Miyajima Island

Itsukushima Island (a.k.a, Miyajima Island) is a 12 square mile island located just a short ferry’s ride off the coast of Hiroshima. In the Shinto religion, the entire island is viewed as a shrine, which means that neither birth nor death may occur on the island, in order to protect its holiness. However, in addition to being home to several Shinto shrines, the most famous of which is Itsukushimajinja and its torii (gate), a few Buddhist temples also are present on the island.

Itsukushimajinja, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is dedicated to the daughters of the Shinto god of oceans and storms. Here, the torii is seen from the back of the jinja (shrine).

As quoted from Wikipedia: “A torii is a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the profane to the sacred.” This is a different style of torii found at the back of the jinja.

The world’s largest rice paddle

Until next time…

Hiroshima

After the earthquake, my kouchou-sensei (principal) allowed me to have three days oyasumi (absence), as I had no work for the remaining six now-half days of the school year. At first, the days at home seemed to be a good idea. However, the aftershocks were still quite strong and frequent; and I discovered that staying home alone was far less preferable to sitting at school with nothing to do. So when my friends, R.D. and A.D., invited me to stay with them in Yokohama over the holiday weekend as well as go with them to Hiroshima for a couple of days, I jumped at the chance to use my last two days of nenkyuu (vacation) to get out of town. And, thankfully, my kyoutou-sensei (vice-principal) was more than willing to let me go. While I didn’t get as much rest as I would have liked, I was able to relax and enjoy myself.

My time in Yokohama was so nice and, now that I think about it, centered almost entirely on food, as there is an abundance of American-style and American chain restaurants scattered throughout Yokohama. But I was so stuffed from my four days of American food gluttony (I forgot the lesson that I learned on Guam about American portion sizes.) that I’m now inspired to eat only when hungry and to eat like Okinawans, who eat until they’re 80% full and then stop.

It was also great to discover that my friends and I travel well together. In traveling to/from and around Hiroshima, we moved at the same pace. (It helped that, at 5’9”, I’m the shortest of the three of us. However, it didn’t help in avoiding stares.) We were interested in seeing the same things. We got hungry at the same time. ☺ And we weren’t distraught when we ran out of time to see the Peace Memorial Museum before having to catch our Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Yokohama. So A.D and I are talking about when we might be able to travel back to see the museum. Here are some pictures from the Peace Memorial Park, with captions synthesized and quoted from the literature provided throughout the park:

A-bomb Dome: On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an American B29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb approximately ¼ mile above and 1½ football stadiums away from the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The building was almost completely destroyed by the resulting fire, causing everyone in the building to perish immediately. As time passed, the former promotion hall became a hazardous, derelict, and painful reminder of what happened during the war. So many wanted the ruins to be razed. But as the city was rebuilt and other buildings that had been destroyed by the bomb were cleared away, others began to advocate the preservation of the promotion hall. The first such project occurred in 1967, funded by Japanese and foreign donations, with several additional projects following in later years to guarantee that the promotion hall, renamed the A-bomb Dome, would forever look as it did following the bombing. In 1996, the A-bomb Dome was registered with the World Heritage List “as a universal peace monument appealing for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of lasting world peace.”

Memorial Tower to the Mobilized Students: Over three million students over the age of 12 were mobilized to work throughout Japan during WWII. More than 10,000 of these students were killed, including 6,000 by the A-bomb.

"This tower was erected by concerned families and friends to console the souls of these victims who sacrificed themselves for their homeland, and who would have had a promising future had there been no war."

For those who died and those who cried: Japanese legend holds that if a person folds one thousand origami cranes, his or her wish will be granted by a crane, a traditionally holy creature. These cranes are hanging at the memorial tower.

Children’s Peace Monument: “This monument stands in memory of all children who died as a result of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima…. Built with contributions from more than 3,200 schools in Japan and donors in nine countries, the Children’s Peace Monument was unveiled on May 5, 1958.

“At the top of the nine-meter (27-feet) monument, a bronze statue of a young girl lifts a golden crane entrusted with dreams for a peaceful future. Figures of a boy and a girl are located on the sides of the monument. 

“The inscription on the stone block under the monument reads: ‘This is our cry. This is our prayer. For building peace in this world.’…”

A one thousand crane origami mural at the peace monument whose kanji read “Peace”.

While in Hiroshima, we also visited Miyajima Island which lies off the coast. I'll include pictures from that portion of the trip in another post.

