Where Everybody's Crazy

As I wrote this morning, we had our second Maibara Revive meeting today. I arrived at church this morning to listen to a litany of people who couldn't make it. Takahashi-sensei said, "Well, it could be just the four of us..."

In the event, it was pretty much standing room only - last month's nine had grown to fifteen, mainly Nagahama church people although there was a couple I had not seen at all before. I felt I was able to share my vision for the group a bit more freely, and I think that although people aren't 100% convinced, they're prepared to play along with me and see where it goes.

I kind of want to lay out that vision here as well, because it's kind of where I'm up to with how we should be doing mission in Japan, and it would be good to get some feedback on that; it's obviously incredibly early days I know but I'm hoping that Maibara could be a model for what I call "light" church planting. Now there is nothing new in any of this, it's all mashed up bits of house church and church planting movements and traditional models, and I've taken out the bits I don't agree with and stirred the rest together. It's not revolutionary at all. The only important bit is - we're actually trying it. And as I said, this is where I'm up to now. If I still believe this in a few years time, that will mean I haven't learnt anything in the interim.

Also it may sound like I know what I'm doing here. I don't. I'm completely making this up as I go along. And it might not work at all. But it sounds good, and it's good to have a plan, and the plan goes like this:

I've come to believe that mission should be centrifugal, not centipedal and that church is a place for getting people ready to go out into mission. (Acts 1:4,8)

I've also seen a few things in traditional Japanese church planting which have made me want to do the exact opposite: first, how traditional churches have an unmobilized laity and a strong dependence on the missionary or pastor to do any and all ministry; second, setting up a church consumes a huge amount of time and other missionary resources. One of our church plants (well, to be honest and to avoid calling anyone out, a composite of several of our church plants into one fictitious example) has consumed 15 missionary-years and I have no idea how much money to establish a congregation of five. I'm not at all saying we have to do the most efficient thing and measure our church planting in terms of manhours per soul - not just no, but hell no - but on the other hand, I don't want to be wasting my and everyone else's time with stuff that's just not happening.

See, the real problem with a "heavy" church like that is that we feel compelled to "protect our investment". (The concept of a sunk cost being a tricky one for people to get hold of, and pride being sadly a factor too.) Heavy churches must not be allowed to fail, because think of all we've done for them. Because heavy churches can't be allowed to fail, we get all protective and controlling over what happens in them. I want to see "light" churches, that can be set up by one or two people in an afternoon, and which we also hold lightly. If they fail, that's OK, because we haven't invested a great deal in them and it's easy enough to try again with another one. (If you see shades of Agile Methods in this idea, that's probably not coincidental. And the current Maibara Revive, which kind of has to be up and running within the next six months, could well be the "one to throw away")

So a light church is outward-focussed, low reliance, high reproducability and simple and easy to set up. This comes pretty much from the Church Planting Movements concept of church.

How practically am I going about planting a "light" church in Maibara? First I trained up a small group of believers from Nagahama church. They are not Maibara residents. I trained them in the Ten-Gai-Nai meeting method that I'll outline below, going through a few meetings in this style to get them used to it, before withdrawing (actually going back to the UK) to allow them to lead one themselves. Now I have a core of five or six believers who (a) are comfortable with what's going to happen next, and (b) are fired up about evangelism. Working with a core from the existing church is critical even in pioneer situations because it's the only way that current Christians will learn about taking on hands-on ministry themselves. You can't just teach them about it - you've got to do it with them.

Next we found somewhere to meet. The community centre was not my first choice, but now we're there it fits so well. The early church met in Solomon's Portico of the Temple not because it was a religious building in which to segregate themselves from society, but because it was right at the very heart of Jewish society. Our meetings are being held at the social and cultural heart of Maibara, and that's how it should be. It also allows us to do centrifugal evangelism by getting involved in the existing social groups meeting at the community centre, which is a heck of a lot easier than having to spend a lot of time and effort reproducing those same groups in a church setting. (Which I believe is the main weakness in Dan Iverson's otherwise brilliant "side-door evangelism" strategy; the other weakness being that it is fundamentally centripetal not centrifugal.)

