Sunday Lunch

After our Sunday morning worship known as Praise Time, some people stay for lunch. It's a good opportunity to get to know people informally, and with so little free time, Sunday is the best day to do that.



With this many small children (and another on the way, we found out on Sunday!) our Praise Time worship needs to be concise! Most Sundays the children do very well, but there's a limit to how long they can occupy their time.

Is This a Great Place or What?

Where else are you going to see one of these? This is a real zeppelin, made in Friedrichschaffen Germany, just like the originals 70 years ago. They updated the design, and of course use helium this time. It's more oblong in shape because it has a rigid frame inside. That's what distinguishes it from blimps.

On weekends with good (VFR: Visual Flight Rules) weather, it lands at the end of our island to pick up sightseeing passengers. 12 seats, at about $400 for a cruise around Tokyo.



No, as a matter of fact, we haven't gotten around to taking the tour yet. But what other neighbourhood can boast of having its own zeppelin landing pad?

Research with a Harpoon Gun

This ship docked at the end of our island a few weeks ago. You'll see it's a research ship, from the Institute of Cetacean Research in Japan. You'll also notice the harpoon gun on the bow. In 2007 just under 1,000 whales were taken for research purposes. The meat went on sale in Tsukiji, just a few blocks north of where we live. The ship does this whaling in the southern Pacific as well as near Antarctica.

I recall a conversation with Mr. Hiraoka in Hiroshima many years ago. He said the world had no business telling Japan not to hunt whales, because Japanese eat whales, while Westerners eat beef. It's just a cultural difference, he said. I tried to point out that there was something bigger than culture here, because whales are close to extinction and cattle are not.

In a similar manner, people look at the world's religions as all being similar, and merely cultural. We have no business insisting Jesus is God's way, they tell us. Yet, there's something bigger than culture here. Religion supposedly gives the means for me to earn, merit, or somehow obtain spiritual benefits. Jesus came to provide them for us for free. He is the only One who could do that. Quit trying to reach up for these things, when God through Jesus has already reached down to us. That's the Gospel.

You Saw It Here First!

The Empty Tomb Cake was the masterpiece of our colleague Carol Love, while Miwako brought the Easter Bunny. The fur is made of shredded egg white, and the ears of sliced ham and cheese.

We combined the Toyosu and Harumi Praise Time congregations for a joint Easter Celebration on Sunday. Easter hymns, a power point presentation, communion and a portrayal of the resurrection from "The Hope" CD (google it, and click on Chapter 11 and you can watch it for yourself, but with English narration) were all a part of the morning. Afterwards we enjoyed lunch together, over Empty Tomb Cake and Easter Bunny casserole.




This is the room that sets us back a whole $3 an hour to rent.

Excerpt from japantoday.com

Japan in 2009 was a busy place — for the Grim Reaper. A National Police Agency report revealed that there were 32,753 suicides in the country last year, exceeding 30,000 for the 12th consecutive year and accounting for 3% of all deaths. Current World Health Organization figures show that of OECD countries, Japan has the second highest suicide rate, at 24.7 per 100,000 people. Only Russians kill themselves at a greater rate.

Unfortunately, in a country of 135 million people, such statistics lend themselves to abstraction, so let’s put a human face on things. Imagine standing at your local train station from morning to night and having to choose six people an hour to take their own lives. Who will it be? The salaryman? The young mother? The high school student?

Last year, the government set up a task force to address the suicide crisis, but there have been a number of such efforts made over the past decade, and the rate shows no sign of declining. This is because the task forces deal not in cures but in treatments, like the latest action of assigning mental health professionals to “Hello Work” employment offices. The rationale is that unemployment is a factor in suicide, but other countries with greater economic woes have much lower suicide rates. Why? Because a perpetually high suicide rate doesn’t just reflect a set of temporary circumstances — it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional society.

In his novel “A Long Way Down,” Nick Hornby offers a striking insight: people commit suicide not because they hate life, but because they love it and can’t endure separation from it. I take this to mean that we all want to lead lives as we choose but are constrained from doing so. The stronger the constraints, the wider and more painful the separation.