This pilgrim was standing here at the foot of Kiyomizudera, chanting in a low monotone voice, collecting coins from passing tourists.

Grave stones at Kiyomizu dera.

Each grave stone represents not a single person, but a single family line, which could have dozens of generations in it. This is a sacred place for literally hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, not only because of its national cultural signifcance, but because it is a graveyard, a home for ancestors, a place to pray for help, and to give thanks to ones progenitors.

More family grave stones. The approximately 1sqare meter piece of property upon which these stones sit would cost tens of thousands of dollars to purchase, if you could find one to buy, and the owners must pay an annual upkeep fee. The bonus, you get to park for free when you come to kiyomizu shrine if you are coming to visit the family grave. That is exactly what we did. Nozomi Caruthers' family grave is here at Kiyomizu dera and we decided that buying some flowers and visiting the family grave was a good way to participate in a very japanese custom, and get good parking to see the rest of the shrine. Nozomi's family is not buddhist, but some of her relatives are and there is apparently some discussion about who should inherit the plot (It is usually inherited by the oldest son, but Nozomi's father has no sons). She and Brandon will for the rest of their lives walk the delicate line between their christianity, their Japanese heritage, their buddhist family line, and their familial expectations. If anyone can do it well they can. Brandon has just enough respect and interest in Japanese culture and Nozomi is well enough acclimated to American life for both of them to be able to role with the cultural currents that mingle, clash, and overlap in a cross cultural relationship. More than that though, I think having the common ground of religion to stand on, they automatically are able to clear some of the hurdles that exist for many mixed culture marriages. They are great friends and always have been so open to and interested in our family. We'll miss them when we go back to the states.

Here is another shot of just a small portion of the family grave stones at Kiyomizu dera.

This is the wheel and axel of a steam engine that sits outside the train museum in Kyoto.

Callan and Tyler got into quite a tiff over who should be able to spin this wheel. "I don't want to share with Tyler" became a common theme for Callan as our vacation began to seem a bit long for two year old patience.

The train museum in Kyoto had several large steam engines that we got to climb on. Some of the levers and valves actually moved!

We got to ride the train behind us, and only had to wait in a short line, despite the swarming crowds. Where there were dozens of foreigners at Kinkakuji, we didn't see a single one at the train museum. No one travels with kids.

After Kinkakuji we stopped at Kyoto station to buy real Subway sandwiches before heading off to the West Japan Railroad museum built on the sight of an old tidmouth shed used at the beginning of the last century.

Callan and Dad stood in line at Kinkakuji to give a few yen to the shrine and ring this bell. The crowd was an eclectic mix of worshippers, tourists, and native sight seers. Some came to see a piece of history, some came to worship it, and others came to say they'd been there. I think we fall somewhere inbetween.

Tyler Caruthers is just about two years old, and is a great friend to Callan. They ran together, and played together, and read books together, and posed for lots of pictures together. This seat they are sitting on is a rock labeled as a throne and holds some significance, but we couldn't decifer it.

Now for the rest of the Kyoto Story. We decided just a week before Golden Week to go to Kyoto, which was bad news for anyone trying to find a hotel in either Kyoto or Osaka. If you can believe it, both Kyoto (pop. 3 million or so) and Osaka (pop. 6 million) had no hotel vacancies for May 3rd and 4th. Not to say that there were no vacancies (just none under 600$ per night). According to every search engine we looked on, there was not a single double occupancy hotel room in either city that was in anyone normals price range. We were about to give up when a last minute desperation phone call to the kyoto tourism information center pointed us in the direction of a search engine that produced five vacant dormatory turned hostels that were available for 2500 yen per night (about 20$). The pictures were less than inviting, but the old woman on the phone sounded kind, and we didn't have alot of other options, so we signed up. We were all ready to go when I got an email from Brandon Caruthers, a mission buddy who currently lives in Osaka with his Japanese wife, saying we could stay with them, so as much fun as the no toilet no shower hostel sounded, we opted to stay with the Caruthers. This picture is from Kinkakuji, and despite the peaceful setting, there were really several hundred people there for the view along with us.

