Where Everybody's Crazy

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?

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.

I've got a load of things to write about tonight, but I'll get this one out of the way because it's quick and snarky.

Since writing my JEMA rant, my field leader has been trying to encourage me to go to tomorrow's annual general meeting in Tokyo (yeah, OK, where else would it be?) to put across my views in person. Now there were a few reasons why I was a bit unwilling to go: I don't know enough of the background and so I don't want to cry wolf, I can't really afford it, and well, I don't actually really care all that much. He tried further cajoling me with the information that the guy who wrote the screamingly anti-Japanese piece in Japan Harvest has now been selected as the next president. OK, that's a bit more potentially disastrous. Maybe I should give it a bit of thought.

But then I looked at the AGM agenda, and found that this big contentious issue of the Fundamentalism response takes up a whole zero minutes of conference time. There are only two things on the agenda: a report from the "nominating committee" and "elections" of the candidates put forward by the nominating committee. The AGM appears to consist of an agenda with no action items, a meeting with no discussion, and an election with no choice of candidates. And you want me to traipse over to Tokyo for this? No thank you.

Dear JEMA, at your next meeting please decide upon a reason for your own existence. No love, Simon.

On Wednesday I got back from a rather good holiday in Hokkaido with some Bible college friends. I seem to have brought the Hokkaido snow with me, because for the past three days I've had to dig myself out of my house.

Well, that's what I've been telling everyone, but it's not true. For the first two days, I've had to clear the area in front of my house to fulfill my social obligations. In parts where it normally snows really, really heavily, the council comes out with snowploughs, but in places like Nagahama, the way to get the snow cleared is good old-fashioned Japanese guilt-tripping. You really don't want to be the only one in your neighbourhood who is letting the team down by having a snow-covered patch in front of your house. My pastor was telling me on Friday how embarrassed he felt to have snow in front of the church when everyone else in the street had cleared their bit.

Hey, I don't like it, but it works.

So Friday and Saturday I was just keeping my neighbours happy. Today, though, I really had to dig myself out of the house. Last night was the first time since getting back that the roads were clear enough to cycle on, but it snowed an awful lot overnight, (the weather warning says 20 inches in the past day) and I literally could not get out of my house without some shovelling.

And not only did I have to dig myself out of my house, I had to dig myself into church at the other end. Or at least, join the work party clearing out the church carpark.

The snow is falling much more heavily now than this morning, and the weather forecast says it won't stop all week.

OK, I said it was coming. Here goes.

I've always believed that professional development is a really important thing. If you're not moving forward in your knowledge of your profession, you're moving backwards as things change around you. More fundamentally, if you're not learning from others and then reflecting about your own work, then you're going to end up plodding on without thinking, and that's the most terrifying thing for me.

So when I was a programmer, I joined the london.pm mailing list, went to their meetings, and subscribed to our trade magazine, The Perl Journal. I also kept up with three or four technical news web sites - I still do, in fact.

And when I became a missionary, naturally I did the same. If you want to know what's influencing me, I subscribe to Encounters, the missions magazine of Redcliffe College, EMQ which is generally pretty meh but occasionally there's some good stuff in there, and IMBR, which is the closest to a professional journal we have.

So that gives me an international perspective and some useful cross-fertilization ideas. (I also read everything on BBC News, occasional copies of the Guardian and Mainichi news, and a few sites on American political news. That and the programming news is why it takes me two hours to get moving in the morning.) But Japan has its own culture and challenges and I want to know what missiological thinking is happening here as well.

Our missionary trade organisation here in Japan is the Japan Evangelical Missionary Alliance, and today I decided not to renew my membership.

I'd been considering it for a while. They run a mailing list which tells you about what events they're putting on. All the events are in Tokyo, apart from those of course in Higashi Kurume, which is OK for those working with 10% of the population of Japan but rather does give the impression that they don't give a damn about the other 90%.

JEMA also has a trade magazine, Japan Harvest. It's very much a magazine rather than a journal, which is fine for people who want stuff at that level, but I was looking for something a bit more solid and that's not meant to be it. It has articles expressing how amazing and surprising it is when the Japanese church come up with ideas for themselves. There was an article last time explaining what manga and anime are, which I think can only be helpful if you've spent all of your time in Japan living in a cave or in the sterile santictity of a church building... oh, wait, yeah, maybe that is useful for some.