Then we chose a name. Names are important. I chose "Maibara Revive" because it's exciting, inspiring and it doesn't contain the word "church". It's also an "umbrella name" we can use not just for our monthly meeting but also as the "sponsoring organisation" for our outreach programmes.

Now we have a meeting place and a core of fired-up believers, we call in the current Maibara residents from the church. They don't have to know about Ten-Gai-Nai because we already have a team who can do it and demonstrate it. They just come to the meetings, and we do Ten-Gai-Nai with them.

Ten-Gai-Nai is a "simple theology" by Mitsuo Fukuda; I wrote a bit about it here. Applying the Ten-Gai-Nai schema to a church meeting, you get a programme like this:

• Ten: Relationship with God. Hold a time of praise, thanksgiving and joy. There are many ways you can do this, we do a fairly traditional praise time with singing and keyboard accompaniment, people requesting songs they want to sing from a songbook. I want to encourage people to pray out simple prayers of thanksgiving during this time as well, but we're not there yet.
• Gai: Relationship with those outside. Get into same-sex triplets and pray for two people each that God has laid on one's heart to evangelise. Try to keep the same triplets each time and report back on what's happened since the last meeting.
• Nai: Relationship within the church, building up the body of Christ. This has two elements, an inductive Bible study and sharing prayer requests. The inductive Bible study consists of selecting a passage of Scripture for study, reading it around, then reading it two or three times silently and prayerfully asking God to teach each person something from the passage, and then reading it around again. We then share in same-sex pairs, and each member of the pair reports back to the whole group what the partner shared. This way people are sharing their own experiences in a limited, small context, but since you are not presenting your own experience to the whole group but your partner's experience, there is no need to feel reticent about speaking out in public.
• Today we closed with the Lord's Prayer. (Exercise: Identify the Ten-Gai-Nai schema implicit in the Lord's Prayer.)

There are many nice features about this. Firstly, it's fairly complete. Think about these three relationships, and do them in community, and I don't think you're going to go too far wrong. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's more complete than most traditional church meetings, which often have a Ten and a Nai but no Gai.

Second, the "leader" of this kind of meeting is merely a faciliator. The true leader and teacher is God. This means that anyone, if trained up and given trust and reassurance, can "lead" the meeting. No dependence on a pastor, big win!

Third, everyone participates and everyone hears from God. No hangers on. Ministry becomes something for the masses, not the professionals. And if you start with a mature and fired-up group of believers, other believers will look at them and say "if they can do it - and they're not clergy and they haven't been to Bible college - then so can I." And they do. It's fanastic.

So now we have a Christian group meeting regularly to do worship and teaching and intercession. Hey presto, instant church! But don't call it a church, because then people will have unhelpful expectations about what it should become. They'll want their own building and pastor, and it will get all heavy again. So just call it a "meeting" or whatever.

This is the stage we have got to so far at Maibara, after two meetings. The next stage is broadening the community. Our members are all of a similar age and generation, and have been Christians for so long they don't have much in the way of social networks outside of the church. This is so often the way. So we persuade them to get more involved in the community and their workplaces and spread the Gospel there. We also bring in missionaries to help reach communities outside of the current age range.

My plan for doing this in Maibara involves using short-term missionaries to work with the community center to put on evangelistic programmes. We're astonishingly privileged to have a completely open door there, and I checked in today saying I was thinking of starting up some children's English classes and is that something they would like us to do? Yes, they would. So we are serving the community, which is important for a church to do, and another reason not to segregate oneself off in one's own church building.

I've always hesitated about English teaching, again because it can suck up missionary resources for ever and ever without actually achieving anything, and when you start something like that, it's hard to stop. So the plan is to put on a fixed-term of "English club" meetings for high schoolers, which also provide opportunities for personal testimony (with translation) and discussion of pastoral topics which are live issues in Japan, such as family life, school, bullying, etc. It's important that we can come before the kids and show our weaknesses to them, as hopefully that will help them open up and share their own concerns with us, and also it gives us a chance to show how God has been active in real this-worldly terms in our own lives. Additionally, doing all this in English will hopefully provide a "level of abstraction" away from their ordinary lives which should also help them to open up. We're again fortunate that Maibara high school has the best English programme in the county, and those kids should be able to speak pretty well about personal stuff if they want to.

