Another month in Japan, another email from your friendly wacky missionary friend! Or, for some of you, this is the first email from your friendly wacky missionary friend. A warm welcome to Leslie, Jen, Ernie, Rich, Sarah E., Katrina, Haidee, Jenae, and Cassie!
We'll start out with some terms again. :-)
LLI: Lutheran Language Institute. The place where I learn Japanese and where many of my more missionaryish activities take place.
Kanji: the Japanese alphabet based from Chinese in which each symbol loosely stands for a word. Actually, many of them are still only parts of a word. So, the word sensei, for example, is two kanji. "Sen" comes from the kanji that means "previously" and "sei" from the kanji for "live" or "birth", so, sensei (teacher) kind of literally means "one who has lived before".
Hachioji: My assigned church that I attend on Sundays. It's a nice congregation with about 30 people on a Sunday. We wear slippers inside, so it's always hard for me to remember that I need to be more concerned with what socks I am wearing to church than what shoes.
The holiday season in Japan is very busy. And for we missionary types, there were many opportunities to reach out to the community in the name of faith, turkey, and Santa Claus. I had three different Thanksgiving dinners over the course of one week at the end of November. The first was a massive dinner that was prepared by my missionary friends and served as outreach to many of the church members and English students at LLI. My housemate disappeared to help cook for about two days preceding the dinner and finally returned, exhausted and smelling of garlic, the evening the dinner took place. Many of the forty some people there were Japanese, and I admit it was vindicating to have multiple Japanese people asking "What is that food?" about things very familiar to me, such as cranberry sauce. After our kids' day from the first month we were here where there were only two kids, it was amazing to see how many people were there. In addition to the dinner, a Japanese man led a praise style worship time. That gave us the opportunity to do some fun singing and to be crazy. We taught the Superman meal prayer and performed our own version of the Humble Thyself / Awesome God medley with Sarah on the piano and Haidee on the guitar. I'm over here with some really talented ladies!
My second Thanksgiving dinner was on Thanksgiving Day itself, and it involved a very special pizza dinner with some of my friends. Cheese is next to non-existent here, or at least very expensive, so the dinner was a big treat. The final Thanksgiving dinner was at long-term missionary Dave's house and was comfortingly familiar and fun.
Non-holiday life in Japan also continues to be amusing. I have officially become the founding member of the Orange Jacket Revolution here in Tokyo. So far, it is a one girl revolution, but it feels strangely productive. Especially on the trains going to LLI in the mornings, there are a ton of people wearing black. I had purchased a black jacket the first couple weeks I was here, and it finally got to the point where I couldn't wear it. What can I say? I've always been something of a non-conformist. So, I went out in search of a new jacket. At first, I was looking at my normal favorite choices of blue or green, but then I saw the orange ones. I'm kind of in a mood right now to be as bright as possible. So, now I wear my orange jacket all over the place and feel a strange affinity with all the other people I see wearing orange or yellow or red.
One of my orange jacket's first experiences was a lovely hiking trip up and over two mountains. Rest assured, dear Wyoming readers, these were not Rocky Mountains, but it was still a very long hiking trip. Sarah (my housemate) and I accompanied two members of my church youth group. It is probably worth explaining that youth groups are a little different in Japan than in the States. I am the youngest member of my church youth group here in Japan. :-) It was a good, bilingual and bicultural day. My Japanese friends introduced us to Kushi-Dango, which is three rice dumplings on a stick with a sweet soy sauce drizzled over. We introduced them to trail mix.
Another fun youth group activity at church was making puppets. Koji, one of my good church friends, asked me a couple weeks before Christmas if I would help him make puppets after choir practice that Sunday. I agreed, and headed up after practice, assuming that we would be making sock puppets or something of the sort. When I arrived, however, I was handed a sphere of clay and shown a model of a sculpted face that I was to imitate. The experience showcased the communal aspect of Japanese culture very well. Before I had finished sculpting, I showed the head to one of the other puppet makers and kind of joked via gestures that the nose was too big. The head was immediately snatched away from me and the woman began adding little bits of clay here, scraping some off there. I felt myself getting offended. I hadn't even been given the opportunity to finish my best shot and here it was already being 'fixed' as though I hadn't done a good enough job! But then I remembered how much the focus is Japan is not on one individual person's work but on what the group could do together. Once I had given up my individual hold on the project, it was much easier to look at the assistance from other people in the group as assistance and not as corrections to a job I had done inadequately. I have to admit that the finished project was much better because there were multiple people involved.
