Category Archives: Christianity

Living the international lifestyle….

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We are an international family!
I am from Northern Ireland, Emily is from Japan, and Anna is straddling both.  International sounds fun and exciting, and quite often it is!  It’s fun to see how Emily and I see things in different ways, it will be fun to see how Anna grows up to see the world and what we can learn from her. But with all of the benefits that we gain from being multi-cultural, there are also some difficult things.

Right now Anna’s application for her second passport is in Hong Kong, hopefully being processed and approved.  This is for her British passport, she already has her Japanese one.  Tomorrow we go to Sapporo to get a re-entry permit for me so that I can leave Japan and return again (provided we can return before my current visa expires).  Then February will be spent sorting out and applying for Emily’s visa for the UK so that we can enter the country as a family in May. It’s a fairly arduous affair that needs us to prove our marriage isn’t a sham, that we have somewhere to live in the UK and that we will be able to support ourselves while we are there.

These are all things we tend to take for granted as we (well most of us) grow up in our passport countries. We pay our taxes and get healthcare, the promise of benefits should we need them, the right to live and work in the country we call home. But now as an international family, while we have these rights, we don’t all have them in the same places. For the time being, wherever we go, at least one of us will need special permission to be there, more permission to work there and it won’t be something guaranteed indefinitely.

Recently I have been working on a message from Philippians 3:17-21 and as I work on it, I have never been more thankful that we can claim our citizenship of heaven, somewhere that we can all be openly accepted and leave the paperwork behind.

Conference, Norn Irish and rememberance

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This past month has been pretty busy with language school, wedding preparations and so on all taking up time. We also had the OMF All Japan Conference in Jozankei, Hokkaido, last week. I was part of the tech team for the conference and it took a bit of preparation and work while we were there, but everything seemed to go well, except for Tre’s laptop! It was great fun roping Oliver and JP into helping out too! (Thanks guys!) So you’ll forgive me for not updating in a little while!

Japan Field Conference is a time that all of the OMF missionaries in Japan come together and spend four or five days listening to teaching (Patrick Fung, OMF’s General Director), have fun (in the pool and onsen!) and fellowship (over delicious food)!

The field conference actually only happens every 3 years, the years in between have regional conferences instead and we are divided into Hokkaido and East Japan regions.
But this field conference had something special. A team of short ter missionaries came out from Norn Iron to run a kids programme for all the missionary kids! 
The team was mostly made up of people from Helen Lyttle’s church, Bloomfield Presbyterian, but also had 3 other guys, Mark, Roger and Jonny.  Jonny of course being known by aliases such as Silly McSilly, Marvin the Minstrel and now also Buzz McLightyear!

Now that conference is over I have the priviledge of hosting Roger and Jonny in my flat for a few nights before they head back to Tokyo and on home to NI.  Today I took Jonny to Oasa to see the church and meet some of the people.  Then we went to the local university’s festival to sample some local delights and see the Yosakoi Dancers performing.
Tomorrow we will be taking the team to a nearby lake and volcanic area, I am looking forward as I haven’t been to that area before either!

The service today at church is the last part of my post title.  Here in Japan remembering those who have passed away is a major part of culture, and also of Japanese Buddhism.  As in the west such dedicated official rememberance is not part of our culture (we prefer more personal rememberance of Granny and Grandad), and because Christianity doesn’t revere ancestors as Japanese Buddhism and Shinto do, it seems as though we Christians don’t care about our ancestors to many Japanese.  Which is a reflection of culture rather than faith.
So to enable Japanese Christians to faithfully remember their parents and grandparents without compromising their Christian faith, churches often buy an area in a graveyard for interning ashes of members.  Then once a year they have a special service to remember those who have been called to heaven before them.  This service is a very serious affair and is very moving.  Pastor Horita gave a short description of each member who had passed away since the church began (it is a bit over 30 years old) during his message and after the normal service there is a short one at the grave site.

This tradition fills many gaps that a plain western Christianity would leave in many people’s expectations and hopes.  A Japanese Christian’s non-Christian family might expect to have religious ceremonies of rememberance at the temple and this could result in the deceased Christian being worshipped as a god or spirit.  It also shows non-Christian family members that Christians do care about those who have been before.  And finally it is just a touching way to remember grandparents and parents who have passed away and honour their memory!  But it is a bit unusual to be in the service without knowing what is going on!

