Southern & Western Areas of the Sendai Mission

We didn't post last week because we went with Pres. & Sis. Tateoka to attend zone conferences and inspect missionary apartments in the southern and western areas of the Sendai Mission. We had some wonderful meetings and became much better acquainted with the missionaries in that part of the mission. Our mission stretches almost half way to Tokyo and takes in all of the northern part of Honshu Island.





We started in Koriyama on the Pacific side of the mission and then crossed through the mountains via about 18 miles of tunnels to the city of Niigata, pop. 800,000. The first two pictures were taken from Niigata--one a night picture from the 12 floor of our hotel, and the next one an early morning view taken along the river.







We have some wonderful young missionaries serving here and could easily fill up our blog with stories and pictures of them. The last stop was a visit to the missionaries and the small branch on Sado Island, a small island about a 2.5 hour ferry ride westward into the Sea of Japan.








We put the car onto this large ferry and watched the sea gulls as they followed us out of the harbor. President Tateoka is a very effective missionary and as we arrived in Sado for a late dinner he struck up a conversation with a school teacher and had a good gospel conversation. After our meal was finished, he had the waitress show us the decorations of the restraurant and was soon deep in a gospel discussion with her.






There are only a few members on Sado Island, but they have a very nice small chapel and the members were excited to have visitors. They had prepared a meal and stayed to talk with us for as long as we could stay. On the way home, President Tateoka told us that we needed to get bold and start speaking to people in Japanese. The ferry did not have seats and instead, people sat on the floor. While we were sitting among them, we began to use our shaky and rudimentary Japanese on them. We tried to ask them simple things like how many people in their family, where they lived and worked, and what they did on Sado Island. They were all polite and tried to help us. Sister Tateoka found on lady who spoke some English and she agreed to start attending our English classes in Niigata. This experience was helpful for us and made the time pass quickly, but we realize that we will need more than 18 months to get so that we can communicate in Japanese.