a new start, and a little less fugiri

1. giri: [noun] debt of gratitude, moral obligation, [verb] to give or do something out of a sense of  obligation or duty.

2. fugiri: the opposite of the above.

My flatmate and I often joke about how there are a lot of words in Japanese where you just add the character "fu" (anti-, un-) to the start of a word and the word will turn into the opposite meaning of what it originally was.  When learning Japanese you tend to hit a stage where you suddenly notice this pattern and, if you're really clever, you'll start trying to make new words from the ones you already know by adding or dropping this character.  Sometimes this works (e.g. the above words, or kanou "possible" and fukanou "impossible") but why we find it so funny is that often it really doesn't work at all.  For example, fushigi means mysterious, but dropping the fu just makes a weird bunch of characters that mean absolutely nothing.  Or fusoku means "inadequate" or "not enough" but dropping the fu character just leaves you with the word "foot."

Well, on that note (or, not at all related), let me share a little bit about how things are going starting off work with Japan International Food for the Hungry (JIFH) here in Hiroshima.

Actually, there's a lot to tell, so let me sum things up in a few simple words.

1. Dusty.  The office is really dusty. So I am sitting at my computer with a throw-away surgical mask on, knowing you would all fall over laughing if you saw me like this.  These are actually hugely in fashion right now as it is also hay-fever season and these masks are great for filtering the air so you don't breathe in all the pollen and cough and splutter all the time.  They actually keep your face quite warm as well, so sometimes I use one in winter to keep my face warm even when I'm not sick... hey, when in Rome...

2. Messy.  The office is really messy.  We're on the second floor of an old renovated house downtown (two minutes from the most central shopping street - amazing location) and below us, on the first floor, is the Hiroshima Christian Bookshop - only one in the city.  There's only been one or two staff members here in the JIFH office since it's been opened, and this has resulted in the place being used for dumping/storing/pretending to have disposed of unwanted stuff.  For both JIFH, and the bookshop downstairs, and yes, my old fridge and washing machine are here too... It's hard to believe we're going to turn this place into a little cafe - we're trusting in a God who can make amazing things out of nothing to help us out here a lot!!  First on the to-do list was organizing regular rubbish collection (done) and second is oosouji, literally, "big cleaning."

3. Surprise.  My second day of work I had a phone-call from a staff member in the Nagoya office. 

Y: "I need to book the flights for your trip to Malaysia, can you tell me your passport number?"
E: "Oh, you mean the trip to the Philippines.  It's in May."
Y: "No, your trip to Malaysia.  It's in April."
E: "Huh? No, it's the Philippines in May."
Y: "Has no-one told you? You're going to the International Food for the Hungry Federation Conference in Malaysia."
E: "Oh, okay. Sure! Yeah, no-one told me."

I got two phone calls after hanging up, informing me that I was going to be attending the international conference in April with some others from the JIFH team.  This makes three overseas trips in my first six months of work, and apparently I'm not an official staff member until I have worked for six months anyway.  Phew!  So the international travel schedule for the year is now:

April 22nd - 30th: International Food for the Hungry Conference and Malaysia ministries site visit (Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia)
May 22nd - 29th: Global Discipleship Congress and Hands of Love Philippines site visit (Manilla, Philippines)
August 18th - 31st: Volunteer Work Camp with Reach ministries (Houses of Reconciliation), (Kigali, Rwanda)

It's going to be fun trying to keep up with the pace of this organization!

4. Explode. I just got back from a week-long orientation in Chiba.  I attended as part of my training as a new staff member, but the majority of the attendees were Christians in their twenties and thirties who were interested in learning about the current state of world poverty, hunger, development work, and ways to get involved.  In Japan it tends to be not your typical personality that gets involved in work like this, so it was fun being around such a mix of "slightly un-ordinary" people and hearing their stories and what God is doing in their hearts & lives. 