And that's basically what my JEMA membership gives me. As far as I'm concerned, JEMA is a waste of time, money and effort.

And now they've gone to war against their Japan-native equivalent, the Japan Evangelical Alliance. Grab me some popcorn, guys, I want to enjoy this one from the sidelines.

The topic that they've chosen to go to war about: Christian support for going to war. According to JEMA, (which is mainly made up of American missionaries) the foreign missionary community in Japan is shocked, shocked I say, that the JEA has put out a theological paper condemning both nationalism in the church and the (largely American) church's support for the Iraq war. Who would have possibly thought that Japanese Christians might be anti-war?

But why stick to the issue at hand? That would be boring! If you're in a fight, the first thing you need to do is escalate! The title of the article on the cover of this issue of Japan Harvest is "Theology in Japan: JEA Theological Pamphlet No. 6 an Example of Reactionary Cross-Cultural Theology?" That's right, it's nothing to do with the fact that the Japanese church won't support America's bloody stupid war like all the foreign missionaries do, it's because the Japanese church are all bad theologians. And they smell of soy sauce.

The author of the Japan Harvest article seems to think that "reactionary theology" is in itself bad; he fails to understand that all theology is fundamentally reactionary. Theologians would sell even fewer books than they currently do if all they ever said was "I agree with him." People do not do theology in a vacuum; they do so in reaction (or perhaps, more generously, reflection) to what they read, see and experience. The article that he writes is, indeed, in reaction to the JEA paper.

But I see little point in pointing this out, since the author also writes that:

The pamplet makes some strong statements regarding views held by many American evangelicals. These kind of strong statements have the potential to cause friction between evangelicals separated by the Pacific Ocean.

Which provides more depressing proof, as if more was needed, that irony is truly dead. (I could continue with a point-for-point refutation of the article, but I'm not morally obliged to, it's a Friday night, and I'm writing for a blog, not a bad magazine.)

Now I have slight reservations about Theological Pamphlet No 6, because I think it could have been a much better critique of nationalism in the Church if it had stuck to nationalism, rather than what it did do, which was treat nationalism as the inevitable outcome of fundamentalist American Christianity, and to examine how some of the doctrines of Fundamentalism has led to American Christianity. Which is nothing I haven't said here in the past, and I think they're dead right. After all it's a Theological Pamphlet, so they had to tackle theological issues.

But it would have been a better critique of nationalism in the church if they had just stuck to historical and social issues. The Japanese church knows very well from its painful history how bankrupt it becomes when its message is compromised by wartime nationalism, and it is, as such, in a good position to show the American Christian Church how bankrupt it has become as its message has been compromised by wartime nationalism. Introducing the theological category of fundamentalism isn't actually necessary to make this point, and potentially weakens it - the Japanese church was not compromised by fundamentalism, but by plain old compromise.

But Fundamentalist Christianity is one of the most dangerous threats to the church in our time, and I respect the Japanese authors for having a go at tackling it. And of course, to progress the debate there needs to be dialogue.

But not with this attitude. And not in my name. So I'm resigning my JEMA membership.

Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?

As a mission, we at WEC say that we go "where the need is". Not where it's easy, or where it's personally convenient, but where the need is. And, well, I could be cynical but for the most part we do that pretty well. I keep forgetting how well we do it.

A few months after coming to Japan, I joined the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association. I had this thing about professional development and joining relevant organisations and reading the professional journals, and... that's another story for another time. Anyway, every month or so JEMA sends me an email about the events that they put on, which are nearly all in Tokyo. Of course they are; if you live in Tokyo, you're never really sure if people have electricity or running water yet outside of Tokyo. And besides, everyone in Japan commutes into Tokyo every day, right?

Anyway, those events that aren't in Tokyo are in a place called Higashi Kurume. Which is technically Tokyo, but is a city in its own right at the north end of Tokyo near Saitama. I just looked that up, because I had never heard of it before getting all this JEMA spam about stuff going on there. Higashi Kurume. Higashi Kurume. What the heck's going on in Higashi Kurume?

