Dear Family,
New Year’s is the consummate holiday in Japan. Most everything shuts down from December 31 through January 3. On New Year’s Day we were invited to the stake president’s home where Sister Aiura had prepared a sumptuous meal of traditional Japanese New Year's food called osechi. She had prepared, packed and beautifully arranged a variety of colorful dishes in layers of lacquer boxes. With some trepidation, we consumed simmered black soy beans, mashed sweet potato with pineapple, candied dried sardines that crackle in your mouth, burdock roots, lotus roots laced with hot mustard that smarts like horse reddish, pickled radish, bitter orange, broiled fish cake, seaweed, mochi rice cakes in miso soup, pink and white rice cake – most of it served cold. Sister Aiura explained that each dish and ingredient in osechi has meanings, such as good health, good harvest, happiness, prosperity, long life, and so on. We were in favor of all those so we freely partook. Like many Japanese women, she had spent several days preparing osechi dishes by New Year's Eve so that they have food for a the holiday period
The pièce de résistance (that’s not Japanese) of the Japanese New Year is mochi, a cake of rice pounded into submission with a mallet until it becomes hard as a rock and then softened up in soup or on the stove top. Some of the cakes are formed into small hard balls and supplied to the Fukuoka Hawks baseball team. It’s chewy and tasteless and hard to break down and we’re told that every year several Japanese choke to death on it. The fellowship was delightful, the culinary layout was beautiful and though new to our pallets, most of the food was delicious, with very little relegated to our we’re-not-trying-that-again list.
The first week of the year was also transfer week in our mission, so again we experienced the arrival of the fresh and excited missionary and the departure of the seasoned veterans. It was a thrill to sit with them in testimony meeting and in the temple. It makes us, if not feel young, wish we were young again. We count it a great privilege to be yoked in the service of the Lord with these wonderful young people. It builds our faith in the Savior to see them arrive with such skill and righteous determination to serve the Lord, and to depart as the Lord’s seasoned emissaries, proficient in this language and buoyed up by the spirit and the sense of having fought a good fight.
If you’re looking for evidence of the upsurge in the number of missionaries serving, you won’t see it here any time soon. There is talk of increasing our contingent by 100 by the end of this year, but we are already booking missionaries who are arriving in July and as it now stands we will barely be holding our own in numbers.
We feel that our family has been greatly blessed as we serve here, whether because of our service or because of our absence, we don’t know, but we’ll take it either way. They are being blessed and we are grateful. Our hope for the New Year is that our health will hold up, that our loved ones will be happy and that the favorable trend of the Japanese yen versus the American dollar will continue. May God be with you and may you have a blessed and happy new year.
Sent with love from your faithful far-eastern correspondents.
Mom and Dad
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