From the Land Down Under to the Rising Sun

The story continues and the year is 1953. A church has been built, an addition to the family (Margot) has arrived and even more changes are on the horizon.

Milton:
We were living at the end of the rainbow and were helping people into the Kingdom of God, but we felt lonely. Here we were, claiming the refreshing experience of unity with all Christians but were members of no group or fellowship. God guided us in a fascinating way to a British-based interdenominational mission. Financially they were poor, spiritually they were warm and keen. They accepted us.

June:
Working without any affiliation can be lonely and we decided to join the English Mission called Japan Evangelistic Band (JEB), an English Faith Mission. They kindly accepted us. It was a very uplifting fellowship.

Milton:
The leader asked me two questions vital from their point of view:

1. What was our average monthly support money?  I had no idea and had to go home and check. At that time, we simply bought what we needed in hopeless abandon. Checking the bank receipts, we found that we averaged 60,000 Yen a month. This was twice the 30,000 Yen we had received while in the Brethren denomination.  (Mary: just an FYI, this was hard to convert in today’s dollars given the changes in the exchange rates over the decades and factoring for inflation, but I think 60,000 yen in 1953 was about $1,600 in today’s US dollars.)
2. What did we intend to do about furlough?? (We were at the tail end of our normal five-year term.) I replied that as some of them were senior to us and overdue for furloughs, we would not push that subject as we were quite content where we were.

I sailed back down the Inland Sea to home. When I arrived, June waved a letter in front of me. It was from my busy Dad. “Come home before Christmas and I will pay your fare – plane or ship, either way. We would like to be together for a while.”

I contacted the Mission. The leader said “This is a heaven-sent chance. Go. We need you in Australia to get our work established there.”

The leaders of the JEB were not prepared to work so far south as Beppu. But previously the leader of another large evangelical denomination in Japan had written and mentioned if we ever needed to hand over our church, they would buy our home and carry on the work. My young helper was prepared to carry on until their new pastor came so we handed the church over.

Mary: A little trivia – I looked up JEB (Japan Evangelistic Band) to learn that it was founded in 1903. One of it’s founders was a missionary named Paget Wilkes. That name rang a bell and I looked back to see Dad had mentioned how he read a book by him in their first few weeks in Tokyo. So it must have been very meaningful at the time to join this group.

June:
There was a Nazarene group in Beppu and we thought it good to turn over our church to them so that the people whom we had led to the Lord would continue to have fellowship with others. We sold our house to the Nazarene head office but gave the church building and the kindergarten to them free of charge. We joined our Beppu Christ Church group to the Nazarene church group and left for a year’s furlough in Australia with our two children: Stanley and Margaret.

Milton:

We gripped the rail of the ship and watched the group of people who had come out of great darkness, waving in the sun. We looked over the city to the hills. Earlier the mayor had called us in and handed us a certificate of merit for the kindergarten work and social activity. But we didn’t need that exaggerated praise to remember Beppu. The Army Christians who had taught us lessons of brotherly love and kindness; circumstances had opened the door for the Lord to show us His miraculous care and over the mountains in the snow-covered valley, we had seen what real discipleship was.

The ship slipped out into the island-dotted sea. Our friends cried out; “Hurry back won’t you?” But we never went back to Beppu to stay. Beppu was to be an interval in the road God had. We had to learn to say a sad farewell to a lot more people yet on this fabulous journey. “We will come for a visit, Beppu, but really this is ‘Sayonara’”.

June

We flew in a small plane to Hong Kong. The weather was bad and the plane circled Hong Kong many times waiting for a signal to descend. We were all sick. When we landed with a bump, I thought we had landed in the water but did not care because I was so sick that I was glad the plane had stopped anyhow. However, we were at Hong Kong Airport.

From Hong Kong, we got on a cargo ship like the one we had first sailed to Japan on in 1948. On this cargo ship, we were nauseated the whole journey although there was no typhoon. Five years of eating canned and cooked food had left us unhealthy compared with when we first set sail in 1948.

Milton:

In December 1953, just five years from when we left Australia, we returned. The low flying propellor plane bounced and island-hopped its 12-hour journey to Hong Kong. From there a ship glided us gently back through the Philippines with palm-fringed beaches and down the choppy East coast of Australia to Sydney.

Mary:

I was a little confused as both Mom and Dad mentioned they flew and then took a ship from Hong Kong. Yet Dad clearly mentions saying farewell from the side of a ship and the pictures above look like this occasion.  Stan would have only been six years old, but I checked with him and he was able to clarify.

(Margot would have only been a ten-month-old baby.)

Stan:
The ship was from Beppu to Okinawa and from there we got a plane to Hong Kong. I threw up as soon as I got off the plane in Hong Kong it was so bumpy and sickening. From there we got a ship called the TAIPING

Mary:

About twenty years ago I remember Dad telling me a funny anecdote about the bumpy plane ride. It was on one of my family trips down to Sydney to visit and I had been expressing my aversion to the turbulence over the equator on most flights from LA to Sydney. He began to regale me with stories of turbulence and this roller-coaster island-hopping flight. He assured me the modern jetliners of today were so much smoother now and were no match to the stomach twisting bumps they felt so many years ago. Before they left, someone they knew told them that should their itinerary include a stopover in I think Guam (or somewhere with a US military base) be sure to go to the diner at the airport and have a real American milkshake. Treats like milkshakes were not yet available in Japan and Dad was very eager to try one. He said to me, “When we made that stop, I knew that if I drank a milkshake, I was sure to throw up when the plane went back up in the sky.” Of course I asked him what he decided to do. And with a gleam in his eye and a big smile he said, “I drank that milkshake and yes I it made me sick, but it was worth it!”

This last picture is NOT from Beppu – it is just a little “teaser” of what is coming up in the next blog post. Milton & June’s first furlough in Australia and another addition to the family!