Tokyo

How can anyone describe Tokyo? It's a 3-D city, expanding endlessly not only to x and y, but also up and down. Obviously every city has its skyscrapers, elevated trains, bridges, skywalks, tunnels, and subways, but the way that Tokyo flows makes it different. In most cities, you stay on the base floor unless you are going into a specific mall, office building, or apartment. In Tokyo, it all runs together in a vertical spaghetti that takes you hundreds of feet above and below ground in the course of a single commute. A whole building is rarely owned by just one company, and it seems that every place has shops and restaurants built into random niches on various floors.

And those niches. It's amazing how many seats you can fit into a tiny restaurant, how many tiny restaurants you can fit into a tiny hallway, how many tiny hallways can branch out of a main corridor, and how many corridors can camber, swerve, and loop through ground and sky. Tokyo has borders, but within those borders, it is endless.

Tokyo has a static mold of streets and buildings, but the people--all 37 million of them--are just as much a part of the city's landscape. Obviously they are all individuals with human dignity, but when there are people constantly surging into and out of trains, flowing down streets, issuing from hidden doors, charging like armies across crosswalks, and vanishing into staircases, all without the slightest word or glance to one another, you can't help but feel that in a way, the people are part of the city's terrain. It's not just that there are so many: it's the way they don't look at each other or say anything, even when someone bumps into them or is clearly in their way. That said, people are nevertheless very courteous, and even though traversing the busiest crosswalks does feel akin to a bayonet charge, you don't have to worry about being knocked down or pushed out of the way. The urgency in Tokyo is relentless, but peaceful.

For the past five days, when we haven't been meeting people with JELA and JELC, attending orientations, or going to Japanese class, Jenny and I have been going all over the city with Paul, exploring different neighborhoods, setting up bank accounts and cell phones, and eating Japanese food. My favorite so far has definitely been the okonomiyaki. Today we met with the executive director of the Japanese Evangelical Lutheran Church, who gave us a presentation on the church in Japan and gave us a chance to ask him questions. Christians make up less than 1% of the population of Japan, and the church's population is aging quickly with very few young people coming in. The number of deaths in the church is now equal to the number of baptisms, and the trend is towards further decline. Please pray that the Holy Spirit would be drawing people to Christ in Japan, bringing the whole country into the freedom and joy of following him. The quote below is something I read on the train this morning. It's something that I hope the people of Japan and everywhere, myself included, can come to realize deeply:

"When scripture speaks of discipleship to Jesus, it proclaims this as the liberation of mankind from all human statutes, from everything that oppresses or wounds, everything that causes worry and agony of conscience. Through discipleship people come out of the hard yoke of their own law and into the soft yoke of Jesus Christ." 
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, 1937.

My street at night

Sushi! Of course eating it makes you smile!

The view from my room