Role Approved!

Finally!! we’re getting ready to go. After about a year of waiting the role has finally been formalised. I will be on the cathedral staff in Tokyo city, just down the road from the famous Tokyo Tower. Now we are in the process of securing the right travel permissions and wrapping up the house here.

Language Learning

Since I last visited the country, my language ability has certainly improved. It’s got a long way to go mind you, especially in more rural settings which is my intended future target. It suddenly makes you mindful of the huge variety of speech we all have and take for granted because our minds are so adept to categorising what we have known since childhood. On coming back, I set to keep watch for all those times we slur or move grammar around in speaking English, and I’ve found it occurs a huge deal more than we think. In Japan these changes have become regionally set and become distinctive dialects, the like of which leaves a learner like myself baffled as a speaker starts of in standard Japanese and slowly finds they can’t maintain it and slips into their easier speech patterns. Try it, if you know you have a regional accent, try speaking a different one, or try the speech styles of a younger generation and you will quickly see how set we are in our speech.

Thomas has proven himself very adept. He has a lot to face, as schooling starts at age 7 he will start school I a foreign language straight away, whereas Samuel and Martin will have the relaxed environment of kindergarten once more. I’ve always known he has the language packed deep away in his mind, and this year while we were there, he showed just how much was there inside. He just needs the right environment to bring it out more. Nevertheless, it will be a challenge and we will likely restart him in year 1. Not an uncommon experience apparently.

Samuel has proven himself a very natural language learner. He doesn’t have the language latent within like Thomas does, but he has the right mind and patience for learning. And Martin?, well who knows, but he certainly is listening and surprised me when he showed he knew the word for ‘over there’ the other day.

Well for me, while I’m back I the UK sorting all the other bits of moving out, I’ll just rumble on with graded readers, flashcards galore, study schemes and verb charts. Somewhere in all that mix, bits of language are drawing together.

Japanese Issues

It’s always been my thought to have links to news articles in this blog describing the issues facing Japan. And I’ve managed to find a way where blog and news can sit happily side by side. If you want to follow the family news, you can just subscribe to the blog here, but if you want to add a stream of interesting, thoughtful and timely articles to help you know what is on the ground where we will be, you can follow this link to a flipboard magazine:
Nine Hours Ahead Flipboard Magazine
It looks better in the app on a tablet device, but is quite serviceable on a webpage. And when our news sits alongside the big news, it kind of makes our stuff look special :)

3 years on…

It’s now three years since the major earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan. The media is silent about it except for these times of anniversary, but the simple fact is that the world moves on, no-one wants to listen now. And it moves on because it can’t make sense of the tragedy. Politicians in the country continue to move for the various interests their parties have for protecting the investment and infrastructure in nuclear energy, regardless of the human story the tragedy broke open to every single one of us connected with the country, and likewise everyone does the same in the orbit of their own little world. We cannot cope with the enormity of what happened. We cannot cope whenever such things happen, no matter what scale. The only thing we can cope with is insulating ourselves from certain levels of it, until one of those levels, such as this, overflows our defences and forces us to ask the questions we dread to ask ourselves about how any of this loss and suffering can be meaningful.

And we can’t answer it. We can only ever ask it and occasionally get glimpses of what might be the vaguest hint of an answer- if we dare to carry the question in the heart of our consciousness day by day as part of the salt of our lives.

But the anniversary of such things gives everyone a chance to consider those questions and to share a journey that perhaps they themselves are not part of, but is very much the journey of others. The anniversary is the moment when the human story can be broken open again with the hope that even the most insulated individual might possibly be aided one more step towards actually feeling the breath that they draw entering their lungs.

Stay with the anniversaries marked in your corner of the world, they are gateways of understanding the unspeakable stories that others are silently carrying.

How are things 3 years on?

-98,000 people remain in temporary accommodation
-Nuclear power remains mothballed
-The current government wants to see nuclear power restarted
-Public opinion has a quiet anxiety over the reliance on nuclear power
-Some basic planning has been achieved for a major Tokyo earthquake
-Most affected areas have been redeveloped
-The official line is radiation levels are safe for living and working outside.
-Children in those areas, however, remain playing indoors and showing some of the physical strains of that.

What about us?

We’re still waiting. We would love to be there and doing as much as we can to make our own journey into meaningfulness come to something, but it seems there are a number of things that remain stuck for the immigration processes. We’re hoping that there will be some usable communications coming our way soon. Meanwhile we wait, again.

Beginning….

Well now, here I sit figuring out how to do a blog. I’m wanting to keep in touch with folk back home with ease but I know I’m going to be unable to send many emails, or keep up with the likes of Facebook or Twitter, so I thought, it’s time for a Blog.

Here I’ll post things about my work, what the boys are doing and generally anything interesting we find here together. It’ll also be a way for me to keep some track of what’s happened when too!

Some teething issues

It’s taken me a while to get used to this blog beast. Some trial and error to set it up and to get it to talk nicely to Flipboard, but it looks as though we’re there and up and running. I’m hoping to set the blog up as a Magazine on Flipboard, which of course will be viewable on the web too by way of an email invite. When we’re settled and sorted I’ll bring that on stream, and maybe, just maybe might be convinced to open a Facebook account to feed the blog into there too (maybe, Facebook and twitter tend to be trashy places I don’t hang around for too long in)

So what are we doing right now?

Right now, we’re still in the UK. We’re getting ready. Things are moving slowly to acquire the right permissions to move, but once it is all set we will be off. So currently the activity is language learning and assessing what we need to take or leave, and sorting out the practicalities as far as we can. Posts might be a bit on the short side until things get moving, but I’m told that while that can be a slow thing, it can suddenly speed up. I’m fairly used to the Japanese way of things, but I have to admit I am finding the pace frustrating; I mean the CofE is known for it’s procrastination over things, but this makes it look fast!

Titles and names

We’ve called the blog Nine Hours Ahead… because it kind if helps everyone to know how many hours to add to their clock from GMT to know the time we’ll be living on. Also it was kind of hard to find a catchy title, so an ambiguous practical one seemed kind of artsy. Hopefully at the very least the name should make people think twice before trying to Skype or phone us at the wrong time of day!

I’ll finish this post with a simple bible quote which seems to hold the essence of where all this change around has come from. Those of you who know us, will be quite aware of it’s context. But it’s a verse from which I drew the beginnings of my ministry and ended up being stitched into my stole for ordination in graphic form by a good friend who I shared the bumpy journey of theological training with. It is hopefully the intent of the efforts I will bring to Japan, and I hope will be the centre well from which I can set myself up on the ground once more. Not an easy one to do such a thing from maybe, but it’s where the journey began and so it is the refrain to which I must connect each time. Here it is:

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. よくよくあなたがたに言っておく。一粒の麦が地に落ちて死ななければ、それはただ一粒のままである。しかし、もし死んだなら、豊かに実を結ぶようになる。John 12.24