Honshu OMF conference 2022

We got back from our two-night conference on Saturday feeling rather exhausted, or at least I did. It was an intense, but valuable three days away. There were lots and lots of conversations and I savoured the time to spend in person with people. At times it was surreal, the faces I've been seeing on screens for years came to life on real people, some of whom I'd never met before. I sidled up to one person I've had many an online meeting with and said, "Good to meet you!" She was surprised.

Of course for me, savouring in-person time comes at a cost. It took me till yesterday (Wednesday) to not feel blotto (not drunk, just wiped out) when the alarm went off in the morning. The post-event exhaustion for me is exacerbated by my mind replaying many of the conversations, especially after I turn the light out or awaken during the night. Does that happen to other people too?

I've been to many mission conferences in Asia over the last 21 years. Venue quality and food have varied, but this is the first time we've done it with restrictions on breathing on people. We had limitations on how long we could be in the dining room and plastic barriers down the middle of the tables. The latter made talking difficult, which is a pity, because meals are one place at a conference when you get to interact informally with your colleagues, a huge bonus for developing trust! We also had restrictions on bathing: we had to sign up for a 15 min slot in the Japanese communal bathroom (only showers, though, no baths). We had to do a COVID test before coming and wore masks the whole time. 

But despite the inconveniences, it was worth getting together. I'm in one of the more unusual support roles in our organisation in that I communicate one-on-one with many of our missionaries via email. Many of them entrust their valuable words to me to edit, often without ever having had a meaningful conversation with me. Meeting the person on the other end of the email is so valuable!

What did we do, aside from eat and bathe? We had several "worship times", singing, people spoke about the Bible and what God had to say to us about unity, and we discussed the talks in small groups. We had a fun evening and a prayer evening. There was an option to choose to attend a small "focus" group on a specific topic. I got to lead one about good writing and prayer letters. It was also the first time that our social media team had all been in the same place at the same time, so we gathered for a short time too. We had some free time on Thursday afternoon, where most people chose to either go to a local dam (that was me) or a local Japanese bath (onsen). The kids had their own program, which parents were so thankful for. Our boys are older and chose to stay home. That's the first time we've gone together to an overnight work event in Japan without at least one of our boys.

Here are some photos from our time away.

Meet Stella, the mascot of the
Iwate Prefectural Kennpoku Youth Outdoor Learning Center.

We travelled over 500 km to get to this conference. It was a joy to be told to catch
the shinkansen (bullet train), rather than drive. They are so much more convenient than planes: no security or baggage checks. And so much more spacious. I know I don't have long legs, but even I never have this much space between my knees and the seat in front of me in a plane.

We could see this sunset view from the second floor meeting room, though I took a stroll with a colleague in the car park to see if we could get a better view. However, the site was surrounded by trees, so it was hard to see much from the ground.

The center had a craft room where they can teach all sorts of crafts. I would have loved to have time in here making stuff! And of course Stella featured widely in their displays.

The center has their own ice rink! Yes, this is a part of the world that gets quite cold. It is therefore fitting that Stella is wearing ice skates.

I wish I'd had a zoom lens here, this tree was covered with wisteria. A very different sight to the highly crafted wisteria sites in the city.

This is an enormous flower larger than my hand. It's scent wasn't super pleasant, though. Officially the Magnolia tripetala, a different type of magnolia than we commonly see in Tokyo. The leaves and bud (seen below) are also huge.

The trip to the dam was interesting. This is Aoba Lake/Dam. While writing this post I discovered that it was named after a Japanese flute, which was a prized possession of a famous samurai, the story of this is told in a Japanese classic "The Tale of the Heike".

Some of my colleagues. 

We were surprised by this windmill and a lot of tulips. Most of them were past their best, but some were still gorgeous.

A turtle towing a boat?

Meals were pretty basic, Japanese style, and none of them piping hot. This was almost the only "Western" item we had in the six meals we ate there. A few years ago I wouldn't have coped very well with rice for breakfast, but it was okay. I made sure to bring my water bottle to each meal because the only drink offered was green tea, which I still haven't grown to enjoy.

