Tokyo reflections.

When we told them we were planning to move to Kumamoto, some of our Tokyoite acquaintances insinuated that Kumamoto would be a podunk little town with nothing in it and nothing to do. Inaka ("countryside") is the word most of them used.

But when the downtown shopping arcade has a Zara, a Gap, and two Starbuckses, I don't think you can really call it "countryside."

"Rural" by Tokyo standards, apparently.

But I suppose in comparison to Tokyo, this really is the countryside. Some streets are actually empty sometimes, and there's greenery--real greenery!--visible in the mountains just outside town. We drove through some farmland to get here from the airport last Thursday.

Sensory overload outside Shinjuku Station.

The empty streets are a little scary after Tokyo, though; in Tokyo, there were people everywhere. "Everywhere" is not an exaggeration, by the way. If you're claustrophobic, do not try walking around the south side of Shinjuku Station in the evening. You will be hemmed in on all sides by people while the lights and neon signs beat down on you and the music blaring from stores and passing advertising trucks will ensure that you cannot hold a conversation with the person next to you, who you've probably already lost in the sea of people. It's estimated that more people pass through just Shinjuku Station every day than live in the entire city of Los Angeles. They say Tokyo has everything, but in reality, there are two things it lacks: solitude and quiet.

My apartment building is somewhere in this picture. I think.
(From the 45th floor of Toyko City Hall.)

I lived in one of the most coveted areas of the world: My apartment was in Shibuya, right on the western border of Shinjuku. (I mean this literally; if you stepped out the front door of my Shibuya apartment building, you would be in West Shinjuku.) Have you ever seen pictures of neon-drenched Tokyo streets crowded with people? That's within a 20-minute walk of my apartment. When I saw the Shinjuku skyscrapers from the JR Chūō Line train, I knew I was home.

My entire Tokyo apartment, essentially.

The apartment was tiny: the one bed/dining/living room is smaller than any of my dorm rooms at Olaf! Actually, the lack of kitchen counter aside, it was actually quite a nice size for one person. If there were anyone else living there, though, even if they were a good friend and excellent roommate, we would start to hate each other within a day. My view in any direction was into the windows of other buildings, most of which kept their drapes closed at all times. The window above my bed was frosted glass because it was literally two feet from the wall of the house next door. But I'm pretty sure the rent (which I did not have to pay directly) was actually more than my monthly stipend. Tokyo is expensive.

Scenic Toyko balcony view.

But as cool as living in Tokyo was, I couldn't hang my laundry outside without it coming back in smelling like the street. My hair absorbed cigarette odors like a sponge. There was too much going on for too long in too many directions. Every time I went to Shinjuku I would develop what I came to call the "Shinjuku headache," which would always go away within a few minutes of leaving.

So, yes, Tokyo is an exciting place to visit, for sure. I really did enjoy my time there, honest. But I'm also glad to be here in Kumamoto, and I think I'll really enjoy living here for the next two years. In many ways it feels like home. It very much reminds me of some of the larger cities near my hometown that my friends and I used to frequent... except more Japanese, of course. Also, I can't seem to get over the fact that there's a castle in this town. My inner 6-year-old is thrilled.

The absolute hardest thing about leaving Tokyo is something I admit I did not expect: new friends. I got off to such a great start with some people, and then suddenly I had to up and leave for Kumamoto. I have quite a sizeable list of people to get in touch with with when I come back to visit next summer, starting with this little church:

I was here almost every Sunday during my time in Tokyo, plus Christmas Eve and New Year's Day.
(Picture from a commemorative postcard from their 70th anniversary.)

Right now we're in the midst of orientation to the city, our apartments, our schools, our churches, and our Japanese lessons with new teachers, so we're all kind of experiencing information overload right now. We've already visited the school Morgan and I will be teaching at and had an interview with one of our new language teachers, but we still have one more school and a long list of churches to visit, too. Also, the frying pan I bought yesterday turned out to be defective so I'm gonna have to figure out how store returns work around here. More when my brain and everything else settles down.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!
Philippians 4:1 (NIV)

Kumamoto greetings.

Posting from my new temporary Kumamoto apartment! We got in yesterday morning, but it's been quite busy with paperwork, shopping for necessities, and unpacking. There's still a ton more I want to say about Tokyo (and about a million photos I want to post), but it looks like today's going to be quite busy, too, so stay tuned.

