Where Everybody's Crazy

You can tell a lot about a country, particularly a highly literate country like Japan, by the books that people buy. I walked into a book shop today, (I don't do this anything like often enough) and the books on the main display were a complete sociology lesson: books about the hikikomori syndrome (by survivors), books about "how to restart your life", one on "eight great founders of the world" (Socrates, Confucius, Jesus and Moses were in, Mohammed was not), and things on Iran and Israel.

I don't read Japanese books much - I only just managed to stumble through my first book unaided a few months back - and because of this I don't pick up on a lot of the currents going through the society. So I took a look at this week's bestsellers list at Kinokuniya bookshop and here's what I found. I've taken the usual translator's liberties.

1. A type-B's self-explanation - we're talking blood group here, and since blood group (obviously!) determines personality, this is about what a type B person says about themselves. First entry on the personality theme.
2. Washing your face and washing your heart - I can't find much about this but it seems to be a meditation on daily life with washing the face as a metaphor. For what, I don't know. I'm going to put this one under self-improvement.
3. The wish-granting elephant - A novel about an ordinary office worker who wants to change his life, and bumps into the god Ganesha (who speaks in broad West-Japan dialect) and his friend, the Buddha. Hey, I just translate them, I don't make them up. First entry on the religion theme, with shades of self-improvement in there.
4. A type-A's self-explanation - Blood group again. Written by the author of A type-B's self-explanation, which suggests a certain physical impossibility.
5. The brain-building study method - A neurologist's take on studying. First entry on the education theme.
6. The 3% management idea - Subtitles "Have your client treat you to lunch", and "If the ideas change, then the management will change too". First entry on the business theme.
7. Hexagon drill - General knowledge quizzes for junior and middle school children.
8. The emotional economy - A quizbook on economic psychology and psychological economics.
9. The story of the wound - Third part of a ghost-story trilogy.
10. Japanese food - Kinda self-explanatory.
11. The bride's final month - The story of a young bride-to-be's fight with cancer. I'm surprised the health theme takes this long to appear.
12. The provinces strike back - If I'm reading this right, it's sort of "How to get ahead in your life even if you don't live in Tokyo"
13. Put all your information into one notebook - How to organise your time, information, plans and ideas.
14. New human revolution, part 18 - Yet more doctrinal exposition of the Sokka Gakkai religion.
15. I'm fine - Usual self-improvement "seven steps to healthy living" stuff. Including the earth-shattering "Don't hate yourself when you make a mistake".
16. How to read your medical report
17. Reading the Tannisho - An explanation of Shinran Buddhism.
18. The laws of life - New-age-y self-improvement.
19. Golden Slumbers - Novel about (I think) someone getting framed for assassinating the Prime Minister.
20. Puri Puri - Monthly magazine of babycare hints, tips and ideas
21. The bond of the shooting-star - Three siblings take a vow to avenge their murdered parents.
22. The Middle-age Revolution - How to stay well and have lots of sex.
23. My darling's a foreigner - with a baby! - The continuing saga of Tony Laszlo's family. I used to give him Linux advice back in the day.
24. The restaurant snail - Chick lit. Girl opens a restaurant to take her mind off an unrequited love.
25. First year of marriage - So I gotta talk about this one a bit. Henrietta was asked recently if she was doing any "marriage preparation". The contents of this book will tell you what sort of "preparation" people mean: "Money, health and manners", "Fundamentals of cooking", "Fundamentals of cleaning", "Fundamentals of washing", "Fundamentals of tidying".

No, seriously, you want to read this one.

If Google took you to this page because you have one of these keyboards and a Mac, and you don't know what to do with it, skip to where it says "The short version." Meanwhile, here's the long version.

On Thursday I took delivery of a new (well, second hand) MIDI keyboard. It's a very nice piano, with a great weighted-key feel and a nice bank of sounds. I'd not normally trust Casio for this kind of thing, but my boss had a look around and said it was one of the best on the market.

It also has a couple of MIDI ports on the back, and a USB socket. Excited at the idea of being able to compose songs straight onto my computer again, I hooked it all up, and then read the instructions. (You know how it goes.) And I found those magic words: "Macintosh not supported." I tried it anyway, and really, it wasn't supported.