The training was intense though, and it confirmed that I can look forward to learning a whole new vocabulary in the new future!  I don't know how to talk about politics, development, or the causes and symptoms of malnutrition in English, let alone in Japanese yet!!  I felt like my head was going to explode after the first two sessions "World Hunger Today" (big numbers, statistics, and lots of jargon).  I was relieved though that most of the Japanese participants found it difficult too, and then relieved again when we moved on to the next set of classes on things such as a biblical worldview regarding poverty & hunger, emergency relief work, and servanthood. 

It's great though that JIFH encourages us to learn slowly and surely at our own pace, and to start work and ministry with what we can do "now," taking little steps towards what we will be able to do "later."

5. Giri.  This is all about relationships, and often ends up meaning "doing the hard work to maintain relationships," especially with people you are indebted to or who have helped you out in some way.  After my training finished, I was able to visit some good family friends in Chiba who have always been incredibly kind to me and have helped me out with work, language, culture.... treating me like a daughter or granddaughter and spoiling me whenever I've seen them.  When I think about it, I actually have so many people like this in Japan who've really taken care of me, and who I owe quite a lot of giri to put it that way!  Often though, in Japanese culture, this feeling of being indebted to others or needing to reciprocate for being taken care of can be a huge source of stress, especially for young people or when you're in a situation where you feel like you actually can't reciprocate.  I struggled with this a lot last year as barely scraping by financially and being unable to take holidays made it impossible to go and visit these people.  I had a year full of fugiri, and I managed to let it stress me out pretty badly. 

It was great to see the Soga family though, and they encouraged me that sometimes it's important to be in a state of fugiri, otherwise you can't cope with all the pressure life throws at you here.  At the same time, I was able to call other mutual friends and acquaintances across the country to let them know I was in Japan and what I was doing.  This is something I hadn't been able to do last year, but I am feeling in a much better state of mind more settled in Japan now and with this new job, so I look forward to trying to visit or at least correspond with more of these people.  I'm looking forward to reconnecting with people, and learning to manage relationships and communication in a way that becomes a source of joy, an opportunity for testimony, and not so stressful!

Sorry for the very "practical" update - I will finish off with a few photos to make up for all the text!!

1. Brainstorming causes and solutions for starvation. 2. Washing each others' feet on the last day of training. 3. After an evening of great food and fun conversation, Takayuki painting some suibokuga artwork 4. The finished product - a golden apple!

gratitude

Philippians 4:6 says "do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God," and 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says "give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus."

I've been thinking a lot about gratitude lately.   Sometimes I've been thinking about it because recently there's been times I've been overwhelmed with gratitude to the point of tears, and other times I'm thinking about it because I'm I'm feeling so incredibly ungrateful, maybe also to the point of tears, and wondering why.  Maybe it's not just me that gets these crazy swings in emotion/ways of thinking.  Or maybe it is just me, and I might need to get some professional help with this (if this is the case, please let me know as soon as possible).

One of the reasons I've been thinking about gratitude is because I am so incredibly grateful to several of the churches here in Hiroshima who have gone out of their way to fill my apartment with second-hand furniture, kitchen appliances, kitchenware, washing machine... basically everything I need to "live" here.  I'm more and more realising that true 'indepedence' is a myth - it doesn't exist.  No matter how independent we think we are, we're not.  We're all relient on provision from sources outside ourselves in some way or another, no matter how much it may look like we're standing on our own two feet.  And ultimately we're relient on God's provision through people, through circumstance, through where we were born into society... whether we were even born to start with... whether we will even live to see tomorrow...everything.  Acts 17:25 says "he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else." Waiting for two months for my out-of-sync moving costs, new living expenses, and salary change to line up, I've been humbled to realise that if it wasn't for the generosity of the church in Hiroshima, I wouldn't be making it through these first two months here.  Let alone the ones after that probably.  I don't know what I would have done otherwise?  Literally, ministry amongst the homeless?  Could have been fun actually, now I think about it... in Sendai I met this guy briefly who was a homeless gambling addict and he met Jesus and his life has completely turned around.  Yes, promo for the Teen Challenge Japan Ministry - check it out!