After the term - maybe ten weeks - ends, we will do a short programme, again in English, for those interested in learning more about Christianity. I'm writing a course similar to the Alpha Course but designed specifically for Japan - dealing with issues like "What is real love?", "How can I love myself?" and so on.

We'll also use our short-termers to do various international-style events as a way of contact-making. Oh, and I should probably do some work myself as well. But not too much. That's another thing I'm trying to model.

Like I said, making it up as I go along. But hopefully we can demonstrate something in Maibara that can inspire our other churches as well. Maybe even our other missionaries...

I got back from the UK on Thuesday night, about 10pm. On Friday morning I headed off to our International Friendship Camp. Our camps are one of the few things we do together as a field, so while they're really tiring - especially if you've just stepped off a longhaul flight - I'm starting to find them more and more worthwhile. Particularly that one, since I didn't have to do very much at it. :)

Well, I did have to write a sermon, because it turned out I was preaching to the Latin congregation that Sunday night. I preached about the fatherhood of God and specifically the doctrine of adoption, which I'm convinced is a fundamental concept for understanding the church. I didn't realise it was Father's Day in Brazil that day, so it worked out rather well...

Yesterday I did absolutely nothing. I slept a lot, mainly to try to beat the heat - it was 35 degrees yesterday, and it doesn't really get cooler overnight, which is why I've been up since 5 o'clock this morning.

Today I've got another Maibara meeting, which ought to be exciting, but they've asked me to bring along a sermon, suggesting I've completely failed to get across the vision for that group - it's supposed to be self-sustaining and not relying on the missionary to come along and airdrop wisdom on it every month. I shall use the sermon (I'm basically ad-libbing a Japanese version of the one I preached at Aldates - still not on their web site, but there's a transcript) to have another go at communicating the concept.

Then tomorrow there's another camp, at which I have to give a talk on 1 Peter 5:1-4. It's not a great passage for me, because in a sense it's too straightforward. I don't like moralising sermons and it's a moralising passage. It tells you what to do. For all of the theocentric-preaching-from-every-passage-of-the-Bible idea, this is not about the glory of God, it's about how to run a church. I guess that's another reason why I don't like it; this is a "Family Camp" and the passage is being used to talk about elder people (particularly parents) providing an example for their families. Which is not what it's about, so I guess I don't like being asked to make it about that.

Still, I appreciate the challenge of having to preach on texts that I don't like preaching on - otherwise I only end up preaching on the bits of the Bible that are easy to preach, and that's not a good outcome for anyone. However, it would have been nice if I had more than half a day to prepare it.

I get back from camp on Friday - and go back on Saturday to the combined Nagahama Latin/Youth camp. And yes, I'm preaching there as well. So I will have to use the Friday to write another sermon. That's four in a week, which is possibly a bit excessive.

Next week I'm going on holiday. I come back on Friday, and guess what I'm doing on Sunday.

I got a copy of Simon Ponsonby's new book on eschatology, And The Lamb Wins, on Thursday. And I read it on Thursday, in one sitting. It's a very, very good book. One of the things that I don't like about most theological books is that they don't tend to take seriously both sides of an argument - they fall victim to the temptation to straw-man the side they don't like. But when reading Lamb, I very often found myself thinking "Yes, I understand point X, but what about point Y?" only to turn the page and find a thorough explanation of point Y. And in the end, I didn't find myself disagreeing with many of Simon's conclusions, mostly because of the way he hunted for a middle way between the various theological positions out there. For a very (and pointlessly) controversial area of theology, Simon treads appropriately carefully.

There are only a couple of areas I had difficulty with, but I think this is to do with differing ideas on Biblical interpretation. Where he does come to conclusions in his earlier chapters, I would have liked to have seen much more exegesis, although I do realise that would break up the flow of a popular book and make it a lot heavier. (The later chapters do have a little more exegesis in them.) For stylistic reasons, it was probably right to do what he did.

