13 June 2010

8 June 2010 - Letter from Elder Wyman arrived in a record 4 days!   Dear (family in Japanese characters),  So interesting week - the Prime Minister of Japan just resigned.  I don't know what that entails exactly as I can't read newspapers or anything.  Nor could I were I allowed to.  Speaking of politics we were eating at makudonarudo and this man was speaking very loudly about American politics and how we should be staying out of China's (and everyone else's business.  Then he would stare directly at me.  My companions back was to him so I got the brunt of his glaring.  Very uncomfortable.  I think he made the assumption that we only spoke English. Not that it's too difficult to pick out words like America and Obama.  We just high tailed it out of there since he seemed rather passionate in this hatred of America.  After that I was using the bathroom in the shopping mall when the cleaning maid walked right in.  She didn't seem fazed at all, but I sure finished up fast as I could!  That's what we would call "hen" (weird in Japanese).
We were tracting one day when this man came up to us and before we could say anything he said "I smoke, I drink", then went on to explain that he was a member of Sakado ward - his younger brother went on a mission, but he had become inactive about 40 or so years ago.  So we'll be teaching him here pretty soon.  It was pretty cool because we don't go to that area at all really, and he was the only person who we really talked to.  We knew why we were out there!  We got that feeling another time this week - we went to a park that we had never been to before.  It was filled with old guys, and we saw a young guy around 25-30 and we talked for about an hour and taught most of the first lesson.  He even said he never came to this park and today was the first day he'd had a break from work in a long time and didn't really know why he had come to this park.
So we've had quite a few run ins with the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Crazy people.  Twice we saw them trying to pass stuff out by the train station and we talked to them for a while (why not).  Boy did they ever just dump stuff on us.  I've got a small collection of Jehovah's literature full of Japanese watchtowers.  I put them all in my collection of crazies.  Unfortunately they found out where we live somehow, so we may hear from them again.  The Jevo's in Japan are a lot tamer than the one's in America, and most haven't even heard of Mormonism.  So instead of proving our religion wrong, they simply try to push theirs on you.  Read some of their stuff, and they really are crazy.  I can see why mom chases them off the porch every time.  Even crazier than Jevo's is Happy Science.  Their leader woke up one morning and realized that he was God.  We're actually going to pick up some of their literature today.  You have no idea just how crazy they are.
We visited a member family and somehow it got mentioned that I did magic, and so a deck of cards was produced and I did a few tricks for them.  Very interesting doing that in Japanese.  Despite not having practiced for months I still seemed to stun and amaze with a few simple tricks - looking forward to getting some more props to use!  (I guess that means the package I, Mom, sent has not arrived yet.)  I suppose my companion is getting a little trunky, but not in the usual sense.  More like - oh we have enough groceries to last us two weeks - let's not go shopping.  So we had pancakes for most of this week.  We were ok on food, but we were all out of food that took no preparation!  Every week we help out at an investigator's English class.

Well - had a beautiful P-day - talk to you next week!  Love to you all, (Elder Wyman in Japanese characters)

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