Or, "Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu" as they say in Japan. You can wipe it off your chin now if you tried to say that out loud!

Aileen and I have a four year old New Year's "tradition" -- going to see Mt. Fuji on New Year's Day. Japan's most famous mountain is about two hours away by car. Four years ago we went on a spur of the moment lark and barely made it, arriving at the foot of Fuji well after sunset, just in time to watch the mountain dissolve into the inky winter sky.

We had such fun that we did it again the next year. And the next. And the next.

This year we found a nice viewing spot at Lake Motosu, on the side of Mt. Fuji that faces away from Tokyo. Fuji nicely caught the pink of the setting sun. Also, Mt. Fuji is depicted on the back of Japan's 1,000 yen bill -- and we were at the spot where that original picture was made. made me feel rich, somehow!

In the car on the way home, in addition to talking about the day, we also got to talking about the coming year ministry-wise. TEAM starts its "Everyone One Hundred" campaign, BJapan and Family Forum Japan are in dire financial straits, PBA is short-handed as usual. Lots to pray for, but also lots to look forward to the Lord doing in 2010. Pray with us for a real advance in the work of all these ministries in the year ahead!

Happy New Year!

Sorry, couldn't resist (^^)

Our church, Kotake Cho Bible Church, is a typical small Japanese church. About 20 people most Sundays. We all eat lunch together afterward, and this week I was chatting with the fellow next to me, a guy in his mid-70's I'd guess.

"Well, tomorrow's the big anniversary," he suddenly says. Huh? What anniversary? "Pearl Harbor." Oh, yeah! We'd been talking about Christmas and the kids' party we're going to do -- hadn't even entered my head. "That was quite a day. It completely shocked everyone in the country." Were you old enough to realize what was going on? "Sure, it was huge news. All us kids were running around being crazy, talking about how we were going to beat up all the Americans. But the grownups all seemed subdued. Well, not everyone - my teacher was all excited, getting us all pumped up, saying how we would win this war. But my dad just shook his head over and over. He'd say, "This is wrong. It's dumb. What in the world did we attack the Americans for? Now they're our enemies and we're having a hard enough time with the war in China. What are they thinking about?"

"And over night, you couldn't listen to jazz any more. It was outlawed. But jazz was really, really popular at that time. Some college kids would sneak into basement clubs on the fringes of Ginza. The plainclothes police went in and busted them, hauled them off to jail. That's ridiculous."

Then he wanted to know if the US soldiers, then and now, get a salary. Sure, it's not a lot, but they get paid. "The Japanese soldiers didn't get any salary. They got a little pocket money - only enough to go get a couple drinks on their day off. No money to send home. It was really tough on families. Your draft number would come up, the military police would come to your door -- "Congratulations! Your father/husband has been selected to serve the nation and the Emperor. They had to bow and scrape, acting like they'd just gotten some great honor, but on the inside they were cursing the military. They took dad away, and suddenly the family has no income. Families were starving. The mothers really had to get tough. After the fathers were all taken, then they started coming back for the sons. And all these guys came home in little boxes, ash urns. The urns would come by train to the station and the families had to go pick them up. They'd walk home caring the boxes, crying, and there'd be a whole slew of us kids trailing behind. What a zoo."

One lady in the neighborhood had all three of her sons taken away on the same day. "She went kinda of crazy for awhile. You couldn't blame her." The guy sitting across the lunch table wanted to know if they came back in boxes too. "No, actually that was the darnedest thing -- all three of her boys made it back alive. That never happened. It was like a miracle..." We were all quiet for a few seconds.

"War is hell," he said. Somebody came around with a pot of coffee, filling cups and talk drifted back to Christmas decorations and party treats...

Not the sport, the restaurant!

I know I just posted about today's LifeLine; but I realized our guest was a musician. Again. Lest you think all we do are programs about musicians, let me introduce last week's program!

Polo is a natural food restaurant that was just opening a few months about by (Mr.) Genki and (Mrs.) Akiko Kudou. Akiko got interested in natural foods when she worked at a restaurant that caters to people with allergies and other food concerns. And both she and Genki were hoping to find work that would give them Sunday off so they could attend church... "We really couldn't find anything that would let us take Sunday off, and the timing seemed right, so..." Away they went.

