Category Archives: Family

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.

Coming up…

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It has just become the last day of 2011 here in Japan, in 24 hours it will be a whole new year. This past year has seen a lot of new things for Emily and I: a trip to Okinawa, a new pastor at the church we work at, the birth of our beautiful daughter Anna… We have had a lot of challenges and new things to learn, a lot of things to give thanks for, and others to continue to pray towards.

These past years have been years marked with change for us, 2008 I came to Japan, 2009 Emily moved up to Hokkaido and we got engaged, in 2010 we married and moved to Oasa, then in 2011 we welcomed little Anna into our family. 2012 looks like it will continue the trend as we prepare to head back to the UK in the spring time (with a estimated date of 1st of May).  Our return to the UK has a few purposes, first of all Emily can spend some time learning about and experiencing the culture that has influenced and shaped my development, also she will be able to study English and gain some experience in using it in day to day life! We hope to return to Japan with OMF in the future and English is a requirement as it is OMF’s internal language. We also need time to process Emily’s entry into OMF and hopefully gain a permanent residence visa for her to ease transition back and forth in the future.

But we hope it will also be a time of personal development for us. Emily will experience life and faith in another culture and I learn to be patient with her and help her as she has with me here in Japan! We hope that God will provide a place for me to work that will help me to develop for future ministry in Japan as well as provide for our family while we are in the UK. Whether that is towards the IT skills side, or more focussed on traditional ministry (or both?!) is to be seen. We also will be spending a lot of time sharing about Japan and the work God has for us to do here. We will both need to learn to trust Him to provide anew as we step into the next stage of our journey.

As we move forward into 2012 we are just at the beginning of this, we are beginning to become active in gathering the documents we will need for Emily’s visa application, thinking about timings as some of those may overlap with original documents needed for Anna’s UK passport application, and for my re-entry permit to Japan… We will need to get used to the seemingly endless streamers of red tape if we are to survive the coming years!

Maybe 2013 will be a little more settled…

Anna Kathleen Orme

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Anna Kathleen Orme

Anna Kathleen

On Tuesday the 18th of October, at 11:52am (JST) Anna Kathleen Orme entered the world!  Her Japanese name is オルム 杏和（あんな）

If you are interested in our experience of giving birth here in Japan (from my point of view…) read on, if you aren’t bothered, you can skip ahead to the end!)

On Monday we went for a check up, the first beyond Anna’s due date, and after leaving and coming home Emily seemed to be struggling with things a bit more than normal (normal for an over-due pregnant mother that is!) and at around midnight she began to have contractions.  As Emily is a first time mother we understood that it would take time for Anna to appear even once labour had begun.  The hospital we’ve been going to also try to keep things as stress free as possible, and so their advice was to call them up once the contractions were serious enough and see what they think rather than panicking and getting ready to go to early.  So we went to bed. At around 4am they were strong enough to wake Emily and we timed them to around 7 or 8 minute intervals.  By 6am they were stronger still and around 5-6 mins between, so we called the clinic and headed in at 7am.

The hospital we went to uses sophrology to prepare and coach the mother through birthing and the key point is to try and keep everything as relaxing as possible.  Part of this was being given a CD of relaxing music to exercise to (and to fall asleep to) that they then played in the room Emily gave birth in.  I think the general idea is to be as relaxed as possible so that the natural processes involved can take place etc…
This also means that the birthing process that they use is pretty natural, there are no drugs involved (except oxygen and a hydration drip), Emily wasn’t moved from the bed she rested in to a special room or table for the birth, everything was actually a pretty homely experience (except the immense pain, blood and all that jazz!)  I guess it was somewhere between a home-birth and having all the necessary equipment in a controlled environment

So Anna came along at 11:52am and weighed in at 3834g (8lb 7oz-ish), 50cms long and with a full head of hair already!

After the birth Emily and Anna stayed in the hospital for 5 days to keep an eye on them. This is fairly normal here in Japan and a great chance for us to ask all the questions we have and learn from the midwives and nurses there.  Also a good chance for Emily to rest and recuperate after giving birth.  On Saturday afternoon they arrived home safe and sound!

Wedding Pictures – at last!

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Finally we have got our wedding pictures online for you to see!

