Wow, God's weaving

One small thing that's encouraged us in the last week would seem almost like a lucky coincidence, except that we know differently.

Here's the story:

Last year we camped around the north and eastern sides of Hokkaido. One weekend we

Nishi Okoppe, nestled in a valley.

spent in a small town (Nishi Okoppe, 1,190 people) with a family we knew from CAJ, but who'd moved up to Hokkaido (if you want to read more about that day, check out this post). 

We camped in the local park free of charge (but no shower or bath). On the Sunday they invited us to worship with them in a local couple's house. For worship we sat around their dining room table and watched a live broadcast of a church service in Sapporo. This is the only church there is in this little area. 

That local couple has been praying for a local evangelical church to be established. We told them of a church plant planned for a nearby larger town that OMF would be involved in. They were excited to hear that news.

We were thrilled last week to hear that at the second ever worship service of that church in Nayoro, this Japanese couple joined our missionary colleagues, even though it is nearly an hour's drive away.

So delightful to catch glimpses of God's bigger picture. Who else could have worked this out? An Australian missionary family who happened to be on holidays and meet up with friends we knew from Tokyo who introduced us to a local Christian couple. This missionary family happened to know one piece of information that would make a huge difference for this couple: that a church would be starting in their area. 

The missionaries who are starting this church in Nayoro probably needed this encouragement too! This is what they wrote to us:

It's exciting to know that the Lord is weaving all these meetings together for the extension of his Kingdom here in Japan!

Amazing! Praising God!

Japan Photo #46

Here's a photo we took last year while on the road. What do you suppose is the reason for this structure over the road?

Our Hokkaido Adventure Days 23 to 25

Wednesday 17th July 

Takayama, Sendai

The first jigsaw puzzle we completed.
This oversized burger was just too big.

And in fact we did survive (see my previous post here). After removing the more obvious spiders (and their webs and poop), wiping down important surfaces, covering the dirty mattresses with sheets or blankets and using our sleeping bags and pillows it worked okay. We found evidence of small rodents in the cutlery drawer so we cleaned that whole drawer out, washing everything and replacing the drawer liner.

Being Australian, I’m a bit of a beach snob. I haven’t seen many beaches in Japan, but most of them are not that appealing to someone who doesn’t even much like Australia’s beautiful white-sand beaches. But we did our duty and took the boys down for a paddle/sand castle building.

Actually three out of five of us would choose mountains over beach anytime. Beaches are lacking in shade and are so, well, sandy.

It was pretty wet and miserable.

Again I didn’t feel tempted to get wet, in fact the temperatures didn’t rise much above 20 degrees Celsius, so the spectators on the beach were wrapped up. I don’t know how the younger ones managed to cope in the water for as long as they did.

Thursday 18th July 

Takayama, Sendai

Wednesday was grey, and we went to bed with the sound of rain on the tin roof (bliss!). We all slept in again on Wednesday and were greeted with heavy rain that didn’t tempt any of us to venture out until it slowed down towards lunchtime. After lunch we had an errand to run at a hardware store. But other than that we stayed at home, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing word and card games, and reading. A lovely day indeed!

That night we celebrated the end of our holidays with an inside BBQ. Lots of meat and not fancy, just how the boys love it.

Last night BBQ using a Japanese hotplate.

Friday 19th July 

Sendai to Tokyo

We packed up and cleaned the house again. And then took off for our last drive of the journey: back to Tokyo.

The second puzzle we completed in three days.

Tokyo surprised us with not being as hot as we'd imagined. Though I was sad our adventure was over, it was good to be home and back in our solid beds, enjoying our own shower and toilet. It was nice to put everything away and know it would be there when you got back. One of the difficulties of camping is that everything gets moved around all the time, so it is easy to lose things, especially at night! I developed the habit of using a bag for my "bedside table".

We'd definitely love to do another camping tour like this one again sometime in the future, but with our home assignment coming up next year, it may be a couple of years before we can. Perhaps we could explore down near Osaka, Kyoto, Nara area, or over on the western side of the island near Nagoya. 

Anyways, we now have our memories of Hokkaido, and dreams about the future to sustain us through the coming months of heads-down-tails-up of work and school.

Our Hokkaido Adventure Days 21 & 22

Monday 15th July

Sapporo to the ferry

We camped at A, drove to B to meet with friends, and
C was the ferry terminal.

