From the Land Down Under to the Rising Sun

Mary:

Last post about June and Milton was about their first furlough in Australia in 1954. Probably around March of 1955 they returned to Japan and headed for the city of Kobe, where their new mission, the Japan Evangelistic Band (JEB) was based. The city of Kobe holds lots of warm childhood memories for me, but I digress. This post is mostly 1955 – and I was not around yet!

Milton

We returned to Japan as regular missionaries, with a mailing list and a Mission Council. And just as amazingly it had all begun; the extraordinary springs of supply that had steadily gushed from unknown sources for three years- they dried up as quietly as they had begun. I don’t know which impressed us more – the coming or the going. God’s timing has always awed us.

I was invited to minister at the Shinkaichi Mission Hall in Kobe, the place the dentist had pointed out to me six years before. (Mary: for readers of previous posts, this was when Milton took a train to Kyushu to scout a place to live, before he, June & baby Stan left Tokyo back in 1949) Night after night, in the street and in the Mission Hall I preached and worked alongside a Japanese evangelist and teams of students from the J.E.B. Bible College.

At the back of our Mission, glittered the highly competitive prostitute avenue with its own shrine and idol where the girls came to pray for success. In front of the hall were the eateries, movie theaters, and strip joints. For many, Shinkaichi was the last fling before suicide. For some, it became the first step on a new road to eternal life. Many came to the street to play and forget the hard day’s work, and some found Jesus and walked with a new heart on the long, long road of life.

June

Very soon after David was born, we returned to Japan, this time to Kobe where there is an English- speaking school called Canadian Academy. Stanley started going to school there. It was a different atmosphere to school in Australia. The headmaster introduced himself to Stanley by his given name and there was no uniform. It was a bit of a shock, but the atmosphere was very relaxed.

Milton:

For a house, we rented a place from another Mission, down by the sea in an eastern suburb of Kobe city. Behind us on the rising mountains stood the glamorous homes of the rich. We were among the fishermen and the factories. That was OK by us, except that the compound was like some missionary station of a bygone era – with a high fence around it. The barrier kept out the breeze and nearly stifled us in the summer. One day the missionary in the next apartment rushed out screaming; huge snakes were playing in her toilet. She was glad to invite some local kids in to get rid of the visitors. We felt we had left the country for the jungle! Another defect with the low-lying area was that the smoke from the factories heightened Dave’s asthma. The doctor insisted we get out and move to higher ground. We were glad to try. We planned on buying a home with money received from the sale of our house in Beppu. Now we hurried.

The land value in a great port city compared to a country town staggered us, plus of course inflation. We started to comb the hills around Kobe like prospectors looking for gold. Eventually, the real estate man came up with a find. It was a dream. In front of the house, a little Japanese garden nestled into the front wall in quiet exotic dignity. And a traditional sloping pine tree reached for the sky across the front gate. We figured if we could get the place at our price, we would buy it.

Mary:

It is interesting to notice, as you will read in the next paragraph by June, the vastly different aspects my parents remember of that short stay in that missionary compound. Mind you, Dad wrote his memoir much earlier in the 1970s and when Mom wrote her comments years later (around 2015), it was through the lens of having been a psychologist for several decades by then.

June

The Japan Evangelistic Band rented a cottage for us in a missionary compound, surrounded by walls. There was a married couple from the USA living not far from us. The wife was expecting a baby. We became friendly with them. After the baby was born and the mother returned to their Japanese home with the baby, she said a strange thing, “I think my maid is secretly planning to kill the baby”.

I thought this was quite weird but did not know how to respond except to give reassurance. The next day her husband called me to their house. The mother of the baby was on all fours in the “knee-chest” position and groaning. I asked her if she was in pain, but she only continued to groan. An American doctor came and asked us,

“Have you noticed anything strange about her recently?”

The husband said “No”, but I said “Yes”. The doctor called for an ambulance. The diagnosis was post-partum psychosis. In the hospital, she thought the nurses were planning to kill her and the baby. Her husband took her back to the US with the baby. There, she made a complete recovery. It was my first experience witnessing post-partum psychosis.