The other area I think was one of misplaced emphasis. Simon takes a classical Scripture-interprets-Scripture approach, trying to identify the interpretative key in the passage. I'm really not big on this, and I'll write another post at a later date explaining why not. But in short, I try to look back a level; rather than expecting the Bible to come up with timeless truths of doctrine, I try to work out what, for instance, the letters of the Bible are trying to say to the churches and what they should take away from them.

Why? Because doctrine is not something we can do something about. As I said before, doctrine is something that has to be lived. We can't do anything about the end of the world, and I don't think the Bible writes these things just for our information - it writes about them so we can live them. For instance, when Peter writes about the end of the world he writes about it in ethical terms. Because the end of the world is close, therefore be careful how you live. Simon sets out his expositions of the doctrine, but the therefore, the "why" of the doctrine, is relegated to a single thin chapter at the end. It should permeate through the whole book, since, as the old cliché goes, the "therefore" is what it's all there for.

It's good to know your Bible, and Simon is very good at helping people to know their Bible. But I think it's better to live your Bible. Brethren, be sober, be vigilant.

There is a hierarchy of sexiness for mission work. There shouldn't be, but there is, and it goes like this:

• Tier one: Africa, China and the Middle East. Workers here are obviously seriously hardcore.
• Tier two: South America, Russia, Eastern Europe, India, Asia-Pac (Thailand etc.).
• Tier three: Western Europe but you have to use the word "post-Christian" three or four times in each deputation talk.
• Tier four: North America, Japan

Home-end workers, the people who actually keep the whole thing together, aren't part of the hierarchy. Sorry guys, you get no respect at all.

(If you think that's mad, try the hierarchy of New Anointings From God Which Our Church Must Follow - America, Africa, China, Canada at a push, and that's it.)

Partly so I can get it on the road if I need it. :)

• Thursday 17th: Arrive, Gerrards Cross
• Friday 18th: 1pm JCL Prayer Meeting, St Helen's Bishopsgate; consultation with JCL staff; evening social meeting with London.pm at the Pembury Tavern, Hackney.
• Saturday 19th: Oxford. Friend's birthday party
• Sunday 20th: 10:30am, preaching St Aldate's morning service.
• Monday 21st: Evening WEC prayer group, Swansea
• Tuesday 22nd - Friday 25th: at home in Wales
• Saturday 26th: Gerrards Cross
• Sunday 27th: Japan Christian Fellowship, London
• Monday 28th: Gerrards Cross
• Tuesday 29th: Oxford
• Wednesday 30th: Meet missions pastor, Oxford Community Church
• Thursday 31st: Meet missions pastor, St Aldate's Oxford
• Friday 1st: New Malden WEC prayer group
• Saturday 2nd: Friend's wedding, Cheltenham
• Sunday 3rd: Preaching Japan Christian Fellowship, London (also meeting potential WEC short termer)
• Monday 4th: Meet with a friend from Argentina, Gerrards Cross
• Tuesday 5th: AM, meet WEC Metropolitan co-ordinator. PM, meet old friend, Gerrards Cross
• Wednesday 6th: Return to Japan

Let no man call it a holiday. Oh, and church folks here are looking in on the house, as is the police detective who lives next door, so don't try it. ;)

To eat, while in the UK:

• Minted lamb steaks
• Steak and kidney pie
• Full English breakfast

What else?

A while back Gervase asked me a very astute question about the role of doctrine. I am still thinking about this, and I don't have a good answer yet. So in seeking to come up with an answer, I want to throw out a few ideas.