For the last time this trip, we packed up our camp, and headed to northern Sapporo to meet up with another OMF family. This family is one of the few in Hokkaido (with our mission) who have children similar ages to our kids (most of the families up there have very young children). 

I regret that I forgot to take my camera out at anytime that day with our friends, so we have no photos whatsoever of our time with them.

It was a public holiday, so their children, who are in Japanese public school, were home. Being a hot day, we decided to go to a small water park on the west of the city. But of course, the rest of the city was also feeling hot and having a day off, so it seemed as though half of Sapporo was there (which, of course, couldn’t have been the case as there are 2 million people in the city). It was crowded, just like it would be in Tokyo, but we’ve apparently gotten used to that kind of crowdedness, unlike our English-New Zealand Sapporo-dwelling colleagues. I guess that is something of a comfort.

There was a smallish wave pool that only ran for ten minutes every half hour. To watch it was to see a sea of black heads rise up and down. Over the top of the crowded joy, there were four or five lifeguards frantically blowing their whistles and shouting directions into their megaphones. They were somewhat distressed because few people were taking notice of them!

After a hot start, the day didn’t get much over 22 degrees and, sitting in the shade, I didn’t feel hot enough to have a swim. I’ve grown to be like my Mum—only interested in swimming when it’s really hot. So I mostly just talked with our friends.

In the mid-afternoon clouds came over and a breeze whipped up, the crowds started to thin and we gathered up our family too, for we had a boat to catch. We were to board the ferry at 5.30 in Tomokomai, about an hour or so away. So we said farewell and took off for the final leg of our Hokkaido Adventure.

On the way to the ferry we were looking for some take-away dinner to eat after we’d boarded (saving an expensive dining-room meal). We discovered an Aeon Mall (the closest Japan seems to get to Western-style malls) with a Subway, so we dashed in an bought some take-away Subs.

Strolling on the ferry's upper deck.

This ferry was even more luxurious than the one we’d traveled on three weeks earlier, as it was newer. This time, though, we shared a room with others. However, the way it was designed, we rarely saw the others. The room had a central aisle with aisles off each side, each aisle containing two bunks, either at floor level, or up a few stairs and above the bunk in the neighbouring aisle. Each bunk had a pull-down blind that made you invisible to outsiders. Very cosy!

My youngest son kindly demonstrating the bunk's privacy blind.

After settling in, we ate our take away dinner and went off to experience the Japanese-style baths. Then I read the second last chapter of The Hobbit to the boys before we all crashed in bed; it had been a big couple of days!

The cabin on the ferry with one of its
aisles. Two of my boys slept here.

Tuesday, 16th July

Ferry to the beach in Sendai.

Sendai

Everyone slept in the next morning: we were all quite relaxed by this stage in our journey. We eventually made it to the buffet breakfast in the restaurant at about 8am. After breakfast we played games in our cabin for a bit and then it was time to pack up again and disembark.

Arrival in Honshu didn’t prove to be a heat blast as we had expected, the temperature being very similar to Sapporo the day before. We were headed to an old OMF cabin at the seashore, not too far from the ferry terminal, but stopped at another Aeon Mall to pick up some groceries before we got there.

It was odd to be buying food to go into a refrigerator! Additionally the store had self-checkout, the first time I’ve seen that in Japan. So I tried it out with my helpful youngest son. It got a bit messy because the computer was very precise and we didn’t have quite the right amount of bags, so it was hard to pack as we went, but we made it through, hopefully without ripping off the store or being ripped off ourselves.

The cabin we stayed in. It's over 100 years old.

The cabin, after we'd cleaned (lots of spiders, and
and their poop).

We’ve never stayed in the OMF cabins at Sendai, so we weren’t sure what to expect, but we were a bit shocked with what we found. It was hard to look past the dirt and insects, the spiders and their webs. I spent ages vacuuming and cleaning. Upstairs in the bedrooms it felt worse because the mattresses were dirty. After travelling around in our clean tent, and being self-sufficient with all our kitchen implements that we knew were clean (and worked), it wasn’t that fun. An hour or so after arriving we adjourned for lunch and the boys weren’t happy about staying. But we persuaded them we would manage, at least for one night.

The view. We struck mostly rainy days.

The beach. Not much to boast of by Queensland
standards, but the two younger boys loved it. Our
eldest didn't go near the beach. He hates the sand.