Now it's almost 7

It's almost 7 am and I've been up for about 30 minutes, but awake for about an hour. The next door rice field is being plowed (for rice I think!) but they started about 6 am, right outside our window. For their sake I'm glad they got an early start but I could have used a little more sleep this morning.
We got in pretty late to Marugame last night from Osaka. While were still in Osaka we realized we didn't have our car or house keys anymore. Brandon and Nozomi looked all over their house and we tore apart the luggage, but with no luck. So we set off on the bus (it's more like a nice coach, which luggage storage, lounging seats, foot rests and a bathroom) for home without the keys and without our boss' cell phone number (it's in the currently missing cell phone!) We were assigned the front seats on the bus which was okay most of the time until Joey got Callan laughing so hard he started coughing and that made him throw up all over Joey and himself, which I'm sure most of the bus saw and heard! We were laughing though (along with Callan), surely a coping mechanism because by then it was about 8:30 pm, we had been on the bus about 3 hrs and we still hadn't figured out what to do about our keyless car and house when we got back to Marugame! Luckily I had a package of wipes handy, Callan wore my sweatshirt and we got Joey cleaned off quick. When the bus stopped again to let more people off we pulled out the luggage and grabbed more clothes for Callan and reassured the bus driver that we were okay (and hopefully he understood that our kid wasn't going to do that again!)
We pulled in to Marugame about 9:50 pm with Callan asleep and walked over to the school where our car was parked. After one more thurough check of the luggage, Joey found the hidden key for the school, ran inside and called our boss who happened to be coming home from a trip herself and was only minutes away! She and her husband gave us a ride home and found the spare key to house. Callan and I promptly went to bed. Now we'll have to figure out about a key for the car and how to get it back from the school!
Overall the trip was excellent and didn't end too sour (we're just glad our boss was close by and not an hour or more away from home!) Callan is a great little traveler and hopefully the tractors won't start so early tomorrow!

We`re in Osaka staying with Brandon and Nozomi Caruthers who live with Nozomi`s family in western Osaka. Brandon served with me in Hiroshima as a missionary and he now works at Forever Living Products, an aloe vera MLM. Today we took a minivan to Kyoto and visited Kinkakuji temple (above,) a train Museum, and kiomizudera (pure water temple). With Melissa and Nozomi both pregnant, we took it slow, which was just as well. The Caruthers son Tyler is seven months younger than Callan and they both enjoyed having friend to play with (that is of course, when they werent fighting over toys). They did a lot of running and giggling and attempting to play baseball.
From What I have been told, Kinkaku ji is famous for having been founded by the most politically inempt, but artistically inclined leaders of ancient Japan. His inability to lead effectively lost him and his family their dynasty, but the cultural center he founded in Kyoto, with this golden palace at its center, created the foundation upon much of modern Japanese Cultural identity is built. The lake around the temple is full of Koi, turtles, and small trees growing out of the water, resting in elegant poses, as if they could remember the courtly dance performances that took place on boats out on the water so many hundreds of years ago. There were hundreds and hundreds of people flowing down the foot paths surrounding the temple, faces from all over the world come to glimpse the most famous ancient building in Japan. Part of me felt like the gold was too much. In the pictures, it looks very elegant, very imperial, very surreal. In real life, it is just a building coated in gold. The surface is not smooth in some places, and actually looks a little bit like it has been spray painted gold, rather than plated in gold leaf (of course I dont think it has been spray painted. Merely I was expecting the shimmer of gold statuary, and up close the texture is a bit wanting. Still, it was amazing to see, and it has really rounded out our tourist experiences here to have been able to come to Kyoto.
Callan has done very well this trip. For being two years old, he puts up with a lot of being drug around to fairly boring tourist sites, with little complaining. However, these four Maiko (Geisha in training) were too much for him. I suggested we take a picture and he melted into tears, saying he didnt like those girls and that they were scary. He is crying pretty hard in this picture.

At the West Japan Rail train museum we got to ride on a real steam train, get inside the engine control room of several old steam trains, and learn all about how old steam engines worked. Besides a minor tiff with Tyler over who got to spin a wheel inside the control room, the kids really enjoyed it.

Tomorrow we are going to try and get into a bunraku puppet show if they arent too expensive, were going to the top of an huge building to see the observation deck, and well do some window shopping.

Lately I have been feeling a bit emotional about this entire Japan experience. We came nine months ago, in the middle of the blazing summer humidity to an unfamiliar country, and have been trying to chip out a place for ourselves in our new world ever since. As the air has become warmer and the subtle signs of spring have begun to blossom, spin webs, and chirp in the fields, I often recall our first unsure week here in Japan. Sharing a house with seven other people at my bosses house our first week was difficult, but I wouldnt trade the experience. In the evenings, after coming home from work those first few days, after eating a simple dinner and changing Callan into pajamas, we put him in his stroller and took him for a walk in the darkness of our new neighborhood.

Far from cool, but less chaffing than the heat of the day, the quiet evenings provided us the opportunity to be on our own to talk, to soak in our new reality, and to put Callan to bed. For Melissa everything was new, and for me it was like reliving a dream. We had no clue what we were getting into, no idea the friends we would make, the places we would go, the accidents we would have, the blessings we would reap. All we could think about was the heat, the pending move into our new home, lesson plans, bills, and getting settled.