Kumamoto Castle from the restaurant we ate lunch at yesterday.
('Sright, there's a castle in this city!)

Christmas, Part 3: Also New Year's.

Caroline and I decided to start off our Christmas Day with an English-language service at an international Lutheran church in Tokyo. Christmas being a weekday, the service was very sparsely attended. Upon our entry, we were welcomed by an American woman who handed us our worship materials. I couldn't help but notice that despite being obviously non-Japanese, she had a Japanese last name.

"Welcome!" she said. "Are you visiting, or do you live in Tokyo, or...?"

"We'll be in Tokyo for another few weeks," explained Caroline, "but then we're going to move to Kumamoto--"

"Are you J-3s?" she asked, beaming. We smiled and nodded sheepishly as she then proceeded to explain that she was a former J-3 herself. She arrived in the '80s, and then got married and never left. (Not to scare my mom, but this happens a lot, apparently.) After the service and some intergenerational J-3 conversation and bonding, we got Christmas cheeseburgers at MOS Burger, a restaurant that bills itself as a fresher alternative to McDonald's or Burger King. And by Christmas cheeseburgers, I mean we got cheeseburgers on Christmas Day. Nothing else was Christmassy about that day; the restaurant was eerily quiet despite being packed with office workers in suits. (Caroline pretty much summed it up in her own blog entry about the holiday: "By the way, Merry Christmas!")

Before dropping by a theater in Shinjuku to see The Hobbit, we stopped in the bustling Koreatown district of Shin-Ōkubo near Tokyo Lutheran Church for some shopping, street food, and coffee. Well, for me not so much shopping as watching Caroline be adorable as she fangirled over her favorite Korean drama stars. I don't really get celebrity worship (I don't even know these guys!), but it's still quite entertaining to see Caroline get so excited to see a desk calendar featuring her favorite Korean celebrity.

Hotteok.
Photo by Fooding Around.

And then there was what we've come to call the Hotteok Incident of 2012. Hotteok, for those not fortunate enough to have tried it, is a Korean street food that I can only describe as what would happen if an English muffin and a baklava had a beautiful pancake baby. It's a fried, honey-filled hotcake with cinnamon, peanuts, and other amazingness. Pure food bliss. You can also get them filled with cheese or anko (sweet red bean paste), but why move away from perfection?

Anyway, Caroline and I were leaning on the rail on the curb, happily eating our piping-hot hotteok, when I get down to the bottom of the hotteok where all the honey pools, and, if you're not careful, explodes all over you. I was trying my best to keep the honey in the little paper envelope the hotteok comes in, but the dough of this particular hotteok was so chewy that I couldn't bite it off from the rest. Spitting it back out was probably an option, but by then it was too late. I was hunched over, laughing through my hotteok at the honey that proceeded to spill all over my hair, my coat, and my pants especially. I still had hotteok in my mouth, so I couldn't explain to the very confused Caroline just what was going on. When she figured out I was actually fine and just having some hotteok troubles, she started laughing hysterically. (It was okay; I was laughing, too.) I finally managed to rip the hotteok out of my mouth (with Caroline's help), and then noticed a little kid on the sidewalk staring at me open-mouthed. I think he thought I was actually in distress and Caroline (still paralyzed with laughter) was being a terrible friend.

Of course, by then I was a mess. There was honey all over my face and hands. I was considering buying a water bottle from a vending machine and just stepping into an alley to pour it all over myself, but thankfully Tokyo Lutheran was less than a block away. I hid behind a pillar while Caroline called Erik. "Are you in the church right now?" she asked him. "We had a bit of an accident..."

It's nice to be friends with the pastor! Erik let us in the back entrance of the church, and we rushed down the hall to the bathroom, where I spent the next half hour rinsing off my face and hands and splashing water all over my clothes. I don't even know how honey got in some of the places it did (on the back of my collar?!). "We're gonna laugh about this so hard later," I said as I stood bent down, washing my hair in the tiny sink.

We warmed up (and I dried off) at Snow Cup, our favorite Koreatown coffee place, whose rainbow-pastel decor perfectly matches its sugary drink and food offerings. Then it was off to Middle Earth for a few hours. (Each of the future Hobbit movies will be released around Christmastime each year that we're here. This is definitely going to be a J-3 tradition.) After the thoroughly enjoyable movie we briefly visited a used bookstore, then grabbed some filled crepes (another favorite street food) to consume on our way home for the night, declaring the whole way that it had been an excellent Christmas.

