Thursday morning is another class made up of older women, and, for whatever reason, also one college aged student. The college aged student in this class is a Korean grad school student who knows one of the top producers / director of Spiderman, a professional baseball player, and several important business executives. At one point, he was on track to become a CEO himself, but decided the dog eat dog world was not one he wanted to be in. So, now he is back in college. The ladies find him fascinating.
My Thursday morning class is the hardest class for me to connect to. They tend to talk about the kinds of topics that I usually don't discuss. I have no idea how to have a meaningful conversation about shopping, Tokyo sight-seeing, or the latest ladies' social event. They have no idea how to have a discussion about religion, justice issues, what-if scenarios, or a series of other things that are on my "I can participate in a discussion about this" list. The surest sign that the class has begun moving into an area that I actually feel comfortable leading is that one or more of the students will begin mumbling "I want to escape", "Why are we discussing such things?", or "We shouldn't really be talking about this." And they even mumble in English, so I know it's for my ears.
Today, however, we happened to stumble on a topic of mutual "interest" (for lack of a better word). One of my students has a sixth grade daughter who recently became sick. She stopped eating and was throwing up the whole weekend. Her mom took her to the doctor, who said that it was psychological, not physical. When the mom questioned her daughter, she learned that she was feeling stressed about her social group at school, and was tired of worrying about whether people were getting along and the like. The stress from this (probably also combined with regular school, cram school, and upcoming entrance exams for middle school) have landed her daughter at home every other day this week. She sleeps almost the whole day and doesn't eat.
As we talked about it in class, many of the other women (moms past and present) assured her that it was normal. That girls that age tend to have troubles like that. They urged her to take good care of herself because she needed to give a lot of love to her daughter right now. I scribbled out a prayer for her and her daughter while Aaron was leading Bible study and gave it to her. It felt good to be included even in a small way in her worries.
I had an hour to kill after class and I sat catching up with emails and blogs and the like. While I was sitting there, two women came in to have lunch. I know I had seen one of them before, but I can't remember where...she might be a church member, but she's not at Hongo so often. They asked me if I had eaten lunch, and I said I was meeting a friend for lunch in 45 minutes. Then they proceeded to give me two inarizushi (rice wrapped in...how to describe it...sweetened and vinagered tofu that has been cooked in some way), asked me how it was, and when I gave the standard "it's delicious" proceeded to give me another one. And then offer me tea thirty minutes later. Then, when I tried to leave to go have lunch with my friend, the lady who I don't know asked if I would please come out to her house sometime, even though it's about an hour away, and asked me to let her know when I have time. I am always a little confused by these kinds of interactions...are they trying to be nice to me or thank me or are they actually trying to get to know me?
I feel pressure in these kinds of situations...whether I have figured the cultural ideas surrounding them yet, I don't know, but my inner interpretation of them is as follows: the people are offering me food and invitations because it is polite to do so, but as we have never had a successful time interacting, it would be extremely awkward for me to actually take them up on the offer. However, giving is important to Japanese people, and so it seems like the polite thing to do would be to take them up on it. Which would land us in a situation where she was having me over only to be polite, and I was coming over only to be polite, and so the entire thing would be 100% for politeness' sake. I think that might make sense to them, but it doesn't to me. At any rate...Thursday's tend to be culture shock days. You'd think culture shock might end after one had been in a country for a year and a half...and maybe the "shock" aspect does end...it's the cultural confusion that is left lingering.
My second lunch was with Ken (Kentaro), a new Christian who has been attending Hongo for 9 months or so. He is overflowing with ideas, and has really picked up on the idea of having some fellowship activities to connect our young students with young Christians and our young missionary community. We're planning a hike on Takao mountain soon. He's made a flier, and a schedule, and was asking about doing songs or a Bible study. Then he gets out his computer and shows me a cd he's been making for our English students. It has a number of Christian worship songs, and he's printed out the lyrics and Japanese Bible verses to go along with them. He also discusses our worship book for the English service and how he wants to add some songs to it and put translations of difficult English words at the bottom of the songs. So, we are tentatively planning to get together some Sunday and tear our songbooks apart, take out the songs we never play, bring in new ones, and make them more accessible to beginner English students.
In the afternoon we made a group discovery between the Hongo staff about the story where Saul is converted on the road to Damascus. The katakana for Saul is サウロ (Sauro) when the narrative is talking about him, but when Jesus stops him with the bright light and calls his name, the katakana is サウル (Sauru). After much guessing, Etsuko finally figured out that this is because Jesus speaks to Saul in Aramaic, while the rest of the text is in Greek. Which makes sense, but really stumped our poor beginner students who were convinced the story was about two different Sauls.
In Beginner Bible class we started reading the Gospel of John. Every week after Beginner Bible class I go out to dinner with students, and we had been planning to go to a special restaurant this week, but I was rather surprised that every single one of them canceled. The guy who knew about the restaurant had forgotten about the engagement, another guy who has come out every single week told me he couldn't make it, the final guy who was in class said that he didn't have time that night, and the guy who was planning to come and meet us specifically for dinner sent me an email canceling. This was a pleasant surprise, because I had a friend I really wanted to have the time and energy to spend time with that night. I called her cell phone, and she almost didn't hear it because she'd put it away in her bag and was listening to music, but she felt like she needed to turn the music off and hear the tail end of the buzzing.
It was one of those small God presents...small in the sense of the world's perspective, but really cool for us. I know it was a big deal to my friend that I was able to come out and it was lovely for me to spend the evening one-on-one with a close friend being deep and real. Definitely worth the hour on the train to get out to her and the lost sleep. :-) God is really good to take care of the small "optional" things along with the huge ones.
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