Now, in the pleasant sway of spring, we walk again through our neighborhood, not as strangers, but as a part of the scenary. The homes and fields that once felt so alien to us, have now, saturated with memories, become our backyard. Like learning a new word, and then hearing it everywhere, when a strange place becomes home, we begin to see its value. There are a million narrow streets, lined by rice fields and ramen shops in this country, but it is the ones I have spent the past nine months driving down that have become meaningful. The park in our neighborhood was merely a slide and a patch of dirt, but now it is a baseball field, a gymnastics arena, and a amusement park all rolled into one. The ricefields next to our home were just grass, and now they`re a marker of the seasons, a home to all of the noises that make this place ours; the early morning grind of the tractor plow, the twilight croak of a thousand frogs singing in coolness of the mud, the dialectic chatter of our neighbor as he leans on his shovel and dicusses the harvest with his aged wife, the sound of our neighbors dog, who hearing his masters car from blocks away, lets into a howl of excitement and stands at the fence, chain taught at his neck, in anticipation.

Marugame Branch's Saturday clean-up!

Yesterday we went to the Marugame LDS Branch's recently purchased plot of land to pull weeds. It's a great location right on Route 11, the main highway in the area and easily accessible. Unfortunately the branch has to have an average weekly attendance at Sacrament Meeting of 80 or 85 to actually build the church building. Today was a pretty average day at church and there were only about 50 people. There are more member in the branch boundries but there are lots of less active members who rarely attend. It's sad when you see how diligent these active members are, some who have been attending church in the same rundown old building for 30 years! But the plot of land is a hopeful sign!!

The missionaries pulling weeds and picking up trash. (There wasn't a whole lot to do, I think the plot was recently cleared, but it was nice to be together with the church members on their own piece of land!)
Callan and Fumiyo (our boss) stopped to have a little chat.

After (a little) work Callan and Elder Itakura kicked the ball around for a bit.

Br. Morimura, Sister Yamaji (the Primary president and Branch president's wife) and me picked up a pile of weeds.

Maybe someday soon there will be a beautiful new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on this piece of land and the Marugame Branch will be a Ward!! :)

(By the way, Saturday was a holiday so nobody had to work, includng us! Yippee! Usually we only have Monday off)

The Game of Telephone

Each week for my larger adult classes, we try to play some type of word game.  We have played pictionary, bingo, twenty questions, I never, balderdash, and most recently ‘telephone,’ the game where one person whispers a phrase into the ear of the person next to them in a circle, and then the message is sent around the circle in whispers, and finally announced to the room by the last person.  

Last week in my class at the community center which is attended by several elderly people, this game proved problematic.  First, about a third of the 15 people in the group are so hard of hearing that they have virtually lost the ability to whisper, and everyone in the circle had to forcibly avoid hearing by humming, or plugging there ears as the message was transferred to the people ahead of them.  The second problem was the Japanese fear of making a mistake.  Many of the students, if they didn’t hear the message quite right, insisted on listening again and again until they were sure they had heard the phrase correctly (which, of course, ruins the point of the game, which is to see how terribly off the group can get from the original phrase).

Still, despite these obstacles, I managed to get the entire class with a seemingly easy sentence.  After trying a few simple phrases like ‘the sky is blue,’ and ‘my name is Joe,’ which where sent around the circle in the above described manner, I gave them this sentence: “My pants are green,” and asked them not to worry so much about getting it right.  This was not only a simple sentence in my opinion, but it was also fact.  I was wearing a green suit.  However, you must also know that the word ‘pants’ as it is used in every day Japanese (pronounced pan-tsu) does not mean ‘jeans’ or ‘slacks,’ but rather ‘underpants.’  

All my young students giggle when I show them a picture of slacks and say ‘pantsu’, and even the adults tend to forget the English usage of the word, as was the case during this game.  I watched as these women (and one 88 year old man) whispered the sentence around the room, turned red, giggled, widened  there eyes, cast coy looks at one another, and generally squirmed as if they were telling a dirty joke.  The product of the whispering was priceless.  Not only had they misunderstood the word pants, but somewhere along the line the word ‘green’ had been misheard as ‘clean’ and the final sentence, announced to the class by the oldest and deafest member of the circle was: “My panties aren’t clean,” which caused a general uproar and many more blushing faces.  My announcement of the original sentence was met by another guffaw, a little more blushing, and smiles all around.

Easter

Callan is dancing in a shower of bubbles in the living room right now, a prize from his Easter Basket, and we’re all enjoying a quiet Easter evening. We had crepes fro breakfast, listened to Amy’s concert choir concert on BYU radio over the internet, went to church, took naps, had Montgomery Family Autumn Soup for dinner, and have been helping Callan play with some of his new things.