At the CPI conference, I met a bunch of missionaries from Higashi Kurume, and I asked them. What is going on there? Is there a big revival happening? Coversely, is it a particularly difficult place to evangelise so we need lots of stuff going on there? And to a man, they all gave me the same answer.

"We're there because there's a good Christian school there."

A woman comes across a man crawling under a street lamp. "I've lost my car keys," he explains.
The woman tries to help the man find his keys. After a few minutes of searching, she asks "Where exactly did you drop them?"
"Down the street, next to my car."
Puzzled, she asks "Then why aren't you looking over there?"
"The light is better here."

Through my various trips to Japan, I'm now aware of most of the things which catch out the unwary foreigner. Things like the stealth public holiday, where you go into work and wonder why you're the only person there. But this is my first New Year in Japan, and it's completely got me.

The first hint that something was not right came on New Year's Day, when after our church service someone said to me "Have you got enough food in?" We had a severe blizzard on New Year's Day, but I didn't think I was going to be cut off. I live five minute's walk from the supermarket, for heaven's sake.

New Year's Day was deadly quiet, what with the snow and with everyone celebrating at home with their families. And yesterday was very quiet as well, but fair enough. I stayed at home and relaxed.

And now it's the third, and I'm fed up of sitting at home relaxing. I got stuff to do. The snow has gone now, but the city is still deadly quiet. All the banks and post offices are shut, and I have a grand total of 90 yen to my name. Not that there's anywhere open that I could spend it - the tourist shops are open because, as always, we have coachloads and coachloads of visitors, but everything else is shut. Now I see why I needed enough food in. (I have, thankfully.)

Will normal service return tomorrow? Or will this country lay dead until next Monday? And what on earth is everyone doing for all this time?

Friday was a very joyful day. In the morning, I was doing a visit to a local primary school as part of their "world festival" - the school had rounded up a few likely foreigners, and we had to give a short presentation on our home countries and then a thirty-minute activity. I got the kids doing the London Bridge nursery rhyme and game, and while it was a bit slow to start, they got there in the end.

It was my first time in a Japanese primary school. I was very impressed by the school and the way the kids were encouraged to take initiative and responsibility. Each guest had a "host" who took us around and showed us the activities that were going on in the various classrooms. One of those activities was a room where the children were giving presentations to the visitors (us guests and their parents) about the countries the guests had come from. I was also very impressed that all the kids already knew our names, as photos, names, and greeting phrases in each of our languages had been put up around the school for the past month. And as I joined one of the classes for lunch in their classroom, they were asking interested and intelligent questions of me. It was a lot of fun!

After lunch, we all headed off back to the train station, and I got a lift from there to Linea, one of the many wedding chapels in the area, where I pretended to be a foreign vicar. Thankfully I have some experience in my role, and was able to conduct myself reasonably well. There's a trend here in Japan for Christian-style wedding ceremonies, in purpose-built wedding chapels. Usually they're in a hotel, but this was just a wedding chapel/reception place. To complete the stereotypical picture of the Holywood wedding, you need a Western vicar to perform the ceremony. Their usual Western vicar - my boss - is currently out of the country, so they asked me to do one. It's a civil ceremony with a Christian theme, so the "vicar" doesn't need to be ordained, and so this is a good line of work for out-of-work actors who are passing through Japan and jobbing English teachers. That said, the company which contracted me is a Christian business which only employs missionaries or Japanese pastors.

I don't particularly want to get into this as a regular thing, not that I have the time, but it was fun. You have to not let on to the bride and groom that it's your first time, so I tried to look confident and authoritative even though I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I'd got a very well documented script that my boss uses, but until you're actually there doing it some of the details are always going to be hazy. Thankfully the staff at the hall were very helpful - if a little stern for my liking with the obviously terrified groom - and took charge of the rehearsal. I fumbled a few things in the rehearsal out of nerves, but in the actual ceremony I think everything went off OK. My own voice was a bit too stern for that happy occasion at times, though! It's hard to do solemn and caring at the same time.

