Working in Nara

After returning to Tokyo, I had a few days to relax before packing up and heading to Nara Prefecture.  While I was still planning my trip, I made a request to go to the city of Osaka in the western area of Japan (Tokyo is in the east for those of you who don't know Japanese geography).  The reason was so that I could visit a church there that I've been paying attention to for a while (which is a story in an of itself).  The nearest Converge missionaries were the Chapmans in Ikoma city, Nara.

Getting down there meant that I was able to take the Nozomi bullet train (aka the shinkansen) down to Kyoto before taking some more trains to Nara.  The shinkansen was really nice, actually.  It was like an airplane ride with more legroom.

Nozomi bullet train

Surprisingly, I was able to navigate the trains all the way from Kyoto to Nara, which is a big deal considering my talent at getting lost.  It was there that I was picked up by Jeff Chapman and his daughter Anna., and they took me to their home where I met Jeff's son Caleb.  Things were a bit crazy at the Chapman house then, since they had just sent their oldest daughter Rachel to college in the US and Jeff's  wife Barb was also in the States.  Poor Jeff had a lot on his plate, so I'm glad I was able to help him with some of it.

My main job was to work on tracts.  Jeff had ordered 10,000 tracts about Ayako Miura, one of the most famous Japanese Christian authors and I needed to stamp the address of the house they would have church in on each of them (which was, incidentally, the place I stayed for those two weeks).  Mrs. Chapman had already stamped around 1000 tracts, so I ended up stamping over 9000.  It was tedious and boring work, but there was a TV where I was staying and I found a few interesting shows I could watch while working.

Ikoma

The Chapmans are using tracts as a change in strategy.  For years they've been trying to develop relationships and introduce the Gospel later, and that approach has had frustratingly little to show for it, for various reasons.  So now they're going to try and spread the net wide across Ikoma.  To be honest, I'm not totally sure how effective it will be, since Japanese people are generally not at all receptive towards that kind of evangelism, but hopefully God will use it.

The two weeks I stayed in Nara were really great.  The Chapmans were very hospitable and we were even able to take some time off from working and went to see the city a bit.  Nara was originally the capital of Japan and has a lot of old temples and shrines.  It's also famous for its deer, which are very common in the city.  We first went to Nara Park where tons of deer hung around.  They're tame and only get aggressive if they think you're hiding food.

We also went to Toudaiji a huge Buddhist temple and the largest wooden structure in the world.  Ironically, I was only able to take pictures of the gate in front of the temple before the battery on the camera died.  Inside the huge building was a huge statue of Buddha with other statues of his guardians.  I guess I've always thought that praying to statues and man-made things was mostly a thing of the past (I figured that nowadays idolatry was towards things like money or power), but there were plenty of people praying and offering incense.  I was able to see what kind of hurdles the Gospel has to go through in Japan, and how desperately the Japanese need Christ.

The gate to the temple.  I'm glad that my God does not need a temple.

My stay in Nara seemed to end before it began, and after two weeks, I was back on the bullet train to Tokyo.  I stayed at the Mehn's house one last night before going to Narita airport, Los Angeles, Los Vegas, and then finally arriving home.  I'll write more about my overall thoughts in my next post here.  Thanks for reading!