen anything like them before. They are thin, white, and very lace-like. This was the only place I have ever seen them.

Ending the walk and riverbank repairs on Nanakita River

 This is the walking path going down the hill toward the station at Yaotome.

 Almost to the bottom of the path.

 The path comes out on this road. You can just see the Yaotome Subway Station in the middle. From here I walked along my familiar route to home.

 On the next day I walked along the river near my home. The water was very tempting and I almost took off my shoes to go wading in the shallows.

 The reconstruction of the riverbank is in full swing. They have brought in some power equipment and, according to the signs, they are going to build a cofferdam to keep out the water while the repair the bank and raise the river bottom a bit. The yellow stripe in the middle of the picture is actually a flag with a sign on it warning people of the construction.

The black and white objects in the picture are large woven (plastic? cloth?) bags that contain dirt. They move dirt around from construction site to construction site. When they dig it up in one place, they use it for fill in another. Also notice the temporary fence. The uprights are frogs that carry a sign apologizing for the trouble the construction is causing. 

Between Asahigaoka and Yaotome

 The road continues to follow the ridge line but is not on it. The road is a little to the east of the highest points, on the side toward the ocean which is only 10+ kilometers away. The large building on the left is the first of a group of apartment buildings.

 Apartments on the left and wherever there are apartments their are beauty shops. This one is on the right.

 The large hedge on the right blocks the view of the playground of an elementary school.

 Here the main road turns off to the right and eventually returns to the main road from Izumi Chuo to downtown Sendai. I will turn off to the left and go down the hill so that I can pass through the Yaotome Subway Station.

 In front of me at the trees there is a pedestrians only paved path that goes down the hill. The area on the right is full of apartment buildings.

This is the entrance to the pedestrian path. It goes down steeply, bending a bit to the right.

Miyagi Gakuin U and near my home

 This is the front of the admin building at Miyagi Gakuin U. The reason I took this picture does not show up well but if you look closely you can see that the tree trunks are covered with green moss. This seems to be the result of all the rain and the lack of sun.

 This is the view from our living room balcony. This crew showed up and redug the gas pipe access hole that had been opened for the repairs after the quakes. They did something that took only a few minutes and then filled it in again and left.

 This building is next to the river at the Yaotome end of the bridge. They must be repairing the damage to the outside, at least some of the tiles fell off, maybe quite a few.

 Here they have removed the fence that separated the sidewalk from the road. The upright poles are still there but the rest of the fence is gone. I suspect that they are going to remake the entire section of the sidewalk from the river to the first intersection in Yaotome. The little pedestrian bridge seems to be replaced by solid fill and now they appear to be getting ready to replace the rest of the pavement. A few months ago they finished doing the other side of the road and this side has much more traffic so I can not imagine them not doing it.

Turning around, you can see that this section of fence is completely gone. Yaotome Subway Station is just visible in the background.

Between home and Yaotome

 I was having a very interesting morning. After watching the cold war between the hawk and the crow, I passed the fire station where they were doing some sort of drill. They had ropes stretched between the practice tower and the station building. It looked like they were learning to go from rooftop to rooftop across nothing but ropes.

 This shows the group of firemen (I use the sexist term because they really are all men) at the top of the tower.

 Next to my building, someone has filled in one of the holes left by the earthquakes. This is typical of my experience in Japan - something obviously needs to be done and often, not always, but often, someone will come along and do it anonymously.

 The next day when I left home, instead of a crane fishing in the river, I found this young man.

 At the bridge the work on repairing earthquake damage to the photo shop was continuing.

The section of the sidewalk that passes over the little bridge at the top left was badly damaged during the tremors. I posted a picture of the cracks a few days ago. They are obviously going to fill in the area under the bridge and the boards show where the new wall will be constructed. This is typical of construction projects here - I have no idea whether or not it is comparable to that in other countries. The project is framed with boards and then the structure is built to fit.

Around the neighborhood

 A frequent sight these days, a survey crew is preparing for construction work on the sidewalk near Yaotome station, which you can see in the distance.

 This is the way that the time schedules are displayed on the Yaotome station platform. People will take photos of the schedule with their keitai, cell phone. Most keitai in Japan have a setting on the camera called Business. This function analyzes the content of a picture and tries to straighten out the lines. If you take a picture of a schedule with this function, the picture is altered so that all the lines of data are alined even though you took the picture at an angle. It is pretty neat.

 Here a crew has started work on repairing the damage to the local photo shop.

 Beyond the torii of the little shrine between my condo and the main road, you can just see some of the scaffolding around the back of the building that holds our Seiyu supermarket, and a number of other stores, as well as a skating rink.

 Even though the rainy season is still in full force, the fruit trees seem to think that it is summer.

In the Seiyu complex of buildings, the store nearest the street is a large size clothing store, and it is the first one to be open for business again. Work seems to be progressing rapidly on the rest of the complex but there is still no official indication as to when things will reopen. We are especially interested in the supermarket because we now have to do all of our shopping at Ito Yokado and Silva in Izumi Chuo, and they are almost two kilometers away.

Remaining damage at Izumi Chuo and the road to Yaotome

 

 These continue from the last entry. This picture is the wall of Selva. You can see where many of the tiles have fallen off. The structure at the bottom is a roof that allows people to get into the storage area in the basement without having to dodge falling tiles.

 Turing around, you can see the same thing on the wall of Ito Yokado. This is the wall that the workmen in yesterdays entry were repairing.

 Returning to the riverside walkway near my home, the second of the two walls that collapsed is nearing completion. The U-shaped concrete structures were used to create a drainage ditch along the levee on the side away from the river. Both of the current construction projects are filling in the space between the new wall and the levee so this ditch has been removed.

 In front of the fire station I discovered a new sign saying that there was construction work 50 meters ahead. Actually the red and white magnetic add-on says that they are not working at the moment.

 This is what they are repairing. It is a short concrete bridge over a little valley like place. As you can see, it is badly cracked. As we will see in the future, this work is going to be more than just repairs to the bridge.

 I never did figure out exactly what this store did, their business plan. The inside was full of samples of different kinds of bottled water, ranging from small bottles to the large containers that go in water fountains that you find in offices.  A while after they opened the water related business and using the left end of the space, they opened a B-class take out shop selling riceballs wrapped in beef. Again I could not figure out the connection between the two, but they were obvious related since the space was continuous. If you walked in the door, the cooking area was on your left and the bottled water samples on your right. In any case, I will never find the answers. The inside is now empty and it appears that they have closed.

This is the view looking south from the subway platform, which is on the third floor here, at Yaotome Station. The apartment building on the left is finally having the earthquake damage repaired. From the platform it appears that the damage is mostly tiles that are loose or have fallen off.