Conference was a "big rock" in my calendar this first half of the year, although it seemed unlikely it would ever happen until even the night before when I got a negative COVID test! This week I've had to face up to the less-than-four-weeks before we fly to Australia. One of the things I'm working on is leaving my various roles and teams in good shape while I step aside for six weeks leave. That's unsettling and not at all easy as I juggle a lot of balls in each role. But thankfully I'm gradually making progress! 

Other things such as accommodation and transport, and key appointments are largely already organised, so at least I can relax on that front. Aside from our usual work we're mostly waiting and praying about: waiting on our visa renewal to come through (submitting our application to an immigration office was an early-morning start on Tuesday) and waiting on one final accommodation spot to be confirmed. And we're also praying that the time we spend there will be helpful in the long-term goal of transitioning our two youngest boys to Australia in the next couple of years.

This week is unusual

Tomorrow we are catching trains to our first in-person overnight mission conference in four years. It's 550km north of here, but we get to go on the super-fast Shinkansen, so it's a shorter journey than if we were driving. 

OMF Japan field has usually held all-field conferences every two or three years. We were about to gather in March 2020 when all plans had to be cancelled for the pandemic. Since then we’ve had two online substitutes, but they really have only been “better than nothing” events.

This is the grand dining room of the venue of
our last all-field conference, in 2018.

One of the best things about on-field conferences is actually gathering with other missionaries. It really is pretty exhausting, because not only do you have various meetings and gatherings to attend, you spend a lot of the “free time”, coffee breaks, and meals catching up with people you haven’t seen in a long time, but it's a "good" exhausted. This is our family-away-from-home. The noise is quite something! I think this one is going to be more overwhelming for me than they have in the past, because rarely, in the last 2 ½ years, have I been in a room with more than 20 people who are talking to one another.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to gathering with our “OMF Family” in May for the first time in four years. (Incidentally it will be first time in Japan that we've been to a conference without any kids—our boys are staying home.) This isn’t a full-field conference, but about two-thirds of our missionaries will be there. There will be many new faces, and, sadly, many faces missing—people who’ve retired or left the field for various reasons, as well as most of those who don't work on Honshu. It's going to be an all-masked affair, and I'm hoping that wearing masks all the time will not hinder our time together.

I don't get off with being just a participant, either. I'm running a writing workshop for an handful of people on Friday afternoon and playing the piano for a short while during communion also. But I'm okay with these! What I have had trouble with is actually believing that this is going to happen. We've had so many plans cancelled in the last 2 ½ yrs, it seems surreal to actually have something big like this really happening. And we've done our Covid tests, so we're really good to go! I'm packing my suitcase soon.

By the way, if you're interested, this was my blogpost after our last conference, in March 2018: https://mmuser.blogspot.com/2018/03/hokkaido-conference-is-wrap.html This time we're going to a much more bare-bones venue, a youth hostel.

An unexpected outing to inner city Tokyo

Earlier this year I worked on a magazine issue themed "Rest". You can check out most of the articles we published in that issue here. When we asked the missionary community in Japan for article proposals, we were overwhelmed with people wanting to write on this topic, so it's obviously something that missionaries in Japan (among others) have thought about quite a bit. 

However, when we talk to people back home, it's not often that people ask us about how we get rest on the mission field. I wonder if this isn't something that people think about until they have actually left their home country and are desperately tired? I know that when we first landed in Japan we were quite exhausted from what had gone before and I can't remember if anyone ever talked to us about pacing ourselves.

I was quite encouraged to see an article in the latest magazine that we've completed (last Saturday) that talked about mentoring people interested in long-term mission. It was an internship program that their organisation runs and one of the five main areas that this couple focus on with their interns is Staying Healthy, which includes incorporating rest into your life.

Well, I've been in Japan for over 21 years now and I've had to learn about rest. I still have lots to learn, but I've learned a few things along the way. Like: How to rest when you've got three lively young boys. How to rest when your to-do list seems enormous and overwhelming. How to rest when no one else in Japan seems to, and how to manage when just making it through a short Japanese-language church service is exhausting. How do you rest when you're very aware of the urgency of reaching Japan for Christ? And when going anywhere away from home just takes so much out of you.

I still remember our first holiday in Japan. Just following the paper map (in Japanese and pre-Navi) was exhausting. Then we needed to figure out buying groceries in a small rural town and a strange missionary holiday house (believe me, they are often stranger than the usual place you'd rent back home). On top of that, we had a lively 2 y.o. and no one but us to look after him.