In terms of language, there have been many big explosions since my last email. In class, we started learning kanji, which is the third and final alphabet that I will learn. Of course, where as the first two alphabets could be learned in a matter of weeks, even Japanese people cannot read all the kanji. The really big explosion, though, has been understanding. I can often get the gist of what people are saying, even if not the fine details. Sometimes this is bad, because I'm getting used to not understanding a lot of things. I had a meeting with a Japanese person about playing handbells, and in it I sat down and just started nodding and listening. The longterm missionary who was with me, eyebrows slightly raised, told me to let him know if I wanted things translated. It was only then that I realized I was only catching about two words a sentence, so I let him translate. ;-) I suppose speaking Japanese is getting much better too. Intellectually I know it is, because I gave a speech a couple weeks ago in which I talked for five minutes about St. Olaf in Japanese. But there are still many things I wish I could say but can't. Occasionally, my brain comes up with ingenious statements like "Sumimasen, hablas Espanol?" (Excuse me (in Japanese), do you speak Spanish (in Spanish)?) But my brain is gradually separating the languages, even if only by murdering my knowledge of Spanish.
Talk about language leads me to Christmas time. The five minute aforementioned speech took place on Speech Day, which was also a big Christmas party and our second (or third?) time to lead Holden Evening Prayer at LLI. I announced the Holden Evening Prayer part of Speech Day in Japanese at Hachioji Church, and then I was in trouble because everyone in the congregation knew I spoke Japanese. I was approached after church by one of the people who had been making puppets with me. She showed me the completed puppets and explained, completely in Japanese, something that involved "puppets" "Pamela-san" "Japanese" and "acting". There was little to do except say, "Yomimaska?" (Am I reading?). And I was, therefore, enlisted as a member of the cast of our Christmas pageant.
At LLI, we had another kid's day for Christmas. I got to help teach a handbell version of Away in the Manger to 24 little guys. Let me tell you, Japanese kids are talented. We only played the song once and it had a couple notes where you had to know octaves or flats and there was not a note missing. The day was such a miracle! Having that many kids was super energizing and fun! We even had a family from the local French school who contributed by teaching us to sing "O Christmas Tree" in French. It was an awesome day.
Christmas as a member of a Japanese congregation is a marathon sort of affair. At Hachioji, we started on December 23rd with a children's day of our own. This was the day that I was to be in the puppet show, but it turned out that I wasn't really a puppet but a live person who would interact with the puppets. In particular, I was Wise Man B. My church friend Koji had taken my script and written it out in nice, big Hiragana (the phonetic alphabet) in place of Kanji. The church members had lovingly decked me out in a decorative scarf, almost tunic, and small graduation cap. It almost went really well, until the woman with the line right in front of mine forgot her line and we started improvising. Or, rather, they started improvising while I stared at the script in rapt concentration waiting for it to return to any Japanese I recognized. Luckily it wasn't that formal of a performance, so our little bloopers just added to the fun.
After the puppet play I had my inaugural appearance as Santa Claus. Somehow, all the kids instantly knew it was me. I'm not really sure how...couldn't have had anything to do with my bad Japanese. ;-)
The next day at church was Christmas Eve. We had a morning service at 10:30, lunch after that, various Christmas presentations (gifts given to the oldest members of the congregation, a second showing of our Christmas pageant, and a wacky English solo from the resident missionary (I'm still not sure how they talked me into that one.)), and then a break until the evening candlelight service at 7:30. The evening candlelight service was a serious candlelight service. None of that only lighting the candles for Silent Night at the end. The candles stayed lit for almost the entire service. For those of us in the choir, that made things very interesting, because we were all sitting VERY close together in the front and juggling a bulletin, a choir folder, and a lit candle. But I am happy to say that there were no repeats of my childhood experiences of nearly burning down churches during candlelight services (which was my little brother's fault anyway... ;-) ).
I was very thankful for no church on Christmas day, and also very thankful for technology. My family and I were able to be "virtually" together on Christmas morning by using webcams. That definitely made the first Christmas away from home more bearable.
This past weekend was New Years, the big holiday here in Japan. I was asked more than once if this would be my first New Years away from home, which I suppose it was, but it was hard to explain to some of the Japanese people that it was Christmas, and not New Years, that I was concerned about. I was in a convenience store buying a sandwich when the New Year started. The Japanese teller wished me a happy new year in English with a big, embarrassed grin on his face. It is rare for a teller to say much more than "523 yen" or "thank you for waiting". It made me smile.
Amusing Gaijin Error of the month: While attending a Christmas party, a Japanese guy approached me and introduced himself. Except he used a lot of words to introduce himself. I had my dictionary with me and, determined to have some idea what he was saying, I picked what I believed was a key word and tried to look it up. He tried to dissuade me first by saying that it wasn't in the dictionary, and then finally said "That's not a word, it's my name." Oops. Lots of bowing on Pamela's part followed.
I hope that the holiday season is ending well for all of you, and that all of you had a chance to rest amid the festivities.
Blessings and peace!
Pamela
p.s. I now have pictures up online! I sent an email to most people on this list about the first album, but now there is a second album as well. The website is: http://picsbypamela.shutterfly
p.p.s. I have absolutely loved getting little emails from those of you who have sent them. Sometimes I have been busy and not managed to respond, but I always read them and they are a wonderful treat and gift. I am sorry, though, for those of you who have not gotten a response. I am trying to get better at responding.
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