From Reading the Newspaper

Something’s wrong here. Terribly wrong.

Despite the fact that I’m to be on an airplane in just a few hours, I can’t rescue my mind from what I read in yesterday’s newspaper in order to think about packing. Two items in particular captured my attention and have troubled my heart.

On the front page of The Daily Yoimuri was a photo that, at first glance, seemed so uninspired that I almost skipped the caption. But I didn’t—and I’ve not been the same since. The photo was of two melons in a white box. Nothing extraordinary, except for the price at which they were auctioned at a wholesale market in Sapporo earlier this week. Unbelievably, those two cantaloupes went for a whopping 2 million yen!

I shook my head and read the caption again. Surely I’d misunderstood. Never having been good at mathematics, I used my calculator to translate the figure into dollars. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it had seemed in yen. But it was. In fact, at more than 8,250 dollars a melon, it was even worse than I’d imagined. Nothing could be that delicious.

A few pages later, a headline called to me: “For Poor Women in Rural China, Suicide Is a Bitter Way Out.” Curious, I read the article and learned about the amazingly high suicide rate in impoverished China. These backwater areas of the world’s most populated nation know nothing about the incredible boom China is experiencing as it reinvents itself as a world economic power. Instead, rural households frequently scrape by with a median per capita income of 13 dollars a month, and women often bear the brunt of the fight for survival. Yet somewhere in Japan, people are eating an 825 dollar cantaloupe!

According to a study by the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center, poverty and the growing distance between China’s “haves” and “have nots” is fueling the surge in suicides to a rate more than two times that of the United States. Even more amazing is the fact that “attempted suicides outnumber completed suicides by 10 to 1,” according to the center’s director.

One can fly from Tokyo to China in only about three hours. But right now, China feels galaxies away. It doesn’t take an economist or sociologist to know that something’s terribly wrong in our world. What, I wonder, is my responsibility as a Christian? Surely it’s more than pledging not to eat overpriced melons (if I could afford them) or even praying sincerely for China’s poor (not to mention the 800 million people in the world suffering from hunger and malnutrition, according to the United Nations). Jesus’ words are reverberating loudly in my mind: “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matthew 25:45).

I do have to pack my suitcase, but I cannot escape the questions that have been stirred up like a hornet’s nest in my mind.