In the afternoon we had made 4 stops at different families to provide some supplies. Before we headed back to Tokyo we wanted to have a look at the Ishinomaki harbor. This was one of the areas that was most damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March. The coast line here sunk around 0.5 meter. The photo below shows a building that was on the dock just a few meters from the water. Now the ground floor is in water. In front of it you can see the light posts in the middle of a former road, which now looks more like a water way between what is now the new roads made of dumped stones and gravel.
From the harbor we continued to a mountain of dead cars. Here many cars that were destroyed in the Ishinomaki area during the tsunami have been collected and piled on top of each other.
Just passed the car mountain was an open space with nothing more than green grass growing between the only thing left of many houses, their foundations. This was a few hundred meters from the ocean and most houses here was swept away.
This final round trip in Ishinomaki was probably the most difficult part of the whole trip. Of course it is difficult to meet people that lost their homes and more but the people we met had such big smiles and seemed to be full of hope. Here the atmosphere was much worse, the only thing you could see was all the devastation and all the lives that had been destroyed.
