Every Day Living - Our New Home & Area

Our apartment has 2 bedrooms – want to come visit? The kitchen is well supplied, including a refrigerator with a reversible door on top (open from the left or right); and 2 drawers below – the bottom one is for fruit and vegetables and the middle one is the freezer. 

We cook with gas – when I turn the oven on, I have to wait quite a while for it to light – at home my oven would light immediately, so I’m concerned about gas. However, it’s not a problem here.

We have a washing machine in our apartment – the dryer is in the next door off our porch. Each washer is very smart – they weigh the load and decide how long the cycle will be. We were told one of the machines washes and dries – but we haven’t used that one! (All directions are in Japanese…) So far clothes dry very fast in the sun.

Garbage is a major issue – we have over 6 categories that we need to sort things into. And there are different days when it gets picked up. And there are different times of day various ones get picked up. So, the “regular” garbage is to be put out at dusk. It gets covered with a net so the birds don’t get into it. The next morning we fold the net up for the week. We buy special bags for burnable & food garbage – that’s how they cover the cost for that category.

Gardens – in riding the bus to church on Sunday, we noticed quite a few small gardens in the middle of town – several were vineyards, but there were vegetable gardens, too. In a crowded city of many people, it was interesting to find gardens – well tended – and Rita told us theft of fresh items is not a problem. In fact, theft is not a problem at all. (Rita is our teacher and good friend now!)

Our First Week in Japan

The cherry blossoms are pretty much over – and they are all over the ground and in our house! There is no way to keep them out! 

The park next to our house is often busy with preschoolers – there’s a school nearby and they use the park. Different ages wear different colored hats. Every day at 5 p.m. a bell rings in the park.

 A Japanese church met under a cherry tree in "our" park for a picnic lunch.

We caught the bus to church on Sunday. See us sitting on the bus bench!

Our friend and “teacher” took us with her. They meet at CAJ – Christian Academy of Japan – where many friends have attended over the years.

We’ve been on a steep learning curve – shopping is most challenging and we’ve purchased several things we didn’t really want!!

Things are more expensive here – we were told all highways are tolled to the tune of about $1/mile. Just taking the bus to church cost us about $15. We hope to find one closer that we can walk to. Walking is the way we get around – all shopping is by foot. We go ‘most every day and carry it all home.

Arrived in Tokyo!

7:30 am Monday – suitcases packed, ready to go – oh, let’s check the weight on this big case – oh, no – 10+ pounds overweight. Quick, get another case. (We didn’t use up more than our allotted number of cases). 8 am Larry and Marilyn are punctual; we didn’t have the traffic issues we expected, so got to the airport plenty early, but Roger’s passport wouldn’t scan. So, we were directed to “special services”. There was no one in line, and 3 friendly attendants got us checked in. We encouraged them to give serious thought to where their last trip would take them. Then, surprise – we both got TSA pre-checked status. No one in line again!

Had good seats, good seat-mate, and good trip with lots of food (2 meals/2 snacks with beverages). The seat-mate was open to spiritual things, too. He took a Gospel of John along. Upon arrival and getting through customs & immigration (finger and eye printed), we bought our bus tickets. Nice bus – cloth seats, seat belts, express route, recliners, heavy curtains to block sun.

Since the bus wasn’t full, we each had a double seat (one of us wasn’t built for the allotted space)! It was 1½ hour trip.

Driving in Tokyo, we saw sights that reminded Heather of Europe – houses squeezed close together in random order; laundry drying on the porches; narrow roads with no shoulders; bikes, people and small shops everywhere.

After arriving at the TEAM guest house, we were served dinner, unpacked and moved in, and then were taken on a long walk to get oriented to shopping. Now we have another hour or so to stay up and then BED!

We're off to Tokyo, Japan on April 8

Why, you may ask, are we heading to Tokyo for almost three months? Well, we have several missionary friends in Japan, and one thing they kept mentioning was the need for volunteers to manage the TEAM guest house in Tokyo. We thought about this for about a year and finally decided that we could probably do that job! After all, it only is a 3-month commitment and anyone could handle that, right! (How about you?). Japan is a country in great need spiritually. Here are some quick facts from the TEAM web site:

-Only 0.43 percent are Protestant Christians.

-Religion does not play a big role in the lives of most Japanese, with many not understanding the main two religions of Shintoism and Buddhism.

-Japan is smaller than the state of California, but less than 20 percent of the land is habitable for its 127 million residents.

-On average, there is a suicide in Japan every 15 minutes.
-The birth rate is just 1.35 children per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Our initial request was for 3 months over Christmas, figuring that would work best with our other ministry obligations. However, they didn’t need anyone right then and preferred that we come in the summer.  However, that’s our very busy time for outreach at fairs with Child Evangelism Fellowship.

So, we are leaving April 8 and returning June 18, God willing.

Our job will involve supervising the Japanese housekeepers hired to clean the rooms (20 beds total), collecting the money for guests’ board and room, shopping for breakfast foods, cooking and cleaning up hot breakfasts 5 or 6 times a week and preparing occasional luncheons for TEAM staff meetings. Heather will be doing a lot of this, including keeping track of all the related finances.  Roger hopes to be involved in some English language conversation with the the hope of discussing matters of eternal  significance. He will also likely be doing some facility maintenance and repairs.

Here are a couple a Googled images of the Team Center in Mitaka: