Elder Callahan in Japan

Hey all!

So this week was New Year's which in Japan is a big deal. All the stores close down, everyone has work off, and they all spend time with their families. This means a couple of things for us as missionaries:

1) Nobody wants to meet with us during this week

2) Nobody is home

3) Nobody wants to talk to you if you do find somebody on the streets.

So this week the members (who don't really celebrate New Year's as much as regular Japanese people) invited us over a lot. We had about 7 appointments this week, which isn't necessarily a lot in America, but it's quite a bit in Japan. There were a couple days where we had two appointments right in a row so we just got home feeling so full. On Saturday one of the members took us to an all you can eat American-style buffet (run by an English guy who just yelled stuff at the customers in English and French) where we stuffed ourselves and then had a dinner appointment at another member's house where they made so much food for us which we had to eat. It was delicious but we came home never wanting to eat again.

On Thursday morning, New Year's Day, we went out early in the morning to find a shrine. On the 1st everyone goes to the shrines and throws coins in the shrine and in has something to do with either Buddhism or Shinto. I would know more, but when we went to the place we were told had one of the biggest shrines in Japan, it was nowhere to be found and the streets were empty. The member who told us about it said there would just be thousands of people on the streets and that we would have no problem finding it, but when we got there it was a ghost town. So we wandered around for a while, bought some donuts and milk at a convenience store and took the train home.

That night, at a member's house, they made us eat the traditional Japanese New Year's food, because they thought it would be funny. Basically it consists of a bunch of raw egg and fish and grossness. There was raw fish molded into this rubbery consistency slice thing, lima beans with fish eggs, what I think was cooked egg molded into like a bacon strip type thing, some just tiny little fish dried up and cooked which you just eat head and bones and all, and some whole shrimp that you had to deshell and take the head off of by yourself. All the food had meaning so it was kind of interesting, but it was all just way gross. But that's pretty much the worst food you have to eat here, and it only happens once a year so I'm pretty lucky on that front.

We found this new investigator last Saturday that we met on Tuesday. He is super super interested in our message and does basically everything we ask him no problem. We met twice last week and he had been reading the Book of Mormon on his own and learned all about resurrection all by himself. It was kind of funny. We committed him to baptism, but we're kind of unsure about him, because he said he's been baptized a lot of times before, and that lesson he asked if he could be baptized that day, and he definitely doesn't have a testimony yet. He wants to be baptized much more than we want him to, at this point. He's an interesting fella. That's pretty much everything that went down this week. We talked a lot with the members about setting member missionary work for the new year, and committing to a date to find somebody that will listen to (not necessarily accept) the gospel, which went over really well. I would suggest that for everybody, to set goals for their missionary work this year. It works wonders.

Have a good week everyone!

Elder Callahan