But that night was not so good for Caroline. It's rough to spend Christmas 5,000 kilometers away from home, and she was feeling it particularly badly. So she introduced me to the wonderful, fluffy, wish-fulfillment-fantasy world of Korean dramas. Up in her apartment we watched one of her favorites, a cute time-travel romance, until 3:30 in the morning. By then we were both about ready to fall asleep. But peacefully this time.

Morgan is a courageous woman.

A relatively uneventful week later was New Year's Eve, which Morgan, Caroline, and I wanted to go all-out for. We started with a coffee shop blogging session (the fruits of which you read last week), then after dropping our stuff back at our apartments, headed to the Akasaka district to go ice skating. Then it was off to T.G.I. Friday's for a traditional American dinner of onion rings and ridiculously gigantic hamburgers. I have no idea how one human can eat as much meat as what was on each of our plates. None of us finished, but we made a decent effort. We had to hang out at the restaurant for a while before we felt like we could actually get up and move.

We met up with one of the students from Hongo, a businessman, who took us to dessert and tea at a nearby restaurant and then Starbucks to wait for midnight. We were right near Meiji Shrine, a major Shintō shrine in Japan, but seeing as 3 million people visit it every New Year's holiday, we decided to beat the crowds and go to the nearby, less-well-known Tōgō Shrine to experience a real Japanese New Year.

Tōgō Shrine after midnight.

There were definitely fewer than 3 million people there, but it was still quite a lively place. A bonfire was burning near the front of the shrine, and starting at midnight (a few younger people counted down to midnight out loud!) the line processed all the way up to the hall where people offered coins and prayers, clapping and bowing. Cups of hot sweet sake were passed out, and people lined up on the other side of the courtyard to buy New Year's fortunes and good luck charms. Others stood around in the courtyard, laughing and chatting while sipping their sake and discussing their fortunes. (This YouTube video was taken by someone at a different shrine, but our experience was much like it.)

We parted ways with our host and made our way back home, where we gathered in Caroline's aprtment to enjoy some Italian champagne she'd bought earlier in the day. Opening it was a little harder than expected.

Ganbatte kudasai, do your best, Caroline!

But eventually she got it open and we were able to welcome 2013 with style.

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu and Happy New Year from the 2012-2015 J-3s!

The next day was the annual New Year's service at my church, which I thoroughly enjoyed, although I was a bit startled at first: as soon as I walked in the door, I was asked, "Can you be the acolyte?" My pastor's wife explained the procedure to me in Japanese (which I then confirmed with my translator, just to be sure), and I was handed a white hip-length surplice and a candle lighter, and sent on my way down the aisle. I think I did all right--nothing caught on fire, at least (except the candles, of course). Though I may have extinguished the candle lighter too soon, oh well.

I usually only understand maybe three or four sentences out of my pastor's entire sermon, but for some reason that day I could understand more than usual. He preached on Luke 4:16-21, when Jesus reads the passage in Isaiah about proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor. Now, I understood maybe 10% of the sermon, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting it, but during the sermon I caught my pastor saying something about how the people listening to Jesus talk about fulfilling the prophecy about "proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor" must have had anxieties and heartaches of their own. And I realized: Jesus was there with them, boldly proclaiming that he was there to bind up the brokenhearted and free the captives. I felt like Jesus was right there with me, too.

2012 was a tough year for me. I experienced probably the lowest lows of my life, especially spiritually. I've become acutely more aware of the gap between what I've been taught and what I've experienced myself, and it's distressingly wide at times. Often I feel like I've been dropped back at Square One of my faith, unsure of whether or how to trust in God. Were I non-Christian, back at Tōgō Shrine I would have been buying every kind of charm and trinket to try to secure blessing for this year. I very much like to be in control of my surroundings, to understand everything that's going on. Caroline and Morgan can attest to how much I overthink things. It's my own mental version of a good-luck charm.

But that's not what God is. He's not a "God of the gaps," constantly displaced by our scientific knowledge or common sense, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against.* As Paul says in Colossians 1:16-17, all things were created by Him and for Him, and in Him all things hold together.