Milton:

Meanwhile, our mission instructed us to spend this first summer back from furlough with them at their retreat in the mountains. We were glad to get Dave out of the heat and smog and we determined not to return to the flatlands again. So, I asked my coworker to close the deal on the house if the owner came down to our figure. Deep in my thinking, there was an odd ripple of uneasiness about the pretty house on the hill, but I stifled it and determined to make the reduced price a sign to go ahead.

A few days after we arrived at the vacation/retreat in Karuizawa, a telegram came. The owner was willing to sell at the reduced amount. I was to return immediately and pay the money. I took the next train back to Kobe.

The pastor and our real estate dealer and I went to the office of the owner’s realtor. We waited for 30 minutes with all papers made out and the money ready to hand over. But the owner did not show. Everyone was getting a little anxious. The telephone rang and the realtor answered it. His face tightened and his tone froze. He finished the conversation as politely as his blood pressure would let him and hung up. Then he walked back to us and made his announcement:

“That was the owner of the house,” he said, “he has sold it to someone else this morning. I’m terribly sorry.” We were all confused for a while, but I knew this was no accident. When we walked outside, I said to the Pastor:

“Let’s praise the Lord. This is too uncanny. I mean, I had the money ready to pay. God must have something in mind.”

We left our summer retreat and brought the children back to the hot apartment in the lowlands of Kobe, swallowing out disappointment and started out on the search again.

Mary

A few bits of trivia about that summer retreat place called Karuizawa – first regarding the photo with Stan with the bandaged on his arm, here is his explanation:

               “I got banged up in a bicycle accident. I was riding down a steep gravel road and lost control and went tumbling on the gravel. Got a bad abrasion on the arm. No one was around so I had to ride/walk back injured but made it.  I remember there were flying squirrels in the trees and the emperor was there at his retreat “

The trivia I wanted to explain to those who have not lived in Japan is that Karuizawa was (and probably still is) a popular retreat for people needing to escape the stifling summer heat and humidity of Tokyo. I remember hearing an anecdote from another missionary kid classmate that his parents ran into John Lennon shopping there. Apparently, he and Yoko Ono frequented Karuizawa but I am not sure of dates.

Milton:

We couldn’t find anything in our price range. One night as June and I talked, we came up with the idea of buying land with a small old house on it and then extending the building as we had the money. We relayed the idea to the young real estate man, and he was delighted.

“If you will settle for land like that, I can think of plenty.” He enthused, as a matter of fact, I can think of one place right now on the hill above where you are going to work.”

“Show us,” we demanded.

On the way there he explained that the place was very untidy and overgrown with weeds.

“It is supposed to be haunted,” he confided, “there is a deep well and a high tree in the yard, and these things, plus no one had lived there for a while, add up to making it haunted for some reason.”

“Why did it first fall into disuse?” I asked, “Did people think there was a ghost running around?”

“On no. That came later. The owner took it as a bad debt. He didn’t want to rent it.”

We got out of the car about one hundred yards from the house. It was set back among little lanes on a slope in an old part of the city. I had no car and the idea of having a place away from traffic danger and pollution was appealing. We figured it would be good for our little children.

We bought the broken-down house in the wilderness of weeds that had become the rubbish tip for the district. Because it was “haunted” we got it cheap. We planned to renovate the ancient building and then build on to it as we saved money.  But while the carpenter was still there, money came, and we were able to proceed with a new house and to grade and repair the land immediately. 

June had previously inherited, with her brother, a couple of apartments. Geoff and their mother lived in one of these. We knew that any suggestion from us that we needed cash, would trigger a desire to help in her kind-hearted brother, and he would feel he had to sell their home to get June her half of the inheritance. We said nothing about high land prices in Kobe compared to Beppu. But Geoff, for other reasons, wanted to sell and asked June for permission to get rid of the apartments as he wanted to buy a little cottage in another part of the city. He sent June her portion and that paid for our new work.

Mary:

In the interest of keeping the posts shorter, I will end there but stay tuned there is much more to say about that house and the Kobe years. But here are some more pictures if you are into historical photos from a bygone era.