1. I believe that doctrine really ought to be Biblical, and that the Bible is both necessary and sufficient for Christian doctrine.
2. I recognise that this first idea itself is not Biblical, and in fact no understanding of doctrine is Biblical, because the Bible does not define a theory of doctrine, nor any instructions about how to adduce one. People might combine various verses together to define doctrine, but the act of combination is a human and not a Biblical one.
3. So far I've said that (in idea 1) I want a Biblical understanding of doctrine but (in idea 2) I don't believe that I can get one because the Bible doesn't lay one out. So I have to start with some arbitrary choice to bootstrap this whole process, and idea 1 is as good an arbitrary choice as any.
4. Idea 1 turns me off systematic theology; the Bible does not lay out a systematic theology or an exhaustive philosophical description of the character of God, and if we believe the Bible is sufficient, then we don't need to lay out these things either.
5. Because of this, all doctrine we adduce from the Bible is provisional on our understanding of the Bible. In other words, doctrine is subordinate to exegesis. I have no time for commentaries where the converse is so obviously true.
6. Instead of being systematic, the Bible's exposition of doctrine is typically narrative and pragmatic. Any "Biblical doctrine" must be a doctrine based on the Psalms, on Job, on Titus - on the Song of Songs - not just on Romans and Corinthians.
7. When I say doctrine is pragmatic, I mean it. Biblical doctrine is for living. Even a doctrine like the second coming is always expressed in ethical terms - because Christ is coming back, live wisely. So if you can't live your doctrine, I'm not interested in it.
8. Even supposedly big heavy doctrines - the soteriology of Romans and the Christology of Phillipians - are pragmatic, and the way you live out the doctrines expressed in both of these examples is through the unity of the Church. Because Jesus saves both Jews and Gentiles, the Church should live in unity; because Christ came as a humble servant, the Church should live in unity. So if your doctrine does not lead to church unity, I'm not interested in it.
9. These two ideas lead me to be pretty ambivalent about most of the things that various Christian factions try to persuade me are important. (For instance, both Calvinism and Arminianism have little pragmatic utility and they certainly don't lead to church unity, so they're doubly useless as far as I'm concerned.)
10. Of course this is a bit of a facile oversimplification and even I don't completely follow it. I believe the doctrine of the Trinity is massively important, even though I have no idea how to live that out.
11. So I have criteria by which I am prepared to exclude doctrines, but none by which I include them. Hey, I'm OK with that; I said theories of doctrine had to be arbitrary.
12. Because I think that doctrine should primarily be lived, I am not enamoured of the idea of teaching doctrine. In fact, it can be a very counterproductive thing to do. Nothing sucks the life out of a church like turning it into a philosophy lecture series. (I know that some people can teach doctrine in an entertaining and lively way, in the same way that some people can swallow razor blades without harming themselves. The fact that it's possible doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.) In other words, orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, demonstrating rather than teaching.

All of this is a long way of saying: if theology doesn't change your life, it isn't worth doing.

It's been a horrible three days. Both my servers have been down, which meant no mail for me, none of my web sites up, no mail for WEC Japan, no WEC Japan web sites up, no lists up, no mail or web for my other users. Sorry, guys. We would have got things together much faster were it not for the hosting company, RapidSwitch. They were worse than unhelpful to begin with, but redeemed themselves towards the end. To keep things fair, I've interposed their excuses with the story.

On Sunday afternoon my time, there was a power failure at the hosting company's facility. They say:

At 4.43am on Sunday morning the building lost mains power. The building suffered a power failure which caused the automatic systems to start the generator, which ran as expected. The system is then design to switch off the Air Circuit Breaker (ACB) to the mains feed, and close the ACB to the generator, thus supplying the UPS with generator power. This worked as expected and the generator took the load. Approximately 2 minutes later, the power cut ended, and power was restored switching down the generator and operating the ACB's to switch back to mains, which all worked as planned.

Shortly after this there was a further power cut, which re-started the above sequence, in that the generator started (successfully), the mains ACB opened (successfully) and the signal was sent to close the generator ACB. This signal was sent to the ACB, however the ACB failed to close, thus meaning that the generator could not supply the UPS with power during the power cut. The UPS worked as expected and took the load. During this time the mains came back on. The ACBs have a physical and electrical interlocking system, which prevents both ACBs from being operated at the same time, thus preventing the possibility of both mains and generators feeding the load, which would result in a severe failure. Because the signals were sent to the generator ACB to close, but it never did, the interlocking systems got into a state of deadlock, where they were both stuck in an 'open' position, thus leaving the UPS with no feed, resulting in the batteries draining down after 15 minutes, and the system loosing the critical load.

