Meeting with Tsutomu

It’s almost 1 PM Monday afternoon. Today is mostly a day of preparation for the travel we will be doing the rest of the week. I am sitting in a lounge on the second floor of the hotel waiting for the washer/dryer to stop. There really aren’t very many Laundromats near by, so the hotel concierge staff were kind enough to let us use the machines located in a part of the hotel where flight crews sometimes stay. By the way, I wrote “washer/dryer” not “washer and dryer”, because there is a machine here that serves both functions. In other words, you put your clothes in the tub just like you would any washing machine, but instead of taking them out to put them into another machine for drying, the same machine switches to drying once the wash cycle is completed. Talk about a space-saving appliance!

This morning Dale and Elliott and I met our friend, Tsutomu (Tom) Kanayama for a late breakfast. Tom is a professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, which is a Jesuit-run institution. I first met Tom when we were in graduate school together at Western Michigan University in 1991. Tom received his Masters from WMU and went on to complete a PhD from Ohio University. His expertise is in telecommunications. We have stayed in touch through the years, being able to visit one another on occasion as a result of either his travel schedule or mine.

Tom has been an invaluable friend and help both times we have been in Tokyo. I asked him early on to please tell us if he saw us committing any cultural blunders. He has been very helpful in that way as well.

Today I shared with Tom the proposal for starting an English as a Foreign Language evangelism outreach. He told us he thought it was a good idea, and he gave us a few helpful suggestions. Most of all, he expressed deep gratitude for our interest in his countrymen. As a Christian, Tom has very little opportunity for fellowship and Bible study, so he personally appreciates the prospect of more of his countrymen becoming believers in the Lord.

We would like to request special prayer for tomorrow through Saturday. We will be traveling more than 3000 kilometers by train on these days. The trip on Wednesday in particular will involve changing trains 8 times. Fortunately, as I posted a couple days ago, our itinerary is all laid out. I took the time early this afternoon to look everything up in a time table booklet and to mark the pages and columns with the information we might need should something go awry.

We are planning to visit with EBM missionaries tomorrow and then with ABWE (and possibly Word of Life) missionaries on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, we stop on our way back in Hiroshima overnight before traveling on to the north of Tokyo on Saturday. The plan is for is to be with Nobby and Bev Tajima on Sunday and through most of the following week. We will be staying at a camp that is operated by their church and a few others. We are excited about seeing everything and about meeting new people to consult with them as well.

By the way, you can guess who is doing the best with learning various words and phrases...and it's not Dale or me! Elliott taught himself to count to 20 in Japanese while we were getting the train schedule set up. I've had to ask him for help a couple of times (Japan really is a humbling place). All of learned something yesterday that is quite useful. The expression for "thank you" is domo arigato gozaimas. We had heard before we came that there is a difference in the language between men and women. In other words, men and women can have different vocabularies and different rules for usage. For example, Melody Yoshida told us that when saying thank you, a woman is never to shorten the phrase domo arigato gozaimas. It is considered gruff to abbreviate and simply say domo or arigato. Men can get away with that, but not women. Well, Dale and I had both noticed that people were at times simply saying arigato or domo. So we did it too, but now one of us has stopped and is using the more complete phrase to say thanks.

We may not be able to connect to the internet for a few days. At the latest, we should be back online on Friday.