At this point, I had two options - buy another USB to MIDI convertor (I think I have one in the UK somewhere, but very few people sell them these days) or reverse-engineer the protocol and write my own driver. I should note at this point I have no idea whatsoever how to write device drivers, for any OS, least of all OS X, but I still fancy myself as a bit of a reverse engineer, so I set to work.

Imagine my disappointment when, after a few hours of fiddling, I found that the protocol was just plain old MIDI over USB. Absolutely nothing special about it at all. Apart from the fact that the keyboard's USB interface, for some inane reason, didn't announce itself as an ordinary MIDI-class device, and so the operating system had no idea what to do with it.

But after breaking the protocol (such as it was), I still had no device driver. Thankfully, the standard OS X Developer package includes an example of a USB MIDI device driver. All I needed to do was plug in the manufacturer and device ID, and recompile, and I had a working driver. Depressingly easy, really.

The short version

You can download the device driver here. Put it into the directory it specifies, which if my packaging skills don't work properly, should be /Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers.

There is one slight annoyance. OS X loads its MIDI drivers once it wants to use them. The Casio keyboard, on the other hand, wants to talk with the computer on the USB interface as soon as it's turned on, so that it can determine whether or not to use USB or the MIDI ports. To convince the keyboard to talk on the right interface, you need to (a) turn it off, (b) open a Terminal, (c) type /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMIDIServer.framework/MIDIServer and hit return, (d) turn on the keyboard. It should now happily report that the active port is USB. Then you're good to go.

My blog is really a surrogate short-term memory. If I don't blog, I can't remember what I've been doing recently. And it has been a fairly hectic few weeks.

My mother was here for three weeks, which was great, and I have a much tidier house and garden as a result. We then spent three days thinking about what sort of orientation programme our new missionaries should undergo - on the condition that the new missionaries coming up with the plan should also go through it themselves! We've come up with a programme which should hopefully be as challenging as it is informative, and will also be a stimulus to the rest of the field as well as the new missionaries.

It feels like since then the past two weeks have been a blur, because from there, my schedule went: pastor's meeting; media team meeting; meet up with an old friend from Oxford who was passing through the area; weekly meeting with pastor; day off; preaching and church vision meeting; preparation for missionary conference plus time with Henrietta; climbing a mountain; (it was the Midori no Hi - Green Day - holiday so the church did something involving being out in the greenery) two more days of conference preparation and another weekly meeting with my pastor, and that takes us up to today. This is why I haven't been blogging much.

Today I played football. No, really, don't laugh. We had an Argentinean professional coach over, who's in Japan to set up soccer schools and share his testimony with the kids he teaches. Our numbers today were swelled by the soccer team from Omi Kyodaisha School which (ObVories) is the school set up by Vories.

I'm presenting about Vories at the missionary conference, and I need to take some more time to look over that. I'm also preaching tomorrow, and I suppose I need to take some more time to decide what I'm going to say...

It's been - and still is - a busy month. Much to report and not much time to report it. Meanwhile, I've been doing some research, and I've put together what I think is the best and fullest timeline of Vories' life and mission (5M PDF) available.

There are some things I like about this country, and some things I don't like.

A conversation with my pastor today:

S: We need to start recruiting a new generation of pastors. Perhaps we should connect with some Bible colleges and offer exchange programmes or something like that?

P: Well, yes, but if we did that, we'd have to decide upon what sort of theological position we want to take as a denomination.

S: Eh, aren't there any non-denominational Bible colleges?

P: There are plenty of colleges which are not run by or supported by denominations, but even they all have their own particular theological perspectives.

S: What?

Time passes. A light dawns.

S: So, Japan is a group-culture society, right? In, let's say, a university politics department, would you have people of different political opinions?

P: Of course not. The kyoujukai (professors' group) gets to decide on any new faculty members, and they would only accept people who they knew they would get along with. So generally they would choose their own disciples, people they'd taught. And if you disagree with an important professor, then your academic career is basically over. You basically have to go to the States and become a professor there.

S: And it's the same in Bible colleges? You only ever get staff who have the same theological position as each other?

P: Right.

Maybe I'm just being an arrogant Westerner here, but if you can't have free intellectual debate in your universities, what the hell is the point of having them?

It's been a very, very busy week. It still is very busy, so I'll tell you about it later. For now I want to work something through in my head.

Normally when I preach, I use a method called theocentric preaching. Basically the idea is: the Bible is not a book about me. It is a book about God. If I want to handle the Bible faithfully, then I have to talk about what the Bible says about God, not what it says about me. I try to bring out of the Bible passages something about God's character, and on the whole leave people to take in for themselves how they should live in the light of it.