Our Hokkaido Adventure Day 20

Sunday 21st July

200 km journey back to Sapporo along the motorway.
It didn't take very long, compared to our more remote
driving at 60km/hr.

Naka Satsunai to Sapporo

It was a busy day. We packed up after breakfast and headed off to Sunday school and church, at the local civic centre, with our colleague. This church is just as small as the one we went to last week, but with a big difference. A larger church in the nearby regional centre has a pastor with a vision to plant seven churches in the region. This town is the place they began to work out their vision. Our OMF colleague has been here for five years with the support of the church and one local couple. They’ve seen no fruit for their labours.

More lovely flat fields. If only the spiritual work here
produced such harvests.

 If you didn’t know that, and walked in on this small church on the 21st of July, you would have thought the situation was quite different. At church that day there were 12 Australians (two missionary families of five, plus two visiting parents) and one German missionary, plus several Japanese Christians. There were almost no locals. Most of the Japanese people were "loaned" from the mother church.

Part of the Hidaka Mountain Range that separates

the Tokachi Plain from Sapporo.

We don’t know what will happen next with this church. The missionary goes on home assignment at the end of the year and next March the local Christian will move with her youngest son, after he graduates from high school, to Sapporo to help him find a job.

It rips your heart out to realise that all the work that has been put into this location hasn't
produced fruit. It is, unfortunately, the reality of church work in Japan. Much seed sowing, but little fruit. In the rural settings, it is even harder so this isn't an isolated incident.

The other Australian OMF missionaries there have just begun a work in another nearby town, the second town that the mother church has turned her eyes towards. 

Driving towards the Hidaka Range

We only saw part of their family at conference, because they’ve just had their third baby in three years and so mum stayed home with the younger two. So it was an unexpected bonus to see them all. The husband preached at the service. But we didn’t get a lot of time to talk with them because we had to race off afterwards to lunch.

Special Lunch

Lunch at the school summer festival.

We’d been invited by the local Christian family to the summer festival at their son’s local high school for lunch. We enjoyed some Japanese fast food: fried pork noodles (Yakisoba). Additionally some kebabs, local ice cream (including a tub of pumpkin ice cream), and drinking yoghurt. I especially enjoyed some rich coffee milk (equivalent to the the best coffee-flavoured milk you’d buy in Australia). But I drank too much and suffered with headaches in the next couple of days!

We also left lunch quickly as we had to get to Sapporo in time to set up camp before dark. We had access to an expressway for the first time in a couple of weeks and took advantage of it to get through the mountains separating us from the capital of the island.

This was our "fridge" for two weeks while camping.

Food while camping

On the way  to our campsite we had to find a grocery store to provide us food for our last two camping meals of our trip. One of the big differences for this camping trip was the necessity of buying food along the way. It was one thing that worried me, knowing what little rural shops can look like in Japan. 

Camp cooking was fun.

However, we found Hokkaido not to be as isolated and rural as we’d expected. If we’d been stopped for many days in a very isolated spot, it would have been a different story. But because we moved along regularly, each travel day we encountered towns of several thousand people, with more than adequate grocery stores.

Our last camping spot. It felt naked without our familiar
blue annex!

Lacking a fridge, it was a challenge to buy and cook just the right amount of food. Every day we bought ice and we didn't have any spoiled food, though the milk wasn’t always as cold as the guys would have liked (but they weren't allowed to drink as much of it anyway). The boys got used to the “no leftovers” policy for main meals and in our two weeks of camping we didn't have to throw out much food at all.

Couldn't see the sunset for we were surrounded by tall
trees, but the clouds were gorgeous.

So I’m really happy to say that the food aspect of our trip went really well. We had a good variety of meals, and a fairly balanced diet. I loved the challenge of it too. I've kept a list of all our meals, I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a blog post about what specific meals we ate?

One-nighter

This was a familiar sight. A number of campsite in
Japan have these carts, especially if you can't park next
to your campsite. They are pretty crude home-made
boxes with bicycle tyres. Great for carting your gear.
Fantastic for getting the kids involved in carting gear,
they love manoeuvring these around.

That Sunday night we eventually found our campsite, which was just on the east-north-east edge of Sapporo. It was a picnic spot hidden in a forest. It had toilets and a shelter with sinks for washing up dishes, like most camping spots, but no showers, so for the third or fourth time in our trip, we skipped showers for the night. There were many campers (it was a long weekend), and for the first time since leaving Sapporo a fortnight earlier, we encountered young families camping. Mostly, on our journey, we’d met bikers and older couples/singles, because it wasn't yet holiday time for Japanese schools.