Over the years we've learned different ways and means of resting and that it isn't an option, rest is essential, as is pacing ourselves. We've had to approach this missionary life more like a long-distance journey, than a sprint. But we still struggle, life and ministry have a way of being busy and both David and I are self-starters, which means that we can be quite driven. I've been trying to finish this blog post for several days. I've been wrestling with tiredness as well as drivenness. Tiredness won out yesterday morning and I rested all morning.

My busyness at work tends to ebb and flow. Thankfully I am not expected to fill out a time-card, so if work is a bit quiet, it's okay to take some time to rest. So last week many people in Japan were resting, or at least recreating, with several public holidays on the calendar. Our house, typically, looked different. Our school didn't take all the holidays, in fact only one. I had plenty of work on my to-do list, including a magazine I hoped we could finish by the end of the week to accomodate the schedule of one of our team members. So I didn't plan to take time off, merely held it as a possibility, if the opportunity arose.

Last Wednesday (a beautiful day, not unlike today), a colleague who lives over an hour away, met me halfway for the afternoon and we explored a little corner of Tokyo. I'm not really a city person, as you might know, but I do find Tokyo to be an intriguing place. Certainly a city where nature isn't completely sidelined. There's still lots of life-giving green to be found if you look.

The area we walked around is near the purple star at the top of the map.

We walked several kilometres, exploring an area around the Iidabashi station, an area just north of the Imperial Palace. That included walking along a portion of both sides of the Kanda River, a short foray along a street in the neighbourhood of Kagurazaka to find lunch, and a stroll around a famous walled garden.

I'm going to show you the afternoon through photos and captions.

Sloped street in Kagurazaka. Lots of quaint stores that beg to be explored.

It's appealing because it's not over-the-top "shiny" and commercial like some famous

areas of Tokyo. This webpage tells me some of the charm is because there's a large French 

expat community here, including a French international school.

This is one of six train lines that run through Iidabashi! Most of them are underground, thankfully. The river is the Kanda, which is only 24 km long and lies entirely within Tokyo borders. This is taken from the southern bank looking northwest away from the palace towards Shinjuku, one of several "city centres" within Tokyo. 

A bit to the left of the photo above, taking looking down the river. In the middle is a place you can fish! I'm not a fisherman, but this just seemed to be lacking any appealing atmosphere.

This is on the opposite side of the river, looking towards the Imperial Palace and the actual "city centre". Later we walked along under those trees behind the train.

More city views from the southern bank.

Who would have thought? Inner city Tokyo? Many of these trees are cherry blossoms and so would have been amazing in a different way a month ago.

Stunning huge tree.

Then we made our way to Koishikawa Korakuen Garden. I'm guessing that some of you have been to a Japanese garden overseas, but in my experience it's a little different in Japan, not that I've been to that many in either place. The biggest difference would be the age. Japanese gardens/parks in Japan, the sort you walk around and admire the ponds, etc., are old. The trees are mature and there's a lot of history embedded in the park. This one is nearly 400 years old.

The English brochure says it was originally built by the founder of the Mito branch of Tokugawa clan (a powerful clan in the Edo period, 1603 to 1868). It is a circuit style garden with ponds and manmade hills centering on the pond. Like many things from Japanese history, it has Chinese influences. It has two special designations: Special Historic Site and the Special Place of Scenic Beauty. Part of this status is the recognition that it is a valuable property that has survived the Great Kanto Earthquake and war damage as well as progressing urbanisation.

Luminescent new-spring leaves.

You can see a hill and winding path behind me in this picture. These small hills and circular paths make the garden seem larger than it actually is. There's no one spot where you can see all the garden.

There's no escaping that this is a garden surrounded by a high-density city. The ambience was tempered by the noise of a neighbouring amusement park rollercoaster and a concert in the adjacent Tokyo Dome. Not to mention it was hard to keep the buildings out of some photos, but here I really liked the reflection in the pond.

You've made it this far: well done! This day was not my typical idea of a rest day, but I did come away feeling filled up and refreshed. I got to hang out with a friend and talk about the various things going on in our lives, I got to see a tiny bit more of this amazing city, including some beautiful green and even amazing man-made structures (though a tree will usually trump a building for me).