This week has brought us to the mid point in April, to the first real spring weather, and to the end of Melissa’s first trimester. Yes, if you couldn’t have guessed it from all the talk about her being sick, Melissa is pregnant, and due around Halloween, after we are back in Utah. She is feeling better lately than she was, but mornings are still generally miserable. Ironically, today she has felt better than she has felt in weeks, and instead I have a miserable cold/cough/headache/achy body that has just about wiped me out. Thankfully tomorrow is our day off and I will be able to stay in bed most of the day.

We managed to get out the door in time for sacrament meeting at noon. I took a nap from after breakfast until about 11:15 AM, and then I threw some clothes on and we headed off to church. There were good talks about the atonement and the resurrection by one of the missionaries, an older sister in the branch, and then a talk on how to increase Christ-like attributes in our families by a a member of the branch presidency. After church the branch president released Melissa from the primary and called me in her place (not as organist, just as a teacher). So for the next three months, I’ll be teaching the 8 and older crowd at primary which consists of one girl and three boys from two different families.

Callan’s Easter was fun, except that he woke up at three in the morning to get a drink of water and found his Easter Basket in the living room. He wanted to look at it, and it took some persuading to get him to go back to bed. After a glass of water and a few bites of something to eat, he finally agreed to come to bed (but only in mom and dad’s bed).

At 7:00 He woke up again and there was no stopping him. By the time I had crawled out of bed, he had already opened and devoured the contents of four of the six plastic eggs and would have finished off the rest if he hadn’t talked him into saving some for later.

As part of his Easter basket Callan got a special toy this year. At the dollar store here they sell fairly durable rip offs of the Brio wooden train sets for ¼ the price of the real thing. We’ve been talking about taking some home with us, and we even bought a few of the trains. This weekend I found a store that had all the pieces in stock, so we bought a whole set, complete with six train cars, two bridges, and a little station with a red roof. He has been playing with it all day. It’s a good toy for when a parent isn’t feeling well.

While Callan and I were napping this afternoon an Easter Package came from Melissa’s parents, which gave her the opportunity to open it up and hide the Easter eggs before Callan woke up. It was very cute watching him find the conspicuously placed eggs out in our front yard. It reminded me of Easter’s at my house when I was a child.

Our Easter Baskets were always hid somewhere in the house by droopy eyed parents who had gotten up extra early to play Easter Bunny. There was always a basket in the oven, usually one in the TV hutch, and sometimes one in the dryer. Because there were five of us kids at home, the baskets were labeled with our names, and it was always a bummer to find someone else’s first.

The contents of our baskets were unique as well. With a brother and sister that were diabetic, sweets at our house were a rarity. In addition to the regular choclate eggs and other candies, our baskets contained a box of Fruit Loops, or Lucky Charms, or Captain Crunch—all cereals that our mother wouldn’t let us have on regular occasions. I also remember our mother often inviting strangers to our house for Easter dinner and other occasions. It has been almost six years since I lived at home full time, but I was always impressed and still am at my mother’s willingness to open our home to people who didn’t have family’s to spend holidays with. I don’t know if it was Easter, but I remember mother inviting an older foreign man who worked at the Burger King near her office to come for dinner.

There is a feast prepared for all of us in the mansion of our Father, one that we, through the grace of Christ, have been invited to attend. The invitation is extended to all, regardless of race, gender, or religion. There is always a seat saved for us at his table, and he is merely waiting for us to decide we’re not too busy to show up. Happy Easter!

The cherry blossoms and callan were baring all at the rest stop on our way to Matsuyama this weekend. We took advantage of some time off to visit the largest city on Shikoku. I visited Matsuyama a few times as a missionary, and coming back with Melissa and Callan was a fine treat. Callan is a super traveler and as you will see in this next set of pictures, we did some super traveling. There are more than thirty tunnels drilled through the mountains between Marugame and Matsuyama and a few of them are more than 2000 meters long (more than a mile). The rest of the highway is mostly built on tall concrete stilts, so either you are barrelling through the heart of the mountains, or skipping over the tops of wide valleys, so that though your traveling through one of the hilliest countries in the world, there is little change in the grade of the road. Callan usually likes the tunnels, but he was asleep most of the ride there so he missed out.

Our first stop in Matsuyama after checking in at the hotel was Ishite-ji shrine. It is number 51 on the 88 temple loop around shikoku and was very busy when we arrived. There were a few hundred people scattered throughout the temple complex, some praying, some burning incense, some buying medalions and charms. This Dragon sculpture marks the entrance to the temple grounds and stands at the edge of a quiet koi pond.