But what I've found is that I'm really good at being grateful when cirucmstances go my way, and not so good at it when they don't.  All too quickly I find myself sulking about this and that, often the day straight after had I cried with gratitude as someone gave me a washing machine, and someone else carried it up five flights of stairs to my apartment for me.  Yes I live on the fifth floor with no elevator.  Some of the pastors think it's funny.  Some people don't (normally these are the people who carried my stuff up those stairs).  


So when I get like that, I get frustrated, knowing that we are called to be grateful in all circumstances.  I think I am growing in this slowly, but it is definitely still a challenge.  Anyway, today I read something that completely blew my mind on this topic and I wanted to share it with you guys.  It's my most recent assignment for work - translating the testimony of a Christian survivor of the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. Her name is Meiko Kurihara, she was 19 at the time. 


In the first pages she writes of walking through the burning town, looking for the ruins of her home, and trying to find her father.  She writes about walking seeing the frames of burnt-out trains, and the charcoal bodies of its passangers still standing, sitting, or fallen over, shrivelled up like black shrimps.  She writes about walking along the rivers and how they were so full of bodies you couldn't see the water, because everyone must have leapt in their to escape the fire or have been blown there by the nuclear wind.


She writes about looking for her dad in the ruined hospital grounds, and walking past all the burnt, injured, and dying people whispering 'water, water.'


And then she writes about how she bumped into a friend, and when she did, she remembered the verse in 1 Corinthians 10:13 that says "and God is faithful; he will not let you (face trials) beyond what you can bear. But when you (face trials) he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it."

What?!?!  She could thank God for "not letting her face trials beyond what she could bear" in the middle of a nuclear wasteland?

I mean, we use that verse to talk about "oh, this really difficult exam that you can't be bothered studying for, don't worry, God will help you, because he never puts you through things you can't handle..."  


Then she goes on to talk about how as a result she went on to be baptised, beleiving that God had given her a second chance at life, and a calling to continue to serve him.  She was baptised again in 1946, having lost her house, her family's wealth, family members... and spending her days collecting driftwood from the seashore to make into things to sell for a living, while drastically weakened and suffering from radiation.  

And she was grateful to God for being alive and went and got baptised.


Seriously, the disconnect between her experience and ours today (definitely myself included) is ridiculous.  Here I am thinking "oh poor me, we don't have an office yet, so I have to work from home and oh, I struggle so much to wake up in the mornings."  Seriously... what is my problem?


Anyway, reading this testimony just really challenged my understanding of "gratitude" and I guess also of "provision."  Really, how selfish-centered are we these days?  Could many from our generation go through what she did and thank God for just being alive?  Maybe some of us could - this reminds me of some testimonies I heard in Sendai from those who suffered the Tsunami disaster last year.  However, I think a lot of us couldn't do it.  Me included, I think many of us today have to have circumstances to our liking in order to truly thank God.  And how ridiculous are our standards for "circumstances to our liking" - is it not enough to just be alive?  Not these days... gotta be alive, with a nice house, with my washing machine, with my iphone... would be better of course if I had an ipad as well, but oh, can't have everything...


Anyway, just wanted to share with you guys how much this intense testimony blew my mind. 


We're looking at doing an interview with this lady at some point, what a precious testimony, and what a challenge to the younger generation today as to what true 'gratitude' really is.  We're looking at 'true peace' as a theme for the Hiroshima Festival in November next year, and her testimony contains a completely counter-cultural, mind-blowing concept of peace... gratitude... contentment... that so many have never experienced, and could probably not even imagine. 


The verse I started with, Philippians 4:6, then goes on to tell us that such gratitude is deeply connected with the true peace we have through Jesus - 4:7 says "and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

Hmm.  A lot to think about.