A Ridiculous Raincoat

It was a rainy spring day. Everyone I met on my way to the train station was outfitted with umbrellas, rain boots, and raincoats, or some combination thereof. (I didn’t even own an umbrella and rain paraphernalia until we moved to Japan. Walking in the rain is not something anyone would choose to do in the United States. Rather, Americans simply jump in a car and avoid the weather--in the process, getting fat for lack of exercise, I might add).

In any case, my story is about a particular woman I passed who was walking her dog. Nothing unusual about that. After all, dogs must be walked even on rainy days. But wearing an aqua and blue checked raincoat? The dog, I mean, not the woman. Her coat was apricot-colored.

But at least she was walking the dog in the old-fashioned and, in my opinion, correct way. Only weeks ago my heart was warmed by seeing a family of three out for a walk. With his right hand pushing the stroller, the father was holding his little son’s hand in his left. The mother was holding the toddler’s other hand in her right, while also pushing the stroller with her left. I smiled, remembering such walks when our own son was that age. It was a cozy sight.

Until I noticed that the stroller wasn’t empty as it should have been with the not-yet-two-year-old boy walking. Riding inside it was the family’s dog. My smile faded quickly, replaced I’m sure by an incredulous look. The image I’d been enjoying was completely spoiled.

So, as I said, at least the woman in my neighborhood was actually walking her dog that morning, even if it was wearing a ridiculous raincoat. The dog wasn’t riding in a baby stroller or being paraded in its own specially-made-for-doggie pram. They do make them in Japan. In fact, for a mere $250 or so, you can get one near our house at a store called Harness Dog. In the same place, you can also purchase an outfit for poochie fit for the ball. You can also buy your own matching clothes. (And our kids used to roll their eyes when Bernie and I wore matching tee shirts!)

Although I have seen a dog wearing diapers in Jiyugaoka, I didn't see any on display when I walked into Harness Dog—not to admire the merchandise but to get the disturbing facts about how dogs often are treated in Japan. Better than children, I sometimes think. After all, how is it possible to spend such amazing sums of money on dogs, cute as they may be, when children under five years old are starving at the rate of 12 per minute?

“They’re not my children,” some might argue. “If people don’t have the money to raise them properly, they shouldn’t have so many children.” It may be a valid argument, but it doesn’t change the fact that in many countries, children routinely go to bed hungry or gaze listlessly with unseeing, sunken eyes at the world around them—until they die for want of only a small fraction of the food the developed world consumes and/or throws away daily. I simply cannot look the other way.

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked,” Jesus told his followers in Luke 12:48. To ignore is to disobey.

Of course, it’s not enough to scowl at dressed-to-kill dogs carried in their “mothers’” arms on a shopping outing or a visit to a dog café to share tea. (This is not an exaggeration.) This is why for more than 30 years we’ve sponsored children through Children of Promise. (Currently we support two girls in India and another in Myanmar.) This Church of God child sponsorship program provides for the daily physical, spiritual, and educational needs of more than 3,800 children in 23 countries of the world. And there are many other excellent sponsorship programs that are also helping to alleviate the plight of destitute children in our world. If everyone would get involved and just do something—and I don’t mean dressing the dog in a ridiculous raincoat and going for a walk.

When Missions is Spelled ABCs

A colleague as she teaches English to plant seeds for faith in children's hearts

“A missionary is someone who goes to another country to tell people about Jesus.”

This, or some variation of it, is what we usually hear from children in America when we visit their churches and ask if they know what a missionary is. Typically, the places they imagine missionaries go have lions, elephants, zebras, and other wild animals roaming freely, bringing an element of danger into the definition. Just as commonly, children (and many adults as well) also imagine desperately poor people begging for food, their sunken eyes and bony, stick-like frames a testimony to the dire straits in which they barely survive. Missionaries go to their lands and give them food—both the Bread of Life to satisfy spiritually and bread with calories to provide for them physically. This is the work of a “real” missionary.

We’ve been missionaries for more than 30 years and we’ve yet to see a gazelle, rhino, or such animal except in the zoo (although once there was a monkey that came down from Kobe’s Rokko Mountains and into our neighborhood, pausing shortly on our verandah to preen). It’s an entirely different world here in Japan, a nation that refashioned itself from the ashes of World War II into a modern economic miracle. We don’t fight wild animals and muddy, pot-holed roads to go to work—only unbelievably crowded trains and gridlocked highways. Every modern convenience is available at the snap of the fingers. Even the homeless of Tokyo are not gaunt for lack of food.

With Japan as it is today, perhaps some might wonder if there really is work for a missionary here. With less than 1% of Japanese Christian after more than 150 years of Protestant missions, the answer is an obvious yes. But just as obvious is the fact that methodology must fit Japan in the same way that it must fit the needs, culture, and realities of any other location and people anywhere else in the world.

Using English as an outreach tool has been one method of evangelism used successfully in Japan ever since Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States steamed into Shimoda Port on the Izu Peninsula in 1854 and demanded that Japan end its 213-year-old isolationist policy and open up to the West. From that moment onwards—with the exception of the World War II years when English was banned in all schools—teaching English has been one of the most common methods of evangelism employed by missionaries of all church denominations and sending agencies operating throughout the nation. More recently, even classes for babies and their mothers have been employed.

It’s a valid method, too. The woman Bernie baptized recently in Kobe is just one example to illustrate. About three years ago, she joined the English-Bible classes at Tarumi Church. The missionary teacher soon discovered that she had deep questions about the Bible and faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, the woman’s questions were so earnest that the missionary soon encouraged her to step over the line from being an interested spectator to becoming a Christian. (Come to find out, she’d attended such classes at two other churches before moving to Tarumi.) Finally on April 28, after years of English-Bible classes and myriads of questions, the 60-something woman was able to declare publicly her intention to live as a Christian for the rest of her life.

Church English-Bible classes taught by missionaries play an essential role in the journey to faith for many Japanese. Emphasizing building relationships with students more than the fine points of English grammar, these classes aren't the only tool for missions in Japan, but they are one that works. We look forward to playing a role in many more harvest stories that emerge from English-Bible classes in our churches in the future. The ABCs have never seemed so exciting.