After more than 200 years of self imposed isolation from the rest of the world, American Commodore Matthew Perry's show of force opened the ports of Japan in the mid-1800's. In 1859 the first Protestant missionaries were officially sent to serve in Japan. This past week there was a big 2 day event in Yokohama, celebrating that anniversary.

In addition to the meetings, lots of organizations had PR booths, including PBA, and the Dendankyo I made the videos for.

I attended the meetings; lots of impressions that I will probably write about in the future here. But the day before the events began, I was eating lunch with a couple of other PBA staffers, talking about the anniversary and all. Missionaries are often discouraged by the relatively meager fruit of evangelism here, and relatively slow growth of Christianity in Japan. "150 years -- so long and so little progress made," I mused out loud. The other two, almost in unison, said, "What do you mean, 'so long'? Buddhism has been here for 1, 500 years. We evangelicals are just getting started!" Another cultural eye-opener. For us young Americans, 1859 feels like ancient history. For Japan, well, it was just the day before yesterday! Here's to the Protestant church in Japan -- congratulations on being 150 years young!

Summer vacation for school kids is a lot shorter in Japan than the U.S. Kids are still in school, and will be until the end of the week. Then, finally, summer vacation starts -- the kids get 5 or 6 weeks off.

To help the kids celebrate, and do a little outreach, our church is having a "Kids' Fair" for grade schoolers on Saturday. Bible stories, games, crafts and food. Like a one day VBS. We've done this in the past, attracting 20 or so kids. But we're hoping for a lot more this year. Not only is our Sunday School back up, which should help, but we've conquered a new PR avenue this year.

Japanese neighborhoods are organized around the local Shinto shrine. Every house is registered to a specific shrine, and every community has a Neighborhood Association -- a civic group that, also, is connected to the shrine. The civic groups are very active, organizing neighborhood clean up days, getting public notices out to all the homes, collecting dues, collecting gifts for approved charities, etc., etc. They also have bulletin boards scattered through the community, with official notices for the citizens. All very civic in nature in the minds of most folk, though quite colored by being associated with the Shinto shrine if you look at it objectively.

The bulletin boards would be a great place to advertise the "Kids' Fair" -- except that they are for civic announcements, not religious. We haven't been allowed to use them in the past. Well, our young pastor's wife decided it was time to try again, and went armed with fliers to the local officials. "We want to advertise our Kids' Fair on the community bulletin boards." "You can't, that's a church function -- religious, not civic." "But, the shrine advertises their festivals on the bulletin boards. That's the same, right?" "..." "Right?" "But the shrine priest doesn't like it when other religions advertise." "But these are community bulletin boards, and our church is part of the community." "..." "Right?" "Okay, you can put them up but if anyone complains we'll have to take them down."

A week later, they're still up. Pray the bulletins turn out to be effective advertising and that lots of kids come! Aileen and I will both be involved in the Fair.

This week we have another musician as our guest on LifeLine. Tsutomu Aragaki had a very rough beginning in life. His father was a Mexican-American G.I. stationed in Okinawa after WWII, his mother is Japanese. Shortly after birth, thinking she was applying eye medicine, the midwife put a powerful salve in his eyes that left him blind. His G.I father divorced his mother and returned to the States, his mother re-married and left Tsutomu to be raised by his grandmother. He grew up thinking his grandmother was his mother; his world was rocked when the neighborhood gossip bluntly told him the truth.

Radio was one of his only joys in life, bringing him music and also Christian radio programs. (His passion for radio is still going strong, and when we went to tape him, he knew my voice right away from listening to the shortwave radio programs I did for PBA for many years!)

Radio led to his attending church, where he was encouraged to sing. To make a long story short, he finally studied voice at a prestigious music school and has become a very well known classical tenor in Japan. He also went to seminary and has pastored a church and is still working as an evangelist as well as singing professionally.

We taped him singing, and then taped an interview with him. His testimony was wide ranging, covering from the joy of finding purpose to his life in the Lord, to the struggle and then victory as a believer to forgive his father for leaving them. He says if he ever has a chance to meet his father again, he'd like to sing, "Amazing Grace" for him!

I don't have a video clip from LifeLine (I'm writing at home, not work) but found a short clip of him singing on YouTube:

The event on Saturday went quite well. At PBA we're celebrating LifeLine's 20th anniversary, but in Gunma Prefecture the local churches have been airing the program for 10 years -- so it was kind of a 10/20 celebration. The rally was held in Maebashi Christ Church, one of the larger, nicer churches I've ever visited in Japan. They even had a pipe organ!

