From the Land Down Under to the Rising Sun

In the last post, June and Milton bought a broken-down house to renovate in Kobe. The price was good because there had been a story going around that the house was supposedly haunted.

June:

With the help of a Christian Japanese man, we went around the district with a loudspeaker announcing a children’s meetings in our house. Nobody came. I then went around the neighborhood inviting children. The children told me that nobody would even walk past our house because there was a ghost in it. The house had been empty for some time and people avoided walking by even taking a long way around to get to the bus stop.

The story was that the priest of the nearby Shinto Shrine, Kumano Jinja by name, used to live in the house we had bought. He hung himself from the large ginkgo tree in the garden. His body fell into the well under the tree and after that, the story goes, he haunted the house. I told the children that I had prayed in the name of Jesus in every room and that the spirit of Jesus Christ is stronger than any other spirit. They accepted that and our house became a meeting place for two children’s groups. Also, two groups of young people soon began to meet in our house. Milton was gifted with the ability to lead worship in song for all these groups.

Milton:

Our home became the headquarters for young adults who had become Christians at the street mission hall in Shinkaichi. They were fired up for the Lord and were called the “Fisherman’s Club”. We started Sunday schools in homes and in the slums of the city.

Every week, they gathered in our front room to train to serve the Lord. We could see a lot of sense in living just where we did. Gradually, we became aware of the layout of the whole district in which we lived.  The reason for our failure to buy the earlier dream home dawned on us. It was like an amazing negative miracle. The little house we originally hoped to buy sat on a hill and to walk there, one had to cross a valley. At night that road was dark and rough people lived in little shacks along the way. No one would want to travel that way at night, and especially no young lady would ever dare. The Lord had snatched that house out of my outstretched hand with split-second timing back when I sat in the realtor’s office.

Then something else happened. Along one side of our new home was a nine-foot stone wall that dropped down to a rock gutter and a lane below. We decided to build a simple room right above the drop.  The carpenter broke down the protecting fence and started hammering up the framework. Little Dave loved to watch the men at work. He stood gazing at the man on the ladder.  The carpenter later told us that he noticed Dave standing still with his back to the drop, staring while the workman nailed a stay onto the wall of the house. The next instant, Dave had disappeared. He had walked backward over the jagged wall. The carpenter rushed around and down into the lane expecting to pick up a battered bleeding body. Dave stood up without a mark from the fall, not even a tear. Obviously, our house wasn’t haunted anymore! It was under new management and angel protection.

Mary:

Another legendary fall from that Kobe house was many years later – not mentioned anywhere in June & Milton’s writings but I remember it vividly as it involved me! I wish I had a photo of the front of our Kobe house to illustrate the story better, The best I could find is the photo below of our neighbor’s house – as taken from the back yard. You can see the combination of roof lines, where it was common for a two-story house to have an overhanging roof between the 2^nd and 1^st floors.

From the second story bedroom windows that faced the front of our house, if you looked out the window and directly down, you would see a tiled roof. All that to say that one day when I was about five or six years old, I was sitting on the window ledge of my parent’s bedroom with my feet resting on the tile roof below.  It wasn’t unusual for us kids to be on a window ledge since there was a sturdy roof below. Sometimes we even walked out on the tile roof to sneak around to someone else’s bedroom window. However, on this day it had rained, and I didn’t realize the tiles were still slippery. I must have put too much weight on my dangling feet and the next thing I knew I was rapidly sliding down the roof to the garden below. It wasn’t a soft bed of flowers type garden – it was a rock garden (very large rocks) with some rose bushes. I landed right between the cinderblock outer wall and a very large rock on a tiny patch of dirt. I literally landed between a rock and a hard place – had I fallen on top of the big rock it probably would have injured me.  I was unhurt but dazed because it happened so quickly. The first person to hear the clatter of me falling was Stan and he ran out to the front yard – the rock garden. I was unhurt but still looking very stunned when he saw me, Stan burst out laughing.  I remember Mom came dashing out next and was so upset with Stan for laughing that she forgot to scold me for sitting on the window ledge in the first place. The angel protection that Dad mentioned was still active!

Milton:

Our children learned to walk in the backtracks of the hills and valleys 15 minutes from our home. Often Stan would wake me at 5 in the morning and whisper “Daddy let’s go for a walk.” We would roam the mountains before breakfast and school.

June

Milton was gifted with a strong voice that carried well and most nights he was preaching in the open air outside the Japan Evangelistic Band Mission Hall. After Milton and others preached the people who gathered were invited into the Mission Hall and we would talk to each person individually after the meeting finished. Through this personal work, some became Christian.

Milton:

After some busy years under the Mission Hall pressure, my voice began to falter, and my body got tired. At that time, the Lord opened our eyes to the thousands of high school youth streaming along the roads. Twice the Lord spoke to me from the Word and twice I promised to try to reach them and twice I hesitated. But after the second promise, a high school youth walked into our home and said,
“Sir, would you start a Bible class at my school? I am the president of the English-speaking society and would like you to come and teach us the Bible at our meeting.”

No high school boy was supposed to walk down our Mission Hall road. Its atmosphere was too corrupting; so, I never met students when I preached there. But here at my door was a student, asking me to tell his class about Jesus. I couldn’t refuse him.  It was clearly the Lord’s doing.

Also, about that same time, a pastor friend told me one day of an interesting phenomenon in the churches. “We have children; we have young adults and older ones. But no high school students. They are too busy and uninterested,” he lamented. I sent out a survey to as many pastors as I knew and asked them when they were converted. The answers from all but two of them showed they were converted at sixteen or seventeen years of age. I applied for release from the Mission Hall and permission to go all out for the youth.

June:

Milton noticed that in the churches in Kobe there were Japanese children up to the stage of 9th grade but very few senior high students, so he started a movement called Wakodo Shinsei Kyokai (WSK), or New Life Association for Young People. In several places, Milton was able to hire venues and have Bible classes for Senior High School students. He also started having monthly rallies with musical entertainment and a message for the young people. Talented American missionaries helped us.

Mary

It’s interesting to me that back in 1946, June and Milton met when June was volunteering at a camp rally that Milton had organized for young people. Now years later, they are back to working with junior high and high school students again. Stay tuned – more stories will be coming!