Now there are a couple of problems with this, of course. The Bible is not just a book about God, it's a book about how God deals with people. And if you don't have any application at all, then people can't relate to what you're saying. But the idea is that you start with the character of God, and don't rush away to application.

Anyhow, that's what I normally do. This week's sermon is a bit different. If anything it has a weakness that it's too anthropocentric. In fact if I were honest it's one of those types of sermons I don't like listening to, one which uses the Biblical text as a jumping-off point for random soliloquy. Well, some weeks you hit and some weeks you miss.

But one of the things I'm talking about is the idea of giri and what should be the Christian understanding of it. I've written about giri here before; it's the obligations that you have to repay people as a result of a gift economy.

As a foreigner, I'm actually really scared of talking about this because I know that I don't understand all the subtleties. I know that there is a very easy mistake I could make here. I could assume that because giri is related to obligation, it is antithetical to love. I know that's not the case. Sometimes - often - a giri repayments can be completely from the heart, just like the set expressions that you say to people can be heartfelt even though they're just set expressions.

But at the same time, giri is certainly to do with obligation, and I know that some people find it difficult to joyfully receive something because they don't want to handle the obligation involved. I can't help thinking that a feeling of obligation when you receive something is a handicap to fully appreciating the grace of God. And yes, I know that when I say that I'm sounding very much like the Canadian missionaries who wanted the potlatch outlawed because it wasn't capitalist enough. I don't see anything wrong with a gift economy. I do see something wrong with duty rather than love being a motivation for service.

So I have a sermon about how Jesus, through a once-and-for-all graceful act, broke the cycle of giri. You simply can't pay back when Jesus did. Nothing you can do can make it up to him. The only response you have available is to gratefully receive. But gratefully receiving takes practice, and if you can't gratefully receive the small and insignificant good that people do to you, you will find it hard to gratefully receive the insurmountable good that Jesus did to you.

Well, that's my reading of the cultural situation anyway. As a foreigner I'm really not the best person to be talking about this. I've tried to find a Japanese Christian perspective on giri, but I've come up blank so far. Maybe this is something we need a discussion about. For the time being, I have a horrible feeling my own soliloquy will have to do.

(I've started blogging in Japanese again; click the 日 button below if that's something that concerns you...)

One wedding, two fake weddings, one dedication, and, today, an exorcism. I've nearly collected the full vicar set. Oh, and today, "visiting preacher", which I think is worth a few points.

How the heck did this happen? I'm sure that some time in the not too distant past I was a computer programmer whose biggest problem was the most elegant way to code a particular algorithm. Now I'm saying "visiting preacher" like it's part of normal life.

It feels like a year since last Sunday. I honestly can't remember all of the things that have happened in the last week, which means I probably need to blog more. I've preached four - different - sermons in the past two Sundays. Last week I was also a "visiting preacher" in Kusatsu church, and preached at our Latin group in the evening. Monday, a Japanese lesson in the morning and some time to catch my breath in the afternoon. Tuesday, a few of us from church went to the Vories exhibition, which is why I came back blogging all melancholy. Wednesday: I have no recollection. Thursday, trying and failing to write a sermon; played go in the afternoon. Lost. Friday, talking with Takahashi-sensei in the morning, and then off to western Kyoto to be a foreign guest at an English school's end of term party. Saturday with H, and then today, preaching at Kyoto Ai No Church in the morning, and our English service in the afternoon.

I'll try to write some kind of analysis of all this later, but for now, I've frankly had enough.

From God's Plan For Children, by Dave Roberts, here are some really good questions.

• Do the adults in our church greet the children by name?
• Is there any cross-generational conversation?
• In the case of toddlers and younger children, are we willing to crouch down to their level to talk with them?
• Are the facilities we provide for their classes warm, comfortable, age-appropriate and well kept?
• How many times a year does the church leadership meet with the children's ministry team?
• Is there a role for a children's activity in the main congregational worship time?
• Do we use younger people and children in servant roles in church life, such as ushering, worship groups and a myriad of other tasks, thus significantly increasing their sense of belonging?
• Do we publically affirm those who teach our children in the same way that we honour others in the congregation who undertake major projects or foreign trips?
• Do the children in our church ever get asked to read the Bible publicly or pray?
• If the church prays for people who respond to what God may have said to the congregation, are their children amongst those doing the praying?