Everyone seemed to like the meeting -- lots of speeches and greetings that are such a big deal here, as well as a short message, and then a concert by a gospel singer who's well known in Christian circles here. The video compilation went over well; got lots of compliments on it.

They also had a nice room for the art display, and had around 8 people to help unload, set up and then tear down when it was all over. The easiest event so far!

Then just this morning before going to church, I was reading the viewer response that comes in through our web page, and there was an email from a guy who just saw the program for the first time. He's a believer and was really excited to 'discover' the show, and he says he's going to tell everyone he knows to watch it. That's exactly how we hope believers and churches will make use of the program!

Here are a few pics from yesterday.

It's not the takes that take the time to take the takes, it's the time between the takes that really takes the time to take the takes.

This is a little saying that gets bandied about in production circles. The "takes," of course, are movie lingo - does that help it make more sense?

Shooting a scene of the hero walking down the alley takes twenty seconds. But setting up the camera, the lights, the props, rigging sound and rehearsals can take hours. Even in the kind of shooting we do, set up and break down can take far longer than the shoot itself. And most people have no idea of how long it takes to plan, shoot, edit and master a 30 minute TV program. And I have no idea, for example, how long it takes to, say, make a pair of shoes.

It was in college that I first became aware of how little we know about the time and effort it takes to create things outside our area of expertise. I was working part time in the school's graphic department, and the president walked in with a list of the school's administrators and said, "I need an organization chart of the administration for a meeting tonight," and left.

It became my job for the day. This was before computers; charts were hand drawn on a drafting table with indian ink, on special coated paper. Took all day. I kept wondering if the president had any idea how much time/money this simple little thing was costing the school.

I find myself musing on this once again tonight. Tomorrow, we're having a LifeLine 20th anniversary meeting. The sponsoring churches contacted us last week and said, we'd really like to show clips of all the LifeLines that feature guests from our prefecture, Gunma. Simple little email. That became one of my jobs this week.

Thirteen programs to load into the editing computer, editing 30 minutes down to 2 minutes for each, string 'em all together and burn a DVD. Loading and editing, a full two days. Double checking, correcting edits/titles and burning DVD -- from about 4 pm today until now, um, exactly 11:55 p.m. Two misfires on the DVD, which take a crazy long time to burn, third one's in the "oven." Let's hope third time's a charm. The computer says it'll be ready in a couple minutes.

Well, on the upside, it did give me time to write a post. Ooh, hey, the DVD just popped out. Need to give it a quick check and go to bed; hit the road at 8 tomorrow morning.

I'm sure they had no idea what they were asking for in terms of time needed to make this DVD. As I have no idea how much time and effort I've caused you. (Well, Mom, maybe except for you... kinda know how much grief I've caused you...)

For everyone else who has spent inordinate amounts of time on Aileen and I (and the kids), that we are totally unaware of, Thank You Very Much!

G'nite,

Today was recording day for "In Touch."

While most of our programming on Friendship Radio is original, recorded by Japanese pastors, we also produce and air a Japanese version of In Touch, the radio program by Dr. Charles Stanley. Rev. Tamai is the voice of Charles Stanley in Japanese. The folk in Atlanta, where In Touch is located, were extremely happy with Rev. Tamai's voice -- they say it sounds very much like Dr. Stanley.

My role in the project is going through the English scripts to clean them up for the translator (fix grammar, typos, idioms, etc. that can give a translator fits). Then I assist with the recording, translate listener response and handle liaison work with Atlanta.

Mr. Otsuka is a freelance who voices the opening and closing announcements, and then edits the whole package together.

For the most part, I think you get a better message when it's created in the broadcast language and not translated. But we work hard to make it as natural as possible for Japanese listeners.

Rev. Tamai has become a fan of Dr. Stanley - almost every time we record he says, "Man, this guy says some great stuff!" I can't say I exactly enjoy editing the scripts, but I am often challenged by the messages as I'm doing it!

I really wish I had a picture of this.

This morning I was helping move some chairs out of the TV studio, when I bumped the fire extinguisher. It's just a little hand held extinguisher and it sits right where we stack the chairs. It gets in the way a lot. Over the years we've bumped, kicked and knocked it around, always saying we needed to find a better place to put it. Well, today it decided it had had enough abuse. I watched it slowly topple over -- I had barely brushed the thing -- and then there was an explosion of pink powder!

