May 22, 2011 – Our first fruit delivery to Rikuzentakata! Minami and I picked up about 15 boxes of bananas in Honjo before hitting the road towards the east coast of Tohoku. The drive down was pretty straight forward minus a detour due to a damaged bridge from the earthquake. On our way down we stopped by to check out another fruit source we heard of in Kitakami (Thanks Rob!).

Super Osen is like a HUGE mega grocery store, but everything is super CHEAP! There was definitely a reason the whole parking lot was packed at about 9:30 a.m. Inside the store was pure madness! I couldn’t believe how many people were crammed in there trying to take advantage of all the bargains! Since we loaded up first in Honjo, we could only fit about 7 more boxes of bananas in the car, but each box of ~74 bananas cost only 1600yen! We were shocked! They are definitely going to see us back there in the future. We rolled into Rikuzentakata a little after noon. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking driving into these areas of devastation, and of course we heard about the tsunami’s impact on this area, but nothing could have prepared us for what we saw. It was shocking to see how high the water level rose, and how far inland the tsunami came. Even driving several km away from the coast, we still saw whole communities that were flattened.

For the complete article and more about the Fruit Tree Project, see the VolunteerAKITA blog.