A slightly strange photo. After two weeks
of living outside, I found my arms were
as brown as they ever get.

Because we were only there for one night (the only time in our journey we did a one-nighter), we didn’t put up our annex, which sped up the set-up and pull-down the next day. It did, however, mean that we had dew over everything the next morning.

Our Hokkaido Adventure Days 19 & 20

Friday 12th July

About 260 km. It was a pretty journey, as almost
all the journeys around Hokkaido were.

Odaito to Naka Satsunai via Kushiro

During the night we were surprised to find a fog had rolled in and everything got wet again, even those things under the annex. Thankfully we had sun later and were able to dry everything off before we packed up once more to move on.

Here ended our 14 days straight under canvas. The longest any of us have ever done that. I have to say I was a little regretful, I could have continued another week at least! I’ve found camping addicting!

We're always on the look-out for good parks. We found
some good ones on these two days.

We drove via Kushiro, quite a large city with 180,000 people. We stopped at a large park there for a leisurely lunch, play, and another chapter of The Hobbit (we’re getting near the end of the book now). It was chilly, even in the midday sun. We Tokyo-ites felt it, anyway. There were many children in the park enjoying their 'nice warm weather.' Many were playing in the artificial stream and the younger ones were very often running around in their wet underwear (in the absence of swimmers, I presume). I shivered inside as I watched them. I forget what the temperature was, but today as I type, Kushiro is 22℃ while we in western Tokyo sit at just over 30℃. Yes, it's generally cooler in Hokkaido!

This day's adventure took us through mountains and
then out onto the Tokachi Plain. This plain is like a
"bread basket". It provides food for about 3.5 million
people but only 350,000 live there.
This English-language website boasts of the enormity
of the plain. In reality it is only 10,000km² which is not
quite twice the size of Brisbane or about 2,000km²
less than the area of Sydney. It does, however, look
much more like Australia than most parts of Japan.
The wide open spaces filled with agriculture was a
wonderful sight for these Aussies.

After lunch we headed on to the village of Nakasatsunai (south of Obihiro),  about 4,000 people, where an OMF missionary is working. She is on her own there in a five-bedroom house. She welcomed us into her house for a couple of nights.

Playing games in "Aunty" Connie's living room.

She is a lover of games: board games, card games, dice games. And she has a large collection (though many had instructions in German, her native language). Our boys got into playing her games and then for dinner we walked a couple of blocks to a locally famous chicken restaurant. There we feasted on chicken baked over coals. Yum!

Our missionary friend had an English class from 7.30, so David joined them while I tried to put the boys to bed in a room. They were a bit skittish. We’ve been used to just going to bed all at the same time, with me reading The Hobbit to them. They didn’t settle easily when we changed the routine, but still I managed to get downstairs for the last few minutes of the English lesson and stay for the Japanese conversation time until 10pm. Needless to say it didn’t take me long to get to sleep after I went to bed.

Saturday 13th July

Nakasatsunai 

We gave ourselves over to being tourists again. Together with our hostess we played Park Golf at a beautiful nearby course and the boys enjoyed a large obstacle course there too.

Then she took us to a famous farm where they make cheese and caramel (and we watched this for a short while). We enjoyed some animals and watched a live show with the animals. The boys got to try milking a very patient jersey cow and I participated in a butter making competition (shaking a jar of milk for about a minute). We enjoyed cheesy pizzas and a fondue for lunch. After the show our afternoon tea was ice cream with caramel sauce. Mmmmm.

Enjoying park golf in a very green park. This town is
very close to the place where Park Golf was invented.

The area we were in has more cows than people, but evidently lots of chickens too! It was a little hard to remember that we were still in Japan. The paddocks are wide and flat and only when it is quite clear could you see the distant mountains that lie between us and Sapporo in the west (see the information under the photo above).

Later afternoon we returned with our colleague to her home and chilled out again with games (and me typing up our experiences).

The cheese factory.

Big horse. Little horse. We sat in some welcome shade
and watched a live presentation by the gentleman on
the big horse. Before the show we spent some time
giving the poor animals some fresh grass. It was odd,
the animals were in grassless pens, yet there were
large patches of grass nearby that needed mowing. Our
boys enjoyed feeding the animals with this free food.