I grabbed it, and thinking it was probably pointless, held my finger over the end of the nozzle -- lo and behold, that stopped the spray. But there's no turning it off, and the pressure needed to stop it was not insignificant. Can't go outside and set it off on the street, Tokyo's a crowded place -- we'd get pink powder all over scores of people and cars. So I went with another PBA guy to the building's maintenance office to get them to let us out on the roof to blow it off. We were heading for the roof when my finger slipped and the hall got a blast of pink.

We finally made it out to the roof and blasted the rest of the contents into a big garbage bag. Had to go sheepishly apologize to people cleaning great splashes of pink on the third and seventh floors. Reminded me of a hat. And a cat. And VOOM.

The rest of the day was spent uneventfully on editing a video for this Saturday, setting up a new editing computer, solving a network printer problem, fixing a bug in a computer program (that I wrote -- I hate it when that happens), and paperwork.

Not nearly so exciting.

This past Saturday was interesting. Fellow TEAM missionary Paul Nethercott woks with helping the Japanese church integrate the arts and worship. As part of that work, he helped organize a concert that featured a collaboration piece between Japanese traditional drums (wadaiko) and gospel music. The piece was based on "Ride on King Jesus." The rest of the two and a half hour concert featured many other gospel choirs and up to 300 people.

Paul asked me to anchor the camera and tech crew. We set up four HD digital cameras, an intercom system and gave the director a video feed from each camera to watch and call the shots from. All in all a long day (left the house at 8:30 am and got home after 11 pm) but it was fun and interesting.

Our shoot is not edited and ready yet: when it is, we'll link to it here!

In the meantime, here is a home video of the drum piece that Paul's wife, Nancy, uploaded to Facebook. Take a look! (You'll need the latest Quicktime player installed on your computer to watch it.)

Two points to today's post -- wordy Japanese and simple slideshows.

Japanese is a really wordy language. To say the same thing takes 20 to 30% more syllables than English. So take "Dendou Dantai Renraku Kyougikai." That mouthful is the name of an association of parachurch organizations that BJapan belongs to (PBA, too, for that matter). Even for Japanese that is a mouthful, so it's abbreviated by picking up single syllables from the words, Den Dan Kyo, to make up the new word, Dendankyo, as the shortened name of the organization. There are tons of these abbreviated words in use. (Yes, tons -- words have weight, doncha know.) They've even gone back into English. Singing along with pre-recorded music is called karaoke, right? The Kara is Japanese and means empty. (Same kara as in karate -- fighting empty handed.) The 'oke' is English -- first part of the word "Orchestra," (Oche in Japan where R is unpronounceable).

I would not be surprised if Japanese has more abbreviations in common use than any other language. Makes it hard on us foreigners who have a hard enough time keeping track of real words, let alone the slew of made up abbreviated ones!

Point two is a bunch of simple slideshows. The Dendankyo wanted to put out a PR DVD highlighting their member parachurch organizations. So BJapan volunteered to make little PR spots for each of them, and compile it into a DVD.

That has been a job I've been working on in spare moments here and there over the past three months. Just turned in the DVD for duplication today. We put up a page where the groups could check their videos before going to press. Again, it's all in Japanese, but you can take a look too.

Here's the link: www.bjapan.jp/dendankyo.

The first video that comes up is BJapan's. Click the other links on the page to see other samples. You'll need a recent version of Quicktime installed on your computer in order to view them.

Today's program was on a gospel singer/songwriter who goes by the name of KiKi. She's had a tough life. Family life was rocky, and her parents split up when she was in junior high. She turned kind of wild, and after getting out of school worked in bars and night clubs. Music was one of the few positives in her life. She was so taken with the power and joy of black gospel music that she went to the US to study and learn how to sing it right.

While there, to make a long story short, she was led to the Lord and came back to Japan a new person. Her troubles haven't stopped, though. After releasing her first CD here, she discovered she had breast cancer. After going through all the treatments and getting it under control, she had enough new songs to make another album, and contacted another Christian in the music business to ask him to produce the CD. Then that same night she got a call from her doctor saying the her cancer had returned.

A sad story, but while she says it's hard, "There's no way that this can't be hard no matter who you are," she's not sad. The doctor says its terminal; barring a miracle KiKi won't be with us much longer. But she says she's not afraid of death, and gives a powerful testimony to hundreds of thousands of LifeLine viewers today.