From an article in today’s Oregonian:
http://photos.oregonlive.com/oregonian/2012/04/japan_tsunami_cleanup.html
It looks like soda anyway. Juice or tea, maybe? A lot of it. Anyone have any idea about the significance of this? Is it a Japan thing? A tsunami thing? I can’t think of a reason you’d leave bottled drinks at a memorial.
An educated guess: an offering to a dead child.
I don’t know Japanese culture well, but in Korean culture, it is traditional to give offerings of alcoholic spirits (and food) to deceased ancestors. (Actually, living ancestors expect alcoholic gifts as well. 
) But it seems strange to offer alcohol to a child, even a dead one. So I would guess the pop is for a deceased child.
That would be my guess as well; either that or just for someone who liked soft drinks.
Incidently, it’s not just a Japanese and/or Korean thing. I’m British and apparently there’s cans and/or bottles of beer that have been left on graves in the cemetary at the end of my road. I guess that some things just feel right.
Dead people like food and drinks just as much as they like flowers and stuffed animals, in my experience.
Sure, I’ve seen similar things here and there in the US as well, but what made me wonder about the photo was the sheer amount - that’s a lot of soda! And maybe a high number of the 50 people killed there were children. I don’t know for sure - I couldn’t find mention of it in the article.
Just seemed odd…like there’s a story behind it.
I don’t think it’s soda. I see what appear to be water bottles on the left, and various brands of oolong tea (usually drunk cold) on the right. A few of the ones in the middle might be soda. The offerings appear pretty recent, so it might be that they are seasonal (i.e. cold drinks) because the weather is starting to warm up.
If one of us worked at NCIS we could have Abby zoom in on that sign, skew it so it was straight on, sharpen up the pixels, and automatically translate it from Japanese into English, so we would know exactly what the memorial was for.
Roddy
It’s hard to tell exactly, but I can spot a number of teas.
I see some Sokenbicha, some Oi green tea, some Calpis, possibly some hot hoji tea (you can tell it’s meant to be sold hot by the orange cap.) There’s something that looks like a coffee can on the right. On the left, the bottles may be water, or Pokari Sweat.
There aren’t any religious rules about what you should offer to the dead, although fruit and sake are common. Often, people will chose something that the deceased appreciated. It seems common to offer popular bottled beverages in these sorts of public tragedies. The logic goes that they’re very popular with the living, and thus likewise with the dead.
Yes, it’s a Japan thing. Many times in Japan I saw memorials to the dead which included cans of soda. I think the idea is to have stuff which the dead person enjoyed. Because you would normally see the soda by the side of the road where it seemed likely that a young person died in a motorcycle accident.
Each person who comes by will leave a couple of bottles. But also drink offerings are made because there wasn’t enough to drink in the aftermath of the quake.