So far, annoying, but not their fault. As a result of the power bouncing up and down, our server suffered a hardware fault affecting the IDE controller. (Also not RapidSwitch's fault, really, as much as I'd like to blame it on them.)

I brought the server back up, but within a few minutes it had become unresponsive even on the serial console. RapidSwitch have a facility for connecting up a keyboard, video and mouse to the server and making these available through a VNC session over the network. I got them to connect this up for me so I could see what was happening on the screen. Despite repeatedly rebooting the server, not a thing happened on the screen. I therefore presumed that the hardware was completely dead. In reality, however, the RapidSwitch technician had managed to connect up the KVM without actually noticing the server was powered off. Not great.

I have checked our logs for this and found a KVM session was processed at 11:38:27 on 29th June. The session was activated by one of our newest technicians and unfortunately he has clearly made a mistake. I will never condone rushing a job, but given the circumstances during the day, I think a slight mistake by such a junior member of staff is at least partially understandable. I will speak to him and highlight the effect that not checking his work has had. I am confident this is not something that happens except in extreme circumstances.

Because we thought the machine was dead, we thought the best thing to do was to order a new dedicated server from RS. And since a server is kinda useless without data, we asked them to help us transfer the disks from the old hardware to the new one. This was, apparently, anathema to them, so they very kindly cancelled the order and left us to start again.

I am sorry this is not part of the process we can do in our standard order processing. We have cancelled your orders because we cannot fulfil them to your requirements.

So we started again. They built the machine, it arrived in the rack and I started to set up the infrastructure; at this point I still held the vain hope that they would help us to transfer the data later, since, you know, a server without data is useless, and, well, we'd told them several times we needed to do this. While I was setting things up, the machine failed, twice. I guess they had given us a new computer with dead IDE hardware as an exact replacement of our old computer with dead IDE hardware.

I can assure that providing defective hardware is a very rare occurrence and usually only happens with new hardware that is faulty. If a piece of hardware is faulty it is highly unusual for the installation and update process to complete successfully without it being noticed. We certainly taking [sic.] the testing of our hardware very seriously.

I complained about this, and was told that if I wanted them to investigate the hardware I would have to agree to potentially being charged thirty pounds a half hour if they didn't find a problem. Faced with the fact that I was being asked if I was willing to accept a new, non-working server and a bill for the privilege, I stepped away from the keyboard and went to bed, leaving Jamie to respond before I did something I might regret.

Before doing so, I asked them to try rebooting the old server for me so I could try to get the data off that. Roughly six hours later, someone went and pressed the power button.

Unfortunately the technicians who were on had no idea how quick a fix your server might be. In that situation they have to deal with problems in order of the oldest ticket first. However, I completely agree, this was too long a period of time for the work to happen. Unfortunately one of the technicians for the night shift called in sick, which was particularly bad timing. I'm sorry that they had so much work on and that we were a technician short. Again, under normal circumstances the problems you had would not have impacted you the way they did.

While I was asleep, Jamie managed to sweet-talk (actually it probably wasn't very sweet) someone into building a second new machine. That one actually seemed to work, and I set up the infrastructure again but still we had no data. I asked them to connect up the old disks to this new, surprisingly-working server, but was told:

I'm sorry, but fitting the drives from a colocated server into a dedicated one is just not feasible. For starters, we obviously don't know what drives are in the existing chassis, not to mention that these are old drives going into a new chassis. We are (believe it or not!) quite particular about our components, as standardisation is a very effective tool for providing constantly high levels of support.

"Constantly high levels of support." At that point the red mist came down and I had step away from the keyboard again. And we still had no data, and it was now Tuesday.

Things started to improve at this point, though. RS, to their credit, offered to send up a technician to the old box with a USB drive so we could get the data off. They get points for the thought, but of course, the old box still has failing IDE hardware, so it's just going to crash again. Which it did.

Oh, did I mention that throughout all this, I'm in Japan and Jamie's on holiday in Cornwall?