Check out orumu.org/wedding for the whole slideshow deal!

The wedding and tea party were great, we had a great time in Northern Ireland with a celebration at my home church (photos snitched from Jonny & First Antrim!) and a sneaky honeymoon at the always beautiful north coast!  Some pictures have found their way online of that too.

Thanks to everyone who could celebrate with us, and to those who sent greetings but couldn’t be there.  And to those who didn’t do anything but were thinking about us!  We are settling into life in Oasa, but it’s pretty busy, so I don’t know how often I can update, not that I was updating that often!  But keep an eye on twitter and facebook for shorter bites!
The picasa albums are here:

1. 結婚式 – Wedding 2. レセプション – Reception
3. ジョンの母教会 – First Antrim Celebration 4. 北アイルランドの新婚旅行 – Honeymoon in Northern Ireland

Graduation, wedding, celebration, honeymoon….

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A lot has happened since I last wrote something of any length on here…

In July I graduated from OMF’s Japanese Language Centre!  This means I have finished their course and they need space for new people…  Well not exactly, I also wanted, if possible, to graduate before I got married so all the aspects of new life could start together.  I am not sure if this was a good idea or not though!!  But it has all worked out well so far!  Technically then I have been working at Oasa Church and doing IT work for OMF since my graduation, but things have been so turbulent with moving apartment, getting married and so on that it is all only really settling down now!

That’s right!  I’ve moved apartment!  Now I am out in Oasa rather than in Sapporo City itself.  Oasa town falls within Ebetsu City, which is the next city to the east of Sapporo.  It is a bit more country side than where I was before, which was much more semi-suburban city-ish!  But it seems like a nice place to live, we are very close to the church we will work at (as opposed to taking two trains and an hour like before) and a fellow missionary who has gone on a 7 month-or-so home assignment has lent us their car for the winter, so it is all pretty convenient!  at least at the moment!

You probably noticed the other bit of news in the paragraphs above there.  Emily and I finally got married on the 21st of August 2010!  We had the ceremony in Sapporo Fukuinkan church in Sapporo city, it was a great day with a lot of friends and family to share it with!
Then we went down to Ibaraki on the 22nd and had a good old (Japanese style) barbecue with those of Emily’s family and friends there who couldn’t make it up to Sapporo.
Then we headed for Northern Ireland where we had another great night with everyone in First Antrim on Friday the 27th!  It was great to be home and see everyone again!!

After the do in First we finally got some time to ourselves and went up to stay in Portstewart on the north coast!  Not the most exotic place to go you might think, but for me it was very relaxing and a great way to spend a few days and for Emily it was a pretty out of the normal holiday (half way around the world from her home!).  And it is hard to beat the north coast really!!

We left Northern Ireland, spent a evening and a night in Dublin and flew back to Japan, got back on Saturday at 10pm Japan time…!  Time to sort out the flat and get everything organised.  Lots of legal bumph to get addresses and names changed and all that kind of stuff to do as well!

So that’s a bit of a summary, spurred on by 5am jetlag wide awakeness!  Once we get the apartment sorted out and all the stuff done we need to get past this week, hopefully there will be some photos and more info for those who are interested!

Tokyo and iOS 4.0

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Today has got to be the furthest I have travelled and returned home within one day…  I got up at 6am to get the train to the airport, flew to to Tokyo and got the train into town, then in the evening was back at the airport flying back and getting home to Sapporo just now at 11pm!  ”What did you forget?” you might ask…   But forgetfulness wasn’t the reason for the trip.  The whole event was a highly organised and coordinated trip to go to the British Embassy (they only have an embassy in Tokyo and consulate in Osaka) to apply to get a CNI (Certificate of No Impediment) which will let Emily and I apply to get married here in Japan.  According to the website I had to attend an “Interview” at the embassy, which I had to apply for (an application so I could apply to get the document I need to apply to get married…), but the whole ordeal took a matter of minutes, with the short walk down the hallway to the next room to pay the fees I was in and out of the embassy in around 30 minutes!  All that travelling for 30 minutes!!