Because it was my first time and because the staff took over, I didn't get much time with the bride and groom. I did manage to say a few reassuring words beforehand, but the vicar is not invited to the reception and is expected to disappear pretty much straight after the ceremony. But - although I hate to admit it - I really just wanted to do it for the experience. And the experience is still doing my head in - the thought that somewhere in Japan there's now a couple who have started out their married life together because I so proclaimed it. And if I don't do any more, then, well, that'll be even more special.

And to cap it all, just before I started the ceremony, I got a phone call on my mobile. I was swearing and cursing and trying to get rid of it, and ended up taking it. "This is the police; we've found your stolen bike. Come and pick it up today!" Result!

One of the things that happens when foreigners live for a country in a while is that they come across things that they don't understand. They then make a guess at interpreting what they see. Then, unless they're corrected, they continue to believe this guess and it eventually becomes received wisdom. When you've got a community of such foreigners, such as a mission field, the received wisdom can be passed down the generations. And all the time it can be completely and utterly wrong.

I remember when I first came to Japan. It was around the time of the O-Bon festival of the dead, when the spirits of the dead come back to visit. I noticed that a number of houses had bottles of water lined up outside them. Aha, must be so that the spirits can have a drink while they visit.

Now I live here, I noticed that the bottles are not just there for O-Bon, they're there all year round. I asked another missionary about it. "It's to ward off evil spirits," they said. Well, OK, something to do with spirits visiting, anyway.

Today I was talking with my language teacher about this, and asking him whether it was to do with welcoming spirits or warding them off. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. "Well, it's something to do with warding them off..." he said.

Turns out it's nothing to do with religion at all. It's about cats. People don't want cats peeing in front of their houses, so they put out bottles full of water. The water reflects the light of the sun, which blinds the cats and scares them away.

And then he told me about another one which does mix religion and pragmatism. Occasionally in Kyoto you will see, stuck into the walls of a house, little Shinto torii gates, like this:

Torii act as the gateway between the sacred and the secular worlds. They symbolise "there is a god enshrined here". I have a mental image of missionaries wandering around Kyoto doing prayer ministry and casting out the evil spirits from these gates in the walls. I am absolutely sure this has happened.

But again this is nothing to do with religion. It's once again to do with peeing. Drunk people pee against walls. But even drunk people have reservations about peeing on something that appears to be sacred, even if actually it isn't.

Culture is a really complicated thing. For those of us who don't completely comprehend a culture, we can jump to some fantastic conclusions, especially where religion appears to be involved and we get all touchy about stuff. I bet we probably teach new Christians to avoid stuff that's completely innocuous, because some missionary fifty years ago got the wrong end of the stick and nobody ever checked it out. So whenever a missionary tells me something about a peculiar Japanese religious practice, I'm not going to trust them. I'm going to go and actually ask a Japanese about it. Odds are good it's actually something to do with peeing.

It's a bit of a shameful admission, but after five years of Japanese degree and then six years of private study, I've finally read my first book in Japanese from cover to cover unassisted.

I may be in danger of becoming a complete Mitsuo Fukuda fanboy here, but it was his "Mentoring Like Barnabas", and it was very very good - and in lots of ways, very humbling. It made me think about what right or experience I have to be talking to others about leadership, which is a good question to ask, whatever the answer.

And it contained a lot of good stuff about coaching, mentoring, counselling, church management and general Christian life. One of the bits that really hit me was something that everyone who is working as a pastor in Japan should know:

In the words of the pastor and counsellor Nobuo Tanaka, many Japanese come to church in search of a father figure. This is a part of a conversation with a consellor: "In my thirty years of counselling, not one person has honestly come to be honestly for a consultation. It may take the form of a consultation, but actually they are looking for a substitute father in me. So proposing any kind of solution is a waste of time. A consultation is the name they put on it, but it is merely an excuse to see me; they come not to seek a solution to their pain, but to find love." Many people coming to church choose the pastor or pastor's wife as a substitute parent, subconsciously seeking the acceptance that they did not receive from their natural parents. If this is true, then what the church needs to provide in order to face their situation is not teaching but relationship.