Today I went with a few people from my church to visit an exhibition of William Merrell Vories' life and work. I'd actually been to the exhibition before, but I wanted to see it a second time. To be honest, I've developed quite an interest in Vories. Some would say an unhealthy interest. But I think it's an important interest.

Vories had a vision which inspired his whole life. As he put it, his vision was "to build the Kingdom of God in Omi". (This is also the title of a short biography of Vories by Naohiko Okamura.) Which is the same vision that also inspires my life! Of course I'm going to find this man interesting.

When he arrived in Japan, he was given this "advice":

Omi, where you are going, is surrounded by mountains and is culturally isolated. The influence of Buddhism is strong and Christian mission is extraordinarily difficult. No preparations have been made for you and it probably can't be helped if you have no success there.

Omi is the name for the northern part of lake Biwa, and the area where WEC Japan concentrates its mission. Omi is where we are. Omi is where I am.

Vories came to Omi in 1905. Soon he had a Bible study group at his school where around a hundred people came to read the Bible together. A few years later he built the YMCA in Omi-Hachiman. In 1911, the "Omi Mission" was founded.

Let me tell you about the Omi Mission.

The Omi Mission was holistic before people talked about holistic mission. Vories had an architects' office, long before people talked about business as mission. He built churches, houses, schools, universities, all over Japan. The Omi Mission, and Vories in particular, literally changed the face of the country.

The mission had two evangelistic boats, the "Jordan-maru" and the "Galilee-maru", from which the mission travelled around Lake Biwa, preaching the Gospel. The area around Lake Biwa is the area where WEC Japan operates today.

They had a school, where Christian education was given, and Vories negotiated the rights to manufacture and sell Mentholatum in Japan. (British readers may be helped to know that Metholatum is the American equivalent of our Vic Vaporub.) The factory allowed the Omi Mission to employ and train those who had no other hope or other means of employment. They had a hospital. They had a printing press and a publishing company. They had libraries. They had churches. They had both Japanese and foreign staff. In fact, the majority of the staff was Japanese. They supported themselves throughout their mission with the work of their enterprises, all based on Christian principles. As far as missiology goes, they did everything right. If you want a textbook example of a great mission, you should study the Omi Mission.

Oh, and they had mission outreaches both through the YMCA system and as actual church plants to Maibara, Nodo, Katata, Minakuchi, and Imazu.

This is particularly painful for me. I am about to start a church group in Maibara. Why is it painful?

Here is a map, produced at the height of the Omi Mission, detailing all of their activities: (click for enlarged version)

WEC entered Japan in the 1950s, and, for theological reasons, refused to work with Vories. (He caused a storm in missiological circles by taking Japanese nationality in a Shinto ceremony in 1941. Obviously no true Christian would attend a ceremony at a Shinto shrine, even if it allowed him to stay in Japan during the war and even influence the Japanese Imperial family directly afterwards.) Now we are slowly catching up to the point that the Omi Mission got to fifty years ago.

As I have said, I am just about to start a church group in Maibara.

Vories planted a church in Maibara fifty years ago.

It's gone now.

Let me let you into a secret. For a mission that got everything right, not a single one of Vories' missionary endeavours remain today.

The Maibara YMCA, the railway mission and the library have all been demolished. There is simply no trace of them. The Imazu mission center, the Katata center, the Noda center, the Minakuchi center, they are all gone. The boats, the schools, the factories, the hospital, the YMCAs, the libraries, the churches.

All gone.

A flourishing mission which was revolutionary for its time and was, according to the evaluation of this time, doing everything right, simply disappeared without trace.

Not fifty years ago.

Do you think our work lasts? Do you think it is important? Do you think that what we do here has any kind of lasting value?

At the end of his life, this man who had almost single-handedly built up a fantastic mission organisation - and in his personal life, outside of the mission, had completely transformed Japan - referred to himself as "a failure".

Maybe this the missionary's work ethic coming in again. But maybe he had a sense of what was coming. He wrote that he was worried that the Omi Mission had lost the Holy Spirit and had lost its direction.

Omi, where you are going, is surrounded by mountains and is culturally isolated. The influence of Buddhism is strong and Christian mission is extraordinarily difficult. No preparations have been made for you and it probably can't be helped if you have no success there.

I do not believe that my work here is going to fare any better.