We Made it to Church

Of course no description of Japan is complete without mentioning that the country is completely gadget crazy.  The ubiquitous gadget now is the Swiss Army knife-ish cell phone/camera/text messaging thingy.  Outside the Kyoto train station there is a beautiful Christmas tree at the top of a set of escalators, and when we visited, at least 50% of the people riding up the escalators were stretching their arms high in the air holding their cell phones up, snapping pictures of it.  On the average subway at least 50% of the people are furiously working the keypads of their cell phones with their thumbs, smoke curling from the tiny screens.  I should have bought shares in NTT DoCoMo years ago.

What's worse is when they don't put the blasted things away when they hop off the subway.  Anyone who has a bumper sticker on their car that says "Shut Up and Drive" should try walking on a sidewalk in Japan while they are in a rush to get somewhere.  There is always some teeny-bopper in high heels and a mini-skirt or a businessman in a suit inching along the crowded sidewalk furiously tapping in a text message into his or her cell phone constraining foot traffic in the process.  Where is my water cannon when I need it?

The prize for the oddest and most enduring gadget surely must go to the humble toilet seat.  These come in different varieties, from the simple heated seat to the nuclear-powered model looking like it came off of the flight deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  I don't know what all the buttons do, and I am frankly afraid to try them.

The first time I ever sat on one of these seats it was a bit of a shock because I was expecting cold plastic.  After the initial yelp, I learned to become quite fond of this arrangement.  In our very chilly inn, in which the owner keeps all the windows open even on very cold nights, Jordan has taken to, er, sitting instead of standing, warming his, um, buns in the process.  I tried to tell him the other boys would make fun of him if he didn't stop it.  I still see him sneaking off with his 956 page copy of The Order of the Phoenix.

Speaking of the boy with the lightening bolt scar on his forehead, ever since we read The Half Blood Prince, Harry Potter has been more or less a course of advanced studies as we have searched through books One through Five for clues to the identity of R.A.B. and the whereabouts of the missing locket.

This has actually made learning the art of serious studying quite a bit of fun for the kids.  And for Dad, too.  For those of you who know what I am talking about, and who also want a hint at who we are convinced R.A.B. is and where the locket is, open up Harry Potter Book 5, The Order of the Phoenix.

and re-read Chapter 6, The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.

We would be in Kyoto on Sunday.  I called the mission home to get an address for the chapel nearest our hostel.  They went the extra mile and e-mailed me a map with directions!

It looked like it would be a 30-minute walk.  Not wanting to be late, especially in manners-conscious Japan, we left an hour before Sacarment meeting was to start.

We followed the map provided by the mission home, and quickly got ourselves lost.  It just didn't make sense - either we were in the wrong place, or there was a translation error in some of the Japanese names that were written in English.

We hailed a taxi, who looked at a our map with a puzzled expression and talked to himself in Japanese for a long time.  Then he started to drive in a direction that was totally different than where we thought the Church should be.  The taxi driver stopped a couple of times to ask for directions, and then, to our delight, he dropped us off in front of a church!  We were going to be on time!  Early even.

As our taxi was disappearing down the street we approached the building, but nothing looked familiar.  I studied the characters on the front door and saw the characters for "Nippon" (Japan) and Ku-ri-su-to (Christ), but that was all I could make out with my limited knowledge of the language.  We walked inside the foyer and noticed that the walls were covered in fliers and that there were several small chairs set up along the walls.  It just didn't seem right.  L.D.S foyers always have one couch and two soft chairs with a table in-between, right?  We stepped out of the building to take another look and that is when I noticed the cross.

Now I should note that we truly do have a great deal of respect for our Protestant Christian counterparts.  But the thought of meeting up with a friendly Japanese church-goer and being invited into the meeting, and then having to awkwardly explain that this wasn't the church that we wanted to attend after all, did send us all into a panic.  We scurried away as fast as we could and hid around the corner until we could plan our next move.

We started to follow our map again.  It was getting close to the time that Sacarment meeting would start.  We hailed another taxi, and he started to drive back toward the same Protestant Christian church. "No, no," we protested, "not THAT church," and wre finally able to convince him that all Christian churches were not the same.

We drove around and around, and then, with my limited understanding of Japanese, the driver was able to tell me that we were on the street indicated by the map, but the address simply was not on the street.

By now Sacrament meeting had started.  I thanked the driver and paid him and we got out thinking that once again, it was going to be a wash.  We vowed to try again next week, in Beijing, China, where it would be harder still to find church as the lds.org website doesn't even acknowledge that one exists.

We started to walk back to our hostel.  We went one block west and what did we find there?  A building that was so clearly an LDS chapel that any Mormon could spot it a mile away.  The map from the mission home had marked the wrong street.

We made it just in time to remove our shoes and be ushered into the front pew and to interrupt the prayer for the Sacrament.  So much for first impressions in a foreign land! Nevertheless, we we able to partake of the sacarment of feel the spirit as the speakers addressed the congregation in a language that is very foreign to us.

In closing, I would just like to remind anyone who is thinking of leaving their jobs and traveling around the world for a year that getting a letter from the IRS is not a good idea while you are away.  It not only can bring on waves of panic, but the desire to actually think fondly of your homeland is greatly diminshed.