Not doing any advertising, but word of mouth keeps them plenty busy. We followed them to church and took the service and the fellowship time afterwards so viewers could see just what this "church thing" that is so important to the Kudous is all about!

It turns out Aileen has an occasional gripe about me. I Know! Hard to imagine, but true nonetheless. One is that, in spite of being married to a photographer, she has precious few good photographs of her magnum opus. Er, opuses? Opii?

Guilty as charged. Sorry, kids -- your modeling sessions never happened.

But Mom's getting me in shape for when grandkids arrive and the other day set up a shoot with the Owen and Sarah Ames family, to take a few pictures of their newborn, Joshua Owen Ames. The Ames' are working on a new TEAM church planting effort, not too far away from where we live. This is the first step in a plan that will see several new church plants taking place in metro Tokyo. So they're dealing with two 'newborns' at the same time! Now you know what you can pray about this week.

Anyway, Joshua was a champ. Well, sort of. Nap time was right there on his schedule, but did he cooperate? Not really. Every time we took his blanket off, stuck a silly prop on him or tickled him with feathers, he woke up and started crying! And even though he knew we'd taken his diaper off, he still wet the blanket, and, um, er, (how to put this delicately?), soiled his Daddy.

But he was awfully cute. And Aileen and I had a lot of fun.

Not sure he did.

But you can judge for yourself -- his pics are here.

Click above video to play.

Just a quickie today. One of the drawbacks of working in video and TV is that your hard disk fills up really fast. I've got 500GBs in my laptop (main machine) but a couple of months after putting it in, it's full. Mostly video footage in various stages of editing. While looking for big files I can safely delete, I ran across a slideshow/video that I shot and edited for TEAM Japan's annual conference in August. Each year we have a required attendance conference of worship, seminars, business meetings, annual picnic, and more. The slide show was shown at the end of the conference. The guest speaker this year was Dr. Jim Meyer, from Philadelphia Biblical University. Numbers were way down; bunches of people in the US and Canada on furlo this year.

If you don't know any other folk in TEAM Japan, this tain't gonna be too interesting! But since a lot of you DO know at least some of these folk, well, here it is! (About 5 minutes, need a recent version of QuickTime to play. And it's big -- may need some time to buffer.)

P.S. Right after the conference was over, we celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary by inviting the TEAM gang that was still around for a big BBQ bash - 30 or 40 people. Unfortunately, no one thought to take pics :-(

This weekend's LifeLine TV program will be a lecture by English missionary Patrick McElligot (Spelling?? I've never seen his name written out in English, only Japanese!)

This lecture series was taped at a seminar sponsored by Family Forum Japan (FFJ), which is the Japan affiliate of Focus on the Family in the US. I've been on the board of this organization since it started over 10 years ago. We've had tremendous ups and downs, but the Lord has seen fit to keep us going this far. Less than a year ago, it looked like we were going to hit the financial brick wall at the proverbial 100 miles an hour... but God was gracious, and we stopped inches short of disaster, and have been slowly backing away from the wall.

Family issues are huge in Japan, and there are not nearly the resources available here as in the US -- secular, let alone Christian. FFJ has a good ministry -- very popular radio program in two prefectures, lots of resources, both translated from the US and original from Japanese authors, and a heavy schedule of speaking in churches, to school groups and more. But financing the work has been problematic, and our extremely dedicated staff work for embarrassingly low wages. Seems to be a recurring theme to ministry in Japan.

This broadcast of lecture series has been very well received. This will be the fourth program. Common Biblical themes for those of us in the Christian West, but really kind of radical, eye-opening stuff for Japan.

As a P.S. here, we'll be traveling some 10 hours away from Tokyo to tape a LifeLine 20th anniversary event this coming Monday -- a national holiday. The event will be on a cruise boat on Lake Biwa, Japan's biggest lake. Will be my first time on a cruise boat, and the first time (duh) to film on a cruise boat. It's going to be a full slate with gospel and classical concerts, kids' program, various speakers and more. I'm slightly worried about seasickness, but even more worried about recording decent audio -- how loud are the engines on a cruise boat?!

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!

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,

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.