And yet even in this sureness of God's cosmic omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence, as a missionary I still sometimes feel like the blind leading the blind. (Didn't I just preach a sermon about Jesus' love a week previously?) Thankfully Jesus takes care of that, too--he did, after all, also come to recover the sight of the blind. I'll be holding His hand tightly this year as I head to Kumamoto to start my teaching work. May we all be filled with His hope and love in 2013.

*"If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Touchstone, 1997) 311.

Also, I couldn't fit this one in, but I kept thinking of it while writing the last part of this post:
"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men."
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperCollins, 1974) 77.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Luke 4:18-19 (NIV)

Christmas, Part 2: Christmas Eve.

This year's was possibly the busiest Christmas Eve of my life. After running out to the drugstore to pick up, among other things, deodorant and laundry detergent, I threw on my nicest clothes and headed to my church around 1:45. Mind you, the service wasn't until 6:30--they wanted me to come for the afternoon children's Christmas party, too.

The Sunday School teachers at my church have some serious skills. Not only did they create four games that would span the length of the party, they also made them so the kids would be occupied and engaged the whole time. The first was a self-introduction game where each child went up the the front and introduced him or herself. Then they were to say their grade in school, their favorite food, and their least favorite food. The first six or seven kids said they didn't really have a least favorite food, which made me think that perhaps that was secretly the correct answer. But then a kid came up and declared he hated asparagus, so maybe the kids at my church just have undiscriminating palates.

Then it was the teachers' turn, starting with my pastor, who happily went up to the front and said his name and that he was 69 years old, prompting laughter and reassurance that stating your age wasn't a requirement for the adults. I was surprised and reassured when another teacher said she hated raw things like sashimi, but then the person after her said he loved raw things like sashimi. My favorite answer was given by a 24-year-old grad student who acts as (for lack of a better word; she's been so much more than this) my translator during the last two months at this church. "My favorite food is God's Holy Word," she said. Cue laughter and approving applause.

Then it was my turn. "My favorite food is ramen," I said. Gasps all around--it often surprises people here to learn how much I like Japanese food. ("You also like pizza and hamburgers, right?" my pastor asked me over a soba-noodle lunch the other day. "Sometimes," I replied, "but I think they're really greasy, so I don't eat them too often.")

After the self-introduction game was a giant board game, and then a game where the kids had pedometers clipped to their clothing and had 30 seconds to get as many steps registered on it as possible. (The adults participated in this one, too, which was hilarious.) The final game was a scavenger hunt with word scramble clues. Those kids are geniuses! They unscrambled words like "ballpoint pen" and "Ikeda-sensei's signature"--and on top of that, the letters were all over the paper in different sizes and at different rotations. I was still scratching my head over some by the time the game was over. Maybe it's easier when your native language is Japanese, but I'm still thoroughly impressed.

My church has pageants down to a science.

After a light dinner of finger sandwiches, they practiced the night's pageant, a series of tableaux accompanied by Biblical narration from the junior-high students interspersed with carols and choir anthems. The costumes made me smile--some of the pieces were made of fabric with obviously Japanese prints. It made me think of the days back at my home church when the Wise Men in our pageant wore Burger King crowns. (They were spray-painted gold, but you could still totally see the Pokémon underneath.) Meanwhile, I was practicing with the choir and getting steadily more nervous--I'd been asked to preach the Christmas Eve service sermon a month beforehand and although I'd had it ready for several days by that point, I still wasn't sure how a Japanese audience would take a sermon written by an American girl who'd been on the ground in Japan for less than two months and wasn't even a real pastor. My translator (the aforementioned 24-year-old grad student) had assured me after she translated it into Japanese that she loved the message, but I was still tense.

Bulletin cover.

As more and more people arrived, several with non-Christian significant others in tow, I was ushered into the vestry where I put on an alb for the first time in probably twelve years, when I was an acolyte back at my home church. I was happy to find that I still knew how to put on the thing, but they definitely get more snaps and ties as you get bigger!

After I got a little pewter cross strung around my neck, the prelude started, and I followed my pastor down the center aisle, casting sideways glances at him to gauge how long we were supposed to bow at the altar before taking our seats up at the front (pro tip: when it starts to feel awkwardly long, you're halfway there).

My choir music.