Until next time…

Why I'm staying in Japan

As I was wrestling with God last summer about leaving Japan, I was working through a Bible study on the lives of the women of Genesis. (Coincidentally, or perhaps providentially, I had worked through another study in the series when God re-called me to move to Japan last November.) Lot’s wife taught me that looking backward when I should be looking forward might prevent me from reaching a physical and/or spiritual safe haven that the Lord has prepared for me. And Sarah’s life showed me how taking matters into my own hands in order to hasten the delivery of a promise may result in greater distress. These stories of Abraham’s family greatly influenced my decision to stay in Japan.

While I would never presume to consider myself worthy of being included in the Hall of Faith with Abraham, in many ways I felt and continue to feel somewhat like him – God called both of us to leave our countries, our people, and our families in order to go to a different land. Here, though, the similarities in our situations end, and not just because he went with his wife, nephew, and entire household of servants and possessions whereas I went alone with two suitcases and a backpack. Although Abraham had no idea of where he was headed when he left his homeland, he knew what he would receive in that land because of the promise the Lord had given to him before he left. I, on the other hand, knew to what land I was going, although I had and continue to have no idea of what I might receive here because the Lord made me no promises other than those which are common to all believers, e.g., He will never leave nor forsake me. So to stay in Japan would require me to truly walk by faith.

When I considered that the Israelites wandered through the wilderness for 40 years because of their lack of faith and that some looked back toward the certainty of slavery rather than looked forward toward the uncertainty of the Promised Land, I wondered what unknown promise or gift I might deny myself if I were to leave Japan. So I decided to stay to see what the Lord had planned for me here in Japan when He first called me all those years ago. Yet knowing and believing all this didn’t stop the fear from setting in during the days following the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant problems. So once again I found myself wanting to leave Japan despite knowing that the Lord hadn’t conditioned my stay with an early-departure clause for natural disaster. Once again I found myself praying for another clear indication that God wanted me to stay in Japan such as I’d prayed for when He re-called me to Japan almost 16 months ago. And once again the Lord proved faithful in graciously overlooking my fear in order to answer the prayer of my heart.

The aftershocks continue to come each day. I now must pore over produce and dairy labels at the grocery store. And I feel lost over here in so many ways. But my kouchou-sensei (principal) asked me to stay next year instead of telling me to return to America, which was my post-earthquake fleece for distinguishing the Lord’s will. So I have to remind myself everyday that this is where I’m supposed to be this day. I don’t know if Japan is my literal or figurative Promised Land or just a rest stop on the road there. But I do know that I want my faith to be more than a t. So I will stay in Japan for a second year. Pray that I will seek the Lord’s guidance in November when making the decision about a third year.

Until next time…

George Michael's "Faith" certainly didn't look like this.

We had another fairly strong earthquake today. I have no idea what's considered an aftershock from Friday's quake, what's considered a new quake, and if any of the quakes/aftershocks that we've received are fulfilling the predicted 60%-70% chance of a similarly-sized follow-up. But I've been getting new earthquake notifications on my phone for the past couple of days, with some of the quakes being strong and some being comparatively minuscule. Granted, I got no earthquake notification for the world's fifth largest earthquake. So who knows how much credence I should give them. But I did sleep fairly wonderfully when back in my own bed last night, despite the ongoing tremors throughout the night.

That said, the first of the teachers in my group, a couple, understandably headed toward Narita as soon as this afternoon's earthquake hit. We are all on edge. And with no idea of when these quakes and nuclear uncertainties will subside, several of my coworkers have bags packed so that, if necessary, they can head out the door at a moment's notice. With no obligation to go school until Friday and with today's large tremor, I've decided that I will join the ready-to-leave-at-a-moment's-notice group. If I do leave, I'll certainly be leaving behind some of the clothing that I brought with me. And I may not be able to bring home all of the precious notes and other gifts given to me by students and parents. So I'm doing the difficult sorting today to pare down to one checked bag and one carry-on.

Yet if it comes down to making the decision to leave, it's not going to be an easy one. I've long felt God's calling for me to be in Japan. Though I appreciate the refinement I've received since coming here, it's been an extremely painful process and doesn't fit with the awesome-yet-nebulous gifts that I thought I would receive by following His calling. I've felt like an outsider at school the entire time I've been here. I've been sick more than I've been healthy since arriving. And I've not taught EBC at church since October, when all three of my students stopped coming. So though I decided to stay for a second year, that decision was reached only after wrestling with the Lord for several months. Ultimately, my decision to stay was based on my desire to be obedient to His will and to not miss out on whatever He wants to do in me and through me by being here. If I decide to leave as a result of these quakes, tsunami, and potential nuclear danger, I feel like though leaving is wise in man's eyes, it's disobedience in God's eyes. Please pray for me that I'll make a Spirit-led decision.