More wide fields. Quite unusual in Japan.

Our Hokkaido Adventure Days 17 & 18

Out to the east of Hokkaido now. The islands
you can see here are owned by Russia (but
contested by Japan). The Peninsula is a World
Natural Heritage Site. It's remote
and has limited public access.

Wednesday 10th July
Abashiri to Odaito via Shiretoko Peninsula and Shibetsu

We’d been watching the weather forecasts carefully, but dropped our guard on Wednesday. Just as we began breakfast at about 7, the rain began and looked set to continue most of the day. For the first time we had to pack up camp in the rain (thankfully it wasn’t too heavy). In hindsight, it was a good thing to experience, because now we know how to manage it without getting everything too wet.

We drove east, then north, part-way up the Shiretoko peninsula, across the mountain pass (about 700m high) and back down to the sea. Unfortunately the fog closed in and we couldn’t see the high, snow-covered mountains either side of us. We could see the unmelted snow beside the road, though! The mountains in this area are around 1,500m high.

I bought an English Park Guide with great photos and information. As I browse through it now, I wish we could have spent more time in this remote corner of Japan.

View of the highway from our lunch table.
A rare motorhome (though we saw more of them in rural
Hokkaido than we've ever seen in Honshu).

We stopped for lunch at Rausu, a fishing village famous for its seafood. At the road-side stop there were some magnificent crabs being sold. We enjoyed a lovely slow lunch, lounging at low Japanese-style tables and watched the rain and fog roll by outside.

More Doctor Fish

We were aware that the later we delayed our arrival at our next campsite, the more likely it would be that the rain would be gone, so we took our time driving on Wednesday. 

We were encouraged to let these fish
(sturgeon) nibble our fingers

We stopped at Shibetsu’s Salmon Aquarium, which turned out to be very informative. They had more doctor fish, as well as some other unusual looking fish. We also learned more about salmon fishing and saw models of the complicated nets they use. That was useful

The sturgeon had odd looking snouts.

information to have when we went driving the next day. The aquarium had several “can touch” pools, including a place you could pick up star fish, hermit crabs and other shell fish and fish, which the boys enjoyed thoroughly.

As we pulled up at the campsite we found this deer,
the only deer we saw the whole trip. My new camera
amazed me by taking this single shot at quite a distance.

Then we drove to Nakashibetsu for more food and found my favourite food store from our Hokkaido Days: Big House.

Arrival at the campsite at 5pm, was a little late, but we rushed through our set-up and did pretty well. This was the 6^th time we’d done this in under 14 days, so we’re getting good.

Inside the tent in the wee hours of the morning.

We were very close to the seashore, and were looking for shade to keep us out of the morning sun, particularly, so we set up behind a stand of trees. 

Unfortunately we encountered extreme lighting. It is strange to me that Japanese campsites seem bent on lighting up their campsites too much at night-time. It felt almost like daylight in our tent. 

Thursday 11th July

Notsuke Peninsula and Odaito

Thursday was another rest day. We drove out along the Notsuke Penninsula, a 28km sand spit. It was an interesting drive, looking back at the mountains on Shiretoko that we could now, ironically see, at a distance, but couldn’t when we were close to them the day before. We could also see the Russian islands.

A map of the Notsuke Peninsula. Again, we couldn't drive
all the way along.

The peninsula includes wetlands, where we enjoyed a short walk while searching for various flowers and the best blooms to photograph. At a rest stop we found some icecream for a treat. David and I enjoyed a flavoured sauce on our ice cream that was supposed to have been made from a local flower. It tasted and looked something like Apricot Jam.

Thursday afternoon we lounged around in and around the campsite. I read for a while and then, to my surprise I slept for a couple of hours. We wandered a little on the nearby beach, though it wasn’t a nice beach and we weren’t tempted to swim or even paddle.

The beach on the peninsula. Swimmers weren't welcome.

I love this photo.

This a photo of a great photo!

Our campsite by the sea. There were lots of insects.

This campsite's facilities weren't quite so great. Here are the
toilets. The showers were 100 yen for five minutes (but no
clock, so you just had to do your best) and quite nice. They
were up in the main reception building as usual.

The sky over the ocean on our last evening.

Check out these lights at 3am. They look even worse here
because fog had rolled in. You can see the tarp we draped
over the end of our tent, this gave us some relief from the
lights!