Change of power

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Today saw the Japanese equivalent of a general election take place.  So in the run up, with the loud-speaker cars driving around disturbing my extra hard study time (definitely not nap time, no no, definitely not), the news going nuts over politics and everyone (ok, some people) talking about it, I spent my time with Mr Yagita, my “language helper” talking about politics and learning how it all works in Japan!  Here is some of what I found out (memory problems and later verification by Wikipedia mean accuracy is not guaranteed!)

The Japanese government system is very similar to, having been based on the British parliamentary system and a Prussian system of constitutional monarchy. The National Diet (国会 – Parliament, not fish and rice…) are two houses, the lower “House of representatives” equivalent to the Commons in Britain, and the upper “House of Councillors” which is sort of the equivalent to the Lords, initially Councillors were not elected, but high ranking nobles. After WWII things were shaken up a bit, everything became a bit more democratic, the Councillors became elected individuals rather than hereditary noblemen.

So today Japan voted for it’s House of Representatives.  A bit like the UK there are two main parties and then a bunch of smaller ones.  The two big players are the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan – 民主党) and the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party – 自由民主党).  There is a whole bunch of history about these two parties that Mr Yagita sort of skipped through at pace, one interesting point thought, is that 50-odd years ago, Mr Aso’s grandfather, Shigeru Yoshida, (Until today, Taro Aso has been Leader of the LDP and Prime Minister of Japan, but that might change) was put out of power by, current leader of DPJ and apparently becoming Prime Minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama’s grandfather, Ichiro Hatoyama.  The reason wasn’t an election, but a merging of two parties and Yoshida (Aso’s grandad) being ousted as leader by Hatoyama, but the story doesn’t end there, in the midst of US/Soviet hostilities, CIA papers reveal a plot to assassinate Pro-US Yoshida and put Hatoyama in place as a more militaristic leadership, but Hatoyama’s government didn’t rearm Japan after all…

Another interesting point is that the house of representatives has had a LDP majority for all but a short time (11 months according to BBC article, two and a half years according to Wikipedia).

But today this has all changed, the vote counting widget on the front page of the Japan Times says that, come September, Japan will have a new Prime Minister and, potentially, a vastly different government.  Though it seems that really noone knows what kind of changes might result, if any at all.  As in any electoral campaign, I guess, promises have probably been made, but with no experience of living under a DPJ government, who knows whether they will be viable or manageable.  What’s more, no one really seems to be interested in the party’s policies, rather just keen for a change of leadership as the LDP has offered problem after problem and Prime Minister after Prime Minister.  Although a fast PM turnover rate is not new in Japan!  Japanese PMs tend to retire easily when trouble arises.

One of the more interesting aspects of the race for us Christians in Japan is that while Aso followed his grandfather’s footsteps into Roman Catholicism (Norn Irish voters unsure of what to make of that…) Hatoyama doesn’t share the Christian faith of his grandfather.  I have even heard that Hatoyama verges on the anti-Christian side, possibly resenting his mother’s faith.  Personally I am not sure that it will really make much of a difference.  Aso didn’t really make anything out of his faith that I am aware of while in office, and I can’t imagine Hatoyama going to any lengths to disrupt Christianity in Japan.  But if changes come, there will undoubtedly be some that help Christianity, and other’s that hinder or oppose, but it seems most likely that both of these scenarios will be unintentional, with other matters being the focus of any decisions at hand.

We are living in interesting times here in Japan!

Give up yer aul sins

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I just had a friend point out these short films to me.  They are animations made using recordings of kids telling Bible stories they have memorized in Dublin in the 1960s.  Made for RTE by Dublin based Brown Bag Films, the stories aren’t exactly accurate, but the jist is there and it just makes them more funny!

I like this one, particularly that “anytime our Lord wanted a cup of tea or anything, he could come into their house … and he brought his gang of apostles with him … they wouldn’t leave them out”

Check some others out on You Tube, there are a whole bunch of different stories!