Until next time...

Nibankari (Aftermath)

**If you're looking for my Jishin! (Earthquake!) post, please scroll down. 

The aftermath of the earthquake has been quite stressful. However, my friends and I have all been looking out for each other. So it has made this ordeal much less intimidating.

Not knowing for how long we'd be without utilities, C.G. and I decided that we would weather the earthquake aftermath together. The first decision of weathering an unknown number of days without water, which affects toilet usage, was to assign one apartment the small potty toilet and the other apartment the big potty toilet. Lucky for me she designated me the keeper of the small potty toilet!

The second decision of not knowing when we would get running water again involved us going in search for water. Japan is a nation that has vending machines on almost every corner. Near my apartment are seven within a two-minute walk. But with no electricity, they were inoperable. (Apparently in times of crisis, one vending machine company allows for its machines' contents to be accessed when there is no power. But we didn't know this at the time.) And the kombini were closed. So we decided to walk to the city's education research office, which is located near my apartment, to check in. On the way there, we stumbled across a warehouse that was selling cases of drinks for ¥1100. (A drink from a vending machine can cost ¥150.) Amazingly, the warehouse wasn't taking advantage of people's desperation for water by charging ridiculously high prices. Unfortunately, they also weren't rationing. So C.G. and I, though we stood in line, were unable to buy any drinks. We met one of the Japanese families from church in the line. We all hugged each others' necks and made sure that everyone was okay before C.G. and I headed off to the education research office with two of their onigiri (rice balls) and some cans of coffee that they refused to let us turn down. (Literally, one of the daughters shoved four cans of coffee into my coat pockets. And though C.G. had already accepted two cans of coffee, the mother tossed another one into her purse as we were walking away.) Upon arriving at the education research office to let the staff know that we were okay, we were able to use a working toilet, wash our hands, and get 10 liters of water.

As the day went on, we noticed people standing in really long lines at kombini, at a grocery store, at a gas station, and at a home center. We were struck by how polite and patient everyone was being in spite of the horrible situation they now found themselves in. C.G. had told me the story from her walk home on Friday of seeing people standing in line at a kombini whose clerks were selling goods through a broken window in order to manage the crowd. Nobody stormed the locked doors to force them open. Instead, they waited patiently for their turn to make a purchase. Through all of this, we've witnessed only one occasion when someone tried to line jump for gasoline. No one has been yelling, pushing, or rioting in their panic. And the third decision we arrived at is if anyone ever has to weather a natural disaster, Japan is the place in which to do it.

Fourth, C.G. and I decided to combine our food resources. While we've not eaten luxuriously or even gotten full at each meal as a result of sharing our food, we have been good at helping each other ration what we do have in order to make it stretch as far as possible. This includes what we already had in our apartments as well as what we found at a fresh produce market that was set up near church on Sunday. We've shared with each other and with K.M. and A.H., two people who opened their apartments to us on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights while we waited for our utilities to come back on. And at church on Sunday, other friends shared their food with us and invited us back to their apartment for a meal, since their utilities already had been turned back on.

Due to our extreme fatigue (ten hours of sleep in a four-day period), we've found great hilarity in some of the things we've said. But we've also tried to find the humor in the situation in order to keep ourselves from dwelling on the magnitude of what is happening all around us. At A.H.'s apartment, her refrigerator had purged itself of its contents during the earthquake before closing its door, which made me think of the armoire in Beauty and the Beast which defends itself against invaders by vomiting its owner's clothing onto the attackers. And as A.H.'s freezer didn't feel as threatened (or perhaps because it opens with a drawer rather than a door), its contents were spared. So once we'd washed the dishes, we decided that the freezer was the safest, albeit coldest, place to protect them in case of an aftershock sending things toppling again, which had happened to our friend N.P.

The utilities at my apartment came back on Monday, where I am now happy to spend my time since my school has told me to stay home until Friday's graduation, as there is no work for me to do there. While I plan to stay on top of what the latest news is saying about the nuclear reactors, in order to minimize my stress, I plan to treat the next two days as a staycation, watching movies, catching up on American TV shows, and doing anything that might temporarily free my mind from worry about what is happening and what decision I should make next.

Until next time...

Jishin! (Earthquake!)

I am so thankful to have been physically uninjured and minimally disturbed by last Friday's major earthquake. And I am keenly aware that millions of people just north of me are unable to say the same thing. Thus, I am conflicted to share the struggles I've encountered as a result of the earthquake's much more minimal effects in my city. They seem so small in comparison. However, they are the struggles I experienced.