I sang with the choir, too: an SATB arrangement of "Away in a Manger" together with the children. (A lot of folks from my home church have asked me if I've been able to sing in a choir: happily, the answer is yes! I've been in this choir since I told my translator I loved to sing.) A little awkward to be in my white alb with the crimson-robed choir, but it worked. And then it was time for me to go up and start talking. I took my place at the pulpit, while my translator stood next to me with a micophone in one hand and her notes in the other.

It's a strange experience to stand in front of an audience with full knowledge that many won't understand your native words, nervewracking even with a skilled interpreter at your side. Shaking, I began my sermon, talking about the differences between Christmas in Japan and America, how much I wished Christmas cake was a thing in the U.S., and how stores in Japan are filled with every bit of Christmas paraphernalia you can imagine--except Nativity scenes.

Sermon, with translation.

So I took that angle. I talked about how for myself, growing up around so many beautiful Nativity scenes every Christmas gave me the unconscious impression that being born in a stable is a glamorous occasion. I talked about how the Savior of the World was born in a smelly, dirty animal stall. I talked about how God loves us so much that He is willing to come to us even though our lives are messy and full of shame and guilt. I used a Max Lucado quote* that was on one of the Christmas cards I received this year. (Many thanks to the sender of that card!)

Did the message reach anyone's heart? I really don't know. I did get lots of "thank you"s in English and Japanese after the service, and my translator did tell me that when I talked about how a stable would be a pretty dirty and lonely place to have a baby, I made an obstetrician in the audience cry. (In a good way, I hope.) But I'll leave the heart-workings to God.

A gorgeous choral rendition of "O Holy Night" later, the service was done. I breathed a huge sigh of relief as the pastor handed me a basket of goodies to hand out to the kids as they exited the sanctuary. The basket emptied in about 15 seconds, so I went back to the vestry to take the alb off. And then my translator's mom wanted to get pictures of us up at the pulpit together so I had to throw it back on. "Send these pictures to your mother!" she told me as she held up the camera. (I did, so if you'd like to see them, feel free to bother either of my parents about it!)

By this time it was about 8:00, but the festivities were just beginning at the house of my translator's aunt and uncle, where some visiting members of their extended family and their boyfriends and fiancés were gathered to celebrate Christmas. I was invited to come along and treated to a feast of salad, roated veggies, fresh-baked bread, pizza, pasta bake, and a turkey, with cheesecake, tiramisu, and--yes--Christmas cake for dessert. Even though I was totally crashing this family's Christmas party, they still welcomed me with open arms. Quite a few people there had lived or studied in the U.S., so they spoke English fluently, or close thereto. My translator's mother, a piano teacher, brought handchimes (Suzuki ToneChimes--the exact same kind that we use at my home church!) and we all laughed as we attempted to play "Silent Night" and "Angels We Have Heard on High" together under her direction. My translator told me that her mother always brings handchimes to gatherings, because it brings people together. "You can't play a song with handchimes on your own," she explained as we put our chimes back in the case. "Everyone needs to work together."

And there I was, in a strange house in suburban Tokyo, an ocean away from my family, and yet I felt at home the whole evening, laughing and chatting and making music with people I'd either just met that night or known for barely more than a month. What a blessing everyone is! I don't know how I can pay back the gifts (both tangible and intangible) I've received from my new church family here in Tokyo. I could write an entire book about the generosity and kindness of my translator alone. We leave for Kumamoto in less than two weeks--it will be tough to say goodbye.

Just some of the Christmas gifts I've received from my church family in Japan.
Not pictured: the smiles and hospitality, the mountain of food and candy, how good the candle smells, the pile of thank-you cards I need to write.

But not all was well in the J-3 world that night--Caroline was unfortunately not having such a great time, and Morgan was off visiting her old high school host family a two-hour bullet train ride away, so while I waited for my train to take me home that night Caroline and I decided over the phone to spend Christmas Day doing fun stuff together, in English. More about that in the next entry.

Also: a Happy New Year to one and all! Sheesh, these holidays are happening faster than I can blog them.

*"He went from commanding angels to sleeping in the straw. From holding stars to clutching Mary's finger . . . Why? Because that's what love does. It puts the beloved before itself."
Max Lucado, A Love Worth Giving (Thomas Nelson, 2002), 58.

And Mary said:
"My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior."
Luke 1:46-47 (NIV)