But hopefully it will be worth it!  I took stamps for them so they could send me the certificate in the post rather than going back again to get it, and I got a form that I need to fill in and post back to pay for the actual certificate as I won’t be there to pay for it on the day of issue.  Strangely they wouldn’t let me pay for it while I was there and had the cash, but rather I have to send it.  We had a brief discussion about how I could just go outside and fill in the forms and post them in  that very day which would only take a day or two off the actual time the embassy was responsible for my money…  So I will maybe wait a little while before sending the form in, until that point I was quite impressed by the efficiency of the embassy, but not being able to pay in advance was a sharp jerk back to the reality that the small patch of land I was on was technically British (is it?) and I wasn’t not eager to please and super efficient Japan for that half an hour!  Hopefully it will process and work and I won’t have to rush back to Tokyo with a few days to spare before we actually get married…

Anyway!  A few days ago I upgraded my (already ageing) iPhone 3G to iOS 4.0 and it was lovely for a little while.  But today’s trip to Tokyo tested it to the limit.  I was listening to music and catching up with podcasts (and Bill’s latest messages from First!) while finding my way with maps and GPS, looking up train times online, writing texts and an email or two, tweeting the odd tweet and even watching a YouTube video or two at some points of non-activity.  This was normally not an issue, it could do all of these things fine, and probably still can as long as two don’t happen at once!  But after a short time using it, it started to be unbearable.  It was very slow responding to key presses, particularly on Japanese input, it ground to a halt more than a few times apps were crashing left right and centre and even once it needed an all out reboot!

So long story (slightly) short: I want to go back!!
But it isn’t easy.  From looking around it seems that I will basically have to go through the “jailbreak” process to install the older version 3.1.3 of the operating system…  So my question is, should I just jailbreak it?  My reasons for not doing it before were that it just seemed like too much hassle, and the little risk involved was probably not worth any of the benefits…
But if I am going to have to do it anyway to get back to functionality maybe I should just do it?  Has anyone out there jailbroken their iPhone 3G and have any experience?  Good experiences?  Bad experiences?  What are the risks and what are the main benefits?  Would Softbank go nuts on me?  If I went to the apple store (urgh) would they restore me back to 3.1.3 or tell me I should be glad to have 4.0?

婚約式 – The Engagement Ceremony

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Photos!

On Sunday the 22nd of November 2009, Emiri and I got officially engaged.

Now I thought we were engaged before, but that’s only part of the story here in Japan.  Japan has a lot of traditions that stem from the Buddhism and Shinto religions, from Confucianism and just from having a culture and people of it’s own.  Marriage, as you’d expect, has a whole bunch of these traditions, one of them is 結納 (ゆいのう ‘yuino’, for more info) which is basically an exchange of gifts between the bride and grooms’ families.  This exchange of gifts formally marked the engagement of the couple and there are a few other things around it that I won’t go into, largely because I am not at all sure that my understanding is correct!

The church in Japan quickly recognised that if Christians are to get married they should have something to go in place of these various ceremonies and traditions, as they are based in buddhism and shintoism.  Otherwise, families and onlookers may feel something is not right and the engagement and marriage aren’t valid.  So in place of this engagement process the church created a 婚約式 (konyakushiki – engagement ceremony, or betrothal ceremony).  While the original Japanese traditions have pretty much died off, the engagement ceremony in the church is still done.  This is what Emiri and I did last Sunday!  We did it at Itayanagi Chapel in Aomori, where I spent 3 months of my short term year, and Emiri attended for 6 years and actually lived in for a few!

We went down by Ferry last Monday, spent the week half on holiday (although Emiri had a lot of homework) and half preparing for the ceremony.  We got to go to the Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday (Surprised I could fit in my suit on Sunday) and on the way home the following Monday stopped in Hakodate to see Nari-Nari and Hana-chan, who used to live in Aomori, but now live and work in Hakodate.

Overall the ceremony was great.  I had kind of expected it to be a kind of formal proposal of marriage, or agreement to get married or something like that, like a formal pandering to culture…  But really it was more significant.  It really was about us gathering with friends and relatives to aknowledge before them and before God, His work in bringing us together, and then promising to seek to honour Him as we prepare to get married.  In that regard it really was a strong affirmation of the purposes of the marriage we intend to, and are preparing to enter into, particularly in a modern culture that doesn’t hold marriage in the regard that it used to be held.

Some detail about the ceremony itself… Continue reading →