Hob-Nobbing in Nagasaki

Dear Family,

Summer has hit hard.  It is HOT and HUMID.  Thank goodness for an AC in the office and a couple of rooms in our apt.  Today we had a Zone Leaders Council meeting at the mission home.  It was fun to see several missionaries we don’t get to see very often.

Last Friday we drove two hours south and west to Nagasaki, stayed in a quaint Portuguese hotel and spent our P-day in the city which, for 200 years was Japan’s sole connection with the outside world through Portuguese and Dutch traders.  It was very pleasant.  The countryside was green and lush, very forested with several little towns along the way with small plots of rice growing (under water).  It is a beautiful country.   In 1697, 26 Christians were crucified on a hill in Nagasaki when the sakoku began and Christianity was forced from the country (sakoku literally means country in chains – no one could enter or leave the country on penalty of death).  There is a monument to them and a museum with some of their testimonies and relics, It is very sad and quite interesting. 

        Couched in very steep terrain, and featuring Japan’s finest harbor, Nagasaki’s notoriety is mostly as the recipient of the second atomic bomb. We visited the Atomic Bomb Museum, the Hypo-center Park, a shrine or two (Confucius and Shinto, actually), and Glover Garden (a European style mansion overlooking the harbor).

  We agonized over the tragedy and awful devastation of the bomb, but marveled at the resiliency of mother earth and her inhabitants.  But for the memorials, one would never know that the “Fat Man” unleashed it’s explosive equivalent of 21,000 tons of TNT 500 meters above the city 78 years ago.  Oh, and before departing we partook of the city’s famous delicacy: Champon, a milky- soupy seafood mixture with noodles – not bad.

It’s rice-planting time in Japan, and the Idaho farm child in the both of us awakens a certain fascination with the process. Rice is the world's most important food crop and dietary staple, is the chief source of food for about 3 billion people, half of the world’s population, and it is said accounts for 20 percent of all the calories that mankind consumes.   Long gone is the team of laborers bending over their work in the rice paddy - superseded 40 years ago by a more mechanized process. Seedlings are raised in a greenhouse incased in kind of matting material until mid June, when they are taken, much like we do grass sod, and placed on the planter.  Each of the planter’s four little arms reaches up and selects an individual seedling and installs it upright in the flooded field, producing four rows in a swath. A cog-wheel tractor pulls the planter through a paddy several inches deep in water. Such paddies dot the landscape here - perfectly level, small patches of land, bordered by low earthen or concrete dikes. A typical Japanese farm consists of many such paddies surrounding a farm home usually on a raised concrete platform.

            It’s not easy to celebrate the 4^th of July in Japan, but we decided a good-old American hamburger would help, so we went with the Pres. and Sister Gustafson to, of all places, the Fukuoka Hard Rock Café. Never before has a hamburger tasted that good. Back at work now, we are busy preparing for the arrival of 30 new missionaries next week.  

Your faithful far-eastern correspondents, Mom and Dad