Last week there were several small earthquakes that occurred before Friday's quake. A couple woke me in the middle of the night. And some occurred mid-day. But the biggest one occurred just before lunchtime on Wednesday while I was at my one-day-a-week kindergarten, lasting approximately one minute and feeling much more real than any of the other joltings I'd experienced in the 10 previous months. In fact, on Thursday when I went to my main school, I mentioned to my school nurse and my jimuin (teachers' room manager) that I'd had enough earthquakes for the week. And after Friday's quake occurred, I remembered having thought that the week's mini-quakes seemed like precursors to something big yet to come.

I'd finished cleaning up my classroom after having taught my last English class of the day and was walking through the hallways when the quake hit. As I was walking, I didn't initially notice that the vertigo I was experiencing was due to the quake. But the quake quickly became stronger and the school's emergency notification system set in, with the automated warning message sounding and the fire doors closing. Thank goodness that the fire doors have smaller doors built into them, as by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs where I could exit the building, the fire doors had all completely closed.

I looked at one of the other staff members of my school to find out what I should do/where I should go because I'd missed the earthquake drill earlier in the year. He was not helpful in letting me know what I should do. (In his defense, his English is limited.) So when another shock occurred, I went outside where the first and second graders had gathered to leave school at their regularly-scheduled time. I could feel and see the ground rolling like ocean waves and then circling like water going down a drain. And the sixth graders who were setting up the hall for a teacher-appreciation party that was to occur in 15 minutes, came running outside to join us in the courtyard. The rolling and circling of the quake lasted anywhere from three to five minutes; and when the initial quake had stopped, attendance was taken before the students and teachers all went out to the playground, which is a big open dirt field so that we could be away from any debris that might fall. After the rest of the school joined us outside (the other grades endured the quake under the safety of their desks, I assume), we waited for perhaps an hour or 90 minutes for aftershocks to die down before walking the students to their homes, some with their parents who'd come for them, some without.

Skip forward a couple of hours... Around 6pm, the principals dismissed us to go home if we wanted. Upon hearing that there were no traffic signals and that it could take two to three hours to make the trip home by car, I'd hoped that the teachers would want to stay at the school for the evening. (Most schools are designated safety evacuation areas.) But most wanted to go home. So I followed a teacher who lives near me to make the long journey home. It did, indeed, take almost two hours to make the usual 25-minute drive. Traffic was snarled; cement walls around homes had toppled into the streets; roads and bridges had buckled; pedestrians jaywalked to stand in lines at kombini (convenience stores) lit up by car headlights. Upon arriving home, I found some of my neighbors preparing to spend the night in their cars. After climbing the stairs to my fourth floor apartment, I opened my door to find my apartment in shambles. Almost everything in the front half of my apartment had been jostled off the shelves. I had to climb over my shoes, microwave, rice cooker, dish drainer, cooking supplies... to get to the back of my apartment, which I found had fared much better. My furniture had moved six to eight inches away from their original positions; and some things were on the floor. But my TV, computer, and photos survived unscathed. And I had no utilities. I cleaned up some of the broken glass, cleared a couple pathways, and got in bed at 8:30pm.

At 11:30pm, one of my neighbors, C.G., knocked on my door. She'd just accompanied one of her teachers on a six-mile hike home, as the teacher had insisted on going home but was too afraid to drive her car. After finding her apartment in worse shape than mine, she came down to spend the night with me. We both spent the night terrified by the hundred or so aftershocks that continued throughout the night. Every time a strong shock came, we bolted upright, prepared to run out of the apartment. We got absolutely no sleep; and in the morning we felt like we'd been in a war zone due to the rumbling aftershocks that sounded like mortar explosions, emergency sirens that blared all night long, and helicopters droning overhead to survey the damage.

To spare you an even longer post that is already long, I'll share the post-quake stories in a later blog(s).

Until next time...

It's more than a t.

Being a Protestant Christian, I never realized how much the Sign of the Cross has shaped some foreign non-Christians' understanding of Christianity. Granted, Protestant Christians don't have as distinctive a worship gesture as do Catholic Christians. And my lack of realization probably says more about me than I intend it to, since it may signify that I rarely attempt to look at the world through another person's eyes. But I find it very interesting that every time I mention to my Japanese teachers something that I did at or with my kyoukai (church), they cross themselves. So that presents the question, What do I presume to understand about other people's religions based on something as simple and as non-revealing as a gesture?

Until next time...