Return to Japan, Part 3

The conversation was everything I hoped it would be, rich, varied, wide-ranging, and as deep as we could manage with Takako’s rusty English and my very broken Japanese. We spoke about God and the gods and God as love and the source of life, about God becoming man to show us how to love, how the Source of Life could not remain dead, and how loving like He does reunites us with Him and with Life itself.

What did I hope for? Well, of course I would have loved it if my friend had decided to become a Christian, but I know enough now about spiritual journeys that I did not expect that to happen. But she was her usual direct and honest self, characterizing our mental and physical decline as we grow older as “神様のつむ” (kami-sama no tsumi = God’s sin), which led to the part of the discussion about the Creator being the source of life, with His love being the reason that He created us and sustains us, about our sin and selfishness being a turning away from Him and thus from the source of life itself, and about the only way back to life being to reunite with Him by loving as He does. Her challenge, as always, was the source of depth in the discussion, and led to what it was that I think I had actually been hoping for: an open and honest discussion in which I could present to her the heart of the Christian faith, so that she could have an opportunity to see it for what it really is (as opposed to how it was presented to her before): not just a message of judgement, but the good news of God’s love for us and the restoration to life that naturally follows from embracing that love.

And she understood. She characterized her own love as small, with the implication that it needed to grow bigger. Takako’s husband, Hiroshi, also participated in some of the conversation, which added to the challenge, as he has even less English than Takako, I don’t know him as well, and my Japanese is terrible, but, despite saying that it was difficult (which, of course, these concepts are), he also indicated that he understood a little of it. Which really was all I could hope for. Hiroshi-san might have just been being polite, but I know Takako understood.

I am not an evangelist. My first memory, after stepping off the train in Shukugawa, was of the exquisite torture that I underwent, having to hand out advertisements for the church language school. As the pastor explained, handing out brochures at the station is not unusual in Japan, and it is effective, given that the polite Japanese almost invariably take one of the proffered pamphlets, and he characterized it as part of our missionary work. I even saw someone handing out brochures at Shukugawa station the next day (and I took one politely), but, as a shy young Canadian, I hated it.

But I also hate to see the Gospel misrepresented or misunderstood, which was another source of agony I underwent as a not-yet-Orthodox-but-no-longer-entirely-Protestant young man, working as a Protestant missionary-English-teacher in Japan. Without going into details, my friend Takako suffered from some of the distortions of the Gospel that had crept into the pastor’s teaching, which I tried to correct at the time, until everything was interrupted by the Great Kobe Quake. So it was very good, thirty years later, to have a chance to put some things right.

There was also a certain sense of closure that I experienced, having left when my year was up in the aftermath of the quake, in seeing Shukugawa rebuilt and apparently prosperous—although it was strange to see new apartment buildings where the old houses had been, and a parking lot where I had seen a child, covered in grey dust atop a pile of rubble, into the base of which his father was calling, “Obā-san! Obā-san!”

And there was a sense of completion that I experienced in being able to introduce my sons to Takako, and to show them where I lived for a year, where the earthquake had happened, and to walk up the Shukugawa River with them into the mountains that were my only escape from the endless city that was, and is, urban Japan.

It was interesting to hear Takako say that, other than obviously being older, she felt that I was largely unchanged: still child-like, which, as a Christian, I took as a compliment. She too was much the same as I remembered, which made communication possible where our lack of proficiency in two rather difficult languages might otherwise have posed an all-but-insurmountable barrier. Truly, while

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Everything changes; nothing stays the same.
No one can ever go back the way they came.

Yet friendship grounded in a common love of truth transcends the ravages of time.