The German-Japanese friendship

Now we continued upwards... We flew to Tokyo. The weather was anything but a welcoming greeting and it poured buckets. However, it wasn't a big deal because we actually spent the day on the plane and buses, as we turned our backs on Tokyo immediately after landing and drove further north, to Sendai, by bus (here we also encountered the next funny Japanese invention... the 'sleep visor' - see last picture!) . We had a date! A joyful German-Japanese reunion with a friend we hadn't seen in a long time - Kunimi! I (Lisa) and Kunimi had met about 10 years ago in Australia and had lived together in Melbourne for a while. It was a great time with beautiful memories! The reunion was fantastic and it was also great that we were allowed to spend a night at her family's home, and thus get a glimpse behind the scenes of a Japanese household. We were greeted with joy! The language barriers between the parents, their 89-year-old grandmother, and us were quickly overcome... because technology has also provided a solution here. However, the translation programs produced mostly nonsensical things, which contributed more to amusement than to real help. 😊 In the morning, we had a typical Japanese breakfast with the family. It was very, very nice!

The weather didn't cooperate completely in Sendai either, and it was bitterly cold. However, Kunimi's parents were so kind as to lend us two warm - and much too big 😊 jackets. Kunimi then showed us around the area by car, we did some nice activities (city festival with fighting samurais, traditional dances and to a fox park, which was really strange and smelled quite bad!), ate a lot, drank a lot of sake, and enjoyed ourselves in a typical Japanese bath - an "onsen" (a hot volcanic spring) while separated by gender. First, you meticulously wash yourself, then you can enter the bath - just as God created me - and then pure relaxation follows! - unfortunately, there is no picture of this to avoid censorship - sorry 😉

But what will also stay in our memory is the visit to Matsushima, very close to Sendai and about 100 km away from Fukushima. Here, there is an information and memorial site for the tsunami disaster in 2011. We still remember that day well, we were in Brazil at the time, shocked, sitting in front of the television. Now we were actually standing at exactly that place, or one of those places, where the wave, or waves, hit the land back then. Geographically speaking, Japan is in a quite delicate region. Slight, mostly barely noticeable earthquakes are normal here, but occasionally they are also stronger. As a result, the electricity initially goes out. For the people here, this was "normal" and therefore became fatal for many. The tsunami was preceded by a strong earthquake in the sea, the electricity went out, and unfortunately, the people here did not receive the warning about the tsunami. They went back to their daily routine after the earthquake and started cleaning up the wreckage when the wave hit the land 1 hour and 6 minutes later. The information site was very interesting and we gained some deeper insights. The videos and before-after photos were very impressive. In addition, a psychological project was exhibited in which children were asked to depict their personal experiences of that day. Very moving and not easy to digest. The wave was over 8 meters high and literally flattened everything. Not a single stone is left standing. Today, you can still recognize streets and sidewalks, but all the buildings of the former 6,000-inhabitant town are missing. Some people still live here in emergency shelters. In commemoration, a stone pillar was erected that shows the height of the wave....