He eventually came up with the plan of getting his parents to go into his house, pick up a spare server chassis, take it to the IT guy at one of our clients, and have him drive down to Maidenhead, get the old box out the rack, swap the disks into the spare server, and put it back in the rack. He used the work room at RS to do this, for which we were charged 30 pounds per half an hour, this time for the privilege of supplying our own technician. Do any other hosting services charge for build room time? I know Redbus doesn't.

With the old server resurrected, I started transferring the data onto the new server, finishing around 4:30am on Wednesday morning. My time. Again while I slept, Jamie persuaded RS to give us another KVM session (they were going to charge us for that as well) so we could reboot the new server safely into Xen, at which point we were cooking with gas. Well, there were a few little niggles, one with kernel drivers and one with networking - RS had put the new server on a different subnet to the old one, so we had to do clever forwarding tricks - but by midday on Wednesday, everything was back up and running.

I don't know what to think about RS. They were great once the dust had settled, but when we needed them, they were atrocious, and that's what makes the customer service experience. It's a bit like the Army. An army which is great in peacetime but completely pathetic in the fog of war is going to get routed. And not in the networking sense.

So yeah, I'm learning sign language. For the past few nights, I've been getting myself to sleep by watching sign language videos, and in particular these guys, who are especially easy to follow. But on Tuesday I had my first proper lesson.

I've been interested in learning sign language for a few years now, but never actually got around to starting. I have a little book of all the activities in the Nagahama community centres, and looked in there but there were no sign language classes; but since I was in there to play go on Tuesday, I asked at the desk if they actually did have any, and they told me that yes, there was one that evening, and should they tell the leader that I'd be there? Swept along by the flow a little I said yes, and later that night I was part of a sign language circle at the local Social Services center.

There were seven of us in the group altogether, six hearing people and one partially deaf. There was supposed to be an instructor for the group, but apparently she hadn't been turning up for the past few weeks, so the partially-deaf guy lead the group. Everyone had a workbook, and we took it in turns to try signing Japanese sentences from the book. He also took us through a couple of vocabulary lists.

I actually found it quite easy to pick up the signs, and was able to get almost all of the vocabulary right when they tested me on it afterwards. I'm not sure I'd be able to remember it all now though.

The one important thing about sign language is that it is not an international language - we are learning Japanese sign language which is distinct from English sign language, which is distinct from American sign language, and so on. In fact, there are regional dialects of JSL, just like there are any other language. But the other thing about sign language is that it is not simply a translation of the "host" country's language. Japanese sign language is hugely influenced by Japanese, and the grammar follows Japanese word order, but it's not Japanese. During the lesson I found myself trying to translate word for word between Japanese and JSL, but word-for-word translation is a bad way of thinking about any foreign language, sign language included.

For instance, JSL has four signs for "to eat", as opposed to Japanese's one word, dependent on what it is you're eating. There are two different signs for "year", depending on whether you're talking about a point in time or the passage of time. In Japanese, you would take "year" and then slap "+duration" on the end of it, but in JSL it's a different sign. Similarly, one of the sentences that someone had to sign was "Where shall we have the meeting?":

Japanese: 会議はどこにしましょうか？
Gloss: meeting +TOPIC where we-shall-do +QUESTION

They were told off for trying to literally sign "we-shall-do". Instead, the signs should be:

Gloss: meeting what place decide +QUESTION

Apart from the fact that "where" doesn't get its own sign but gets broken into "what place" (meanwhile "who" does get its own sign), there's the change from "do" to "decide", which reminds me that, hey, this isn't just Japanese-with-your-hands, this really is another language. If I'm going to get anywhere with JSL, that's a realisation that I'm going to have to hold in my head the whole time.

So the other day I wrote a Javascript go board.

First, it had a few problems with the rules and liberty counting, and I've ironed those out. Now as I said before, what I actually want is a go problem application for the iPod, and to get that working, I'd need to be able to read in Go problem files. Go games are stored in a format called SGF. The next step to my go problem application, then, is a Javascript SGF parser. So... you guessed it.

Here's a second version of the Javascript go board, this one will pull in an external SGF file and replay it move for move.