The battle for souls is alive and well in Japan

Who is winning?

It was a lovely warm Sunday and we were on a bench by a river. Two well-dressed ladies approached us. Many things emerged very quickly. Their names were Mary and Cindy. They were Peruvian. They asked us if we spoke Spanish and Tatum answered that she did. One had been in Japan for 23 years and her husband was Okinawan.

Mary invited us to bible study and that’s when I saw jw.org on the card she fished out of her bag. It turns out the bridge by the river was the Sunday morning rendezvous for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Soon we were joined by several others, all nicely dressed, of course. One of them, Hatsuko, spoke English, Japanese, and Spanish! When it came time to say goodbye, Hatsuko and Cindy hugged us. Very un-Japanese!

Later that day, at a busy, major train station, a Japanese woman approached me in English and was surprised when I responded in Japanese. She had two companions with her. One was half-Nepali. Again, the conversation began with language. What do you speak? How did you learn? And then she asked us if we knew about Nam Myoho Renge Kyo - the Buddhist mantra - and she invited us to a prayer meeting. I answered ‘Chotto Muzukashi’ which literally translates to ‘slightly difficult’ but, in Japan, means, “I absolutely CANNOT do what you’ve asked.’

Astonishingly, she barreled through this refusal and made a second ask to which I responded ‘Chotto Muzukashi’ a little bit more emphatically and we slipped away. I did a bit of digging and learned several things.

Soka Gakkai, an evangelical Buddhist movement based out of Japan, is both immensely popular and very controversial. At its core, there’s definitely a very valuable spiritual practice — community and chanting. And its leader, Daisaku Ikeda, definitely had some interesting, radical ideas earlier in his career. Now, however, SGI is mired with all the problems associated with cults and Ikeda is also reviled in many circles.

I’m trying to make sense of these two incidents happening on the same day; it must be hard to be an evangelical in Japan where approaching people in public is rude, so when they see a foreigner, it seems they’re much more likely to approach. Also both groups were composed of a mix of Japanese and immigrants. Perhaps for immigrants, who are inevitably alienated from mainstream culture, these groups welcome them with full-member status.

Earlier in this trip, one of our friends who lives here opined that Japan is in a spiritual crisis and that ties into its over-preoccupation with food, its consumerism, its brutalizing work culture. At the same time, the way almost everyone person I encounter, Japanese or immigrant, does each task with such complete absorption seems to me an expression of the Zen value of living in the present.

Japan, like America and India, is big. So many different streams of thought run through it simultaneously. And yet, one thing, is inevitable in life.

Come all the way here and who did we find? JWs. Jay Dubs. Wherever you go, there they are.