I endeavoured to seek out some of the places where I had been in Sept 2011. Below is a factory where we spent a day scrubbing rust from metal brackets, for a not particularly clear purpose. There were no walls there when we worked there. See http://ponkanchan.blogspot.jp/2011/09/rikuzen-takada-7-what-we-did-fri.html It now seems to be a nama-kon (fresh concrete) factory. Concrete is be a boom product in the race to rebuild tsunami walls etc. It's pretty political as construction companies historically have a thick money trail that leads to politicians, and sometimes the underworld with a lot of corrupt dealing. (Think TEPCO and Fukushima.)
The pictures further are going around the bay to Hirota peninsula. I didn't have a very good sense of where we had volunteered without reference to a map (the one on my phone was too small to make out clearly) so we didn't go to Hirota-cho or Otomo-cho where I'd been in 2011.
View Rikutaka in a larger map
This is the factory on the map
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| Looking towards the inland from the factory |
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| Looking out into the bay at the oyster beds |
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| The view from the high land at the opening to the Hirota peninsula. These homes would have been above the tsunami level. |
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| New homes being built. I imagine this would be out of tsunami area |
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| what to do with the water's edge is a big dilemma in some places. |
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| Looking out on the bay. Hirota Peninsua on the left, the factory on the right. |
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| We didn't venture far down the peninusula & didn't go to the Otomocho school or the Hirota cho area where we did volunteer work - picking out and picking up debris. |
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| Back towards the former centre of the town. |
2 comments:
That fourth photo, of the houses on the higher land? That's where I would've lived anyway, for the view.
Your posts have made me realize how complex the current group dynamics in these towns must be. I imagine the wa is at breaking point at times.
It often seems the houses on the high ground, don't aim to take advantage of the view... very strange. Donald Richie makes the same comment in the Insland see.
Teasing out the complexities of human relations doesn't sell newspapers.
It gets glossed over a lot.
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