From the Land Down Under to the Rising Sun

Mary:

The events in this post take place around August of 1968. It didn’t dawn on me until recently that 1968 marked twenty years since June and Milton first arrived in Japan. Tokyo at that time had practically been leveled by the bombs of World War 2. They arrive with baby Stan barely a year old with a huge box with all their possessions. If you haven’t read the post about that arrival and are curious here is a LINK.

Now, in this post, Dad describes the family (June, Milton & the three kids still at home) move from Kobe back to Tokyo in a whirlwind move. He also can’t help but reflect on how Japan has significantly rebounded since 1948. Point of trivia – the 1964 Olympics were in Tokyo.

Milton:

Even though evidence of the work of God in Kobe was exciting, our time in that city seemed to be running out. The school that educated our children had developed from a Mission school to kind of a rich man’s college preparatory school. Fees were sky high, and we felt guilty trying to pay for them. Also in churches, leaders who once bemoaned the lack of students were now organizing their own programs and youth camps. Rents had drained us; more and more we were moving into church buildings for our Bible clubs. Our work was dovetailing so precisely with the local churches that we were losing our identity as a separate ministry.

We had watched the Kobe Street scene develop from the pedal cars pulled by a man huffing and puffing to spluttering motorbike-drawn taxi cabs and then to little rattling automobiles.  Now sleek taxis zipped around the city, with their two-way radios and automatically opened passenger doors.

Everything else had boomed into the affluent age. Especially the price of food. The Japanese were embedded in their own material prosperity and winning souls was like chipping diamonds out of a concrete wall. There was no place for redundant work, and we saw the handwriting on the wall. As we pondered the future, Pastor Kanai who had been working with us was offered a pastorate in the lake area where we held our camps.

We decided it was time to get our children into the Christian mission school in Tokyo and to start a new life. Our last anchor to Kobe was our house. We had offered it for sale but its position away from the streets in the new era of car ownership made it unpopular. We promised the Lord if He would sell it, we would travel.

Summer was approaching with the busy camp program. We had enrolled the children at both the Kobe school and the Tokyo academy. The headmasters of both schools graciously agreed to let us swing in our dilemma right up until the starting day. We returned home from the youth camp at the lake, with ten days to go before the beginning of the new school year. There had been no potential buyers of our house. Then, the next Thursday, three men walked in. The leader turned out to be a realtor friend of a carpenter who worked for us at times. I had forgotten all about him. The other two were interested in our house. They didn’t move out of the living room to inspect the place but decided to buy as they sat drinking tea.

The new owner would pay us in cash on Saturday, he stated. He had one condition: we were to vacate the place within a week of the payment.  On Saturday I watched the new owner’s bank representative open his briefcase and hand over 6-million-yen worth of neatly wrapped 1,000-yen bills to the representative from my Bank.

 Note (In 1968 dollars that was about $20,000)

We signed the papers with the help of the lawyer. I drove home and we started packing.

Within seven days, we had packed, given away or burned twelve years of our material life. On Saturday, as had been requested, we all rolled out of Kobe in the old station wagon, even with our family dog.

We drove past all the places where young people had come to Christ, past the churches they now attended, and on into the country past Osaka and Kyoto and all the memories of High School evangelism. And over the mountains past Lake Biwa, the site of our summer camps with many thrilling experiences.

As the wheels whirled over the concrete highway, we were all in a state of shock. Dave kept saying; “It’s impossible. My friends’ parents take three months to prepare for a year’s furlough. We just left the only home I have known, and we did it all in one week. It just can’t happen.”

About 50 kilometers outside of Tokyo, we rolled onto the first completed section of the future Tokyo to Nagoya expressway. All the hard curving, truck dodging, headlight blinding driving was over for the day.  We saw a knife-fork-spoon sign indicating a roadside restaurant. The car slowed and moved into the exit ramp almost automatically. The place was crowded; hot-rod drivers were out to test the new highway. Also, families were out tasting the luxury of a smooth drive, contrasted to the city streets where cars squeeze through lanes that were originally developed to carry rickshaws and pedestrians.  Only the rickshaws had disappeared to be replaced by cars.

We had first arrived in Tokyo by ship, twenty years before in the cold of winter. We had shared the pain of poverty with our war-devastated neighbors. We now returned to Tokyo on a star sparkling summer night and came to the edge through the toll gate with thousands of car drivers who shared the space on the road of the Japanese miracle.

I lost my way in the maze of the sprawling flat city. In Kobe, we were hemmed in between the mountains and the sea. No one could get lost for long. But here in Tokyo, one false turn in the nameless streets and your future was anyone’s guess. A veteran Tokyo-based friend insisted that the megacity was “just one big mistake” in design.

We had rented an empty rat-infested old house for one month, while the future permanent lease, another missionary was gone. The place sat snuggled up next to the railway line and with each passing train, the whole house vibrated as if there were an earthquake.  We arrived late at night and when we dropped into bed, we were completely oblivious to any gnawing or shaking.

The next morning, I drove the children to school. I lost my way and arrived late. That set a precedent for the rest of their school life.

Mary:

I think I speak for my siblings when I say, Kobe holds a very warm nostalgic spot in my heart. It was where I was born and spent some fun childhood years for the first ten years of my life. We had many adventures there. I wish I had more pictures but here are a few additional ones that are from the Kobe years.