Utagawa Hiroshige

Eugene Woodbury wrote Tokyo South based on his two years in Japan as a missionary from 1978 - 1980, ages 19 - 21. The book is technically fiction with strong autobiographical elements. 

Eugene reflected quite often on his mission and many of his reflections can be found on this blog, including a post from 2024. 

The book retains the perspective of a young man leaving home: family life, college life, and homeland. He encounters not only a new culture and new perspectives but a variety of human beings, ranging from ambitious and rule-oriented to whimsical and romantic to matter-of-fact and dedicated. Most importantly, he encounters and falls in love with place:  

For the first time [Thackeray] understood mono no aware—the idiom that referred to the pathos and beauty of the human condition, the tremulous ache of a freshly broken heart. For the first time he knew that America was very far away. 

The text is downloadable only as a PDF. Click on the button below. 

Labels: ebooks, tokyo south

In this largely autobiographical account of the author's two-year proselyting mission to Japan during the late 1970s, a Mormon missionary is confronted by an overzealous religious bureaucracy and faces his own growing doubts as the work of preaching the gospel gets turned into a cynical and self-serving game of numbers and spiritual one-upmanship.

The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the innagural story of my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I liked using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than programming.

Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I doubt the story would be so well received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s at Brigham Young University under President Jeffrey Holland its glasnost era.)

Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the the Tokyo North and South missions being reunited in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.

If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.

Tokyo South will be made available at a later date.

Related posts

The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
Tokyo South is dead
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Labels: books, BYU, ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south

The most beloved stereotype of the Japanese salesman is that of a mild-mannered carnival barker as portrayed in the long-running Tora-san movies. Persistent and endearingly ingratiating (almost to the point of being annoying). Not hard-sell.


The business of business-to-business—a popular subject of Japanese television melodramas—combines persistence and supplication in the face of rejection. The objective, it seems, is to be inoffensively irritating to the point that the other side caves to get rid of you.

Sort of like stalking. In a good way! Ganbaru—to patiently persist, endure, never give up—is intrinsic to the character of the ideal Japanese striver. A good salesman is NOT Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. That's how yakuza behave. That's why yakuza terrify the average Japanese.


In Japan, one such feared "hard sell" technique is known as "catch sales." It uses an aggressive approach (invading a person's space and getting in his face) to physically move the conversation to a "home ground" where the salesman controls every aspect of the interaction.

You know, like a church.

As I recount in Tokyo South, back during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mormon missionaries deployed catch sales techniques with enormous success. In the short term. In the long term—well, by design, Mormon missionaries aren't around for the long term.

So the whole thing fell apart in a few short years. The catch sales approach treats people as disposable. The bird in the hand is never worth as much as two in the bush, and for good reason. It's a lot easier to sell the idea of joining a community than to create one.

Or as Groucho Marx famously said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." If it's that easy to join, why join? Besides, all Japanese already belong to a club. It's the Japanese club, and being a member is a full time job.

If you can sell that, then you are sure to "always be closing."

Labels: introversion, japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, social studies, tokyo south, yakuza

Going back half a century or so, here's how how I interpret the convoluted and often incoherent evolution of the Mormon Church's missionary program.

Stage I. Mine was one of last cohorts of the legacy system. This was the "Every Young Man Should Serve a Mission" era. (As for the young women, well, if you still hadn't gotten hitched by twenty-one, then sure. But why haven't you gotten hitched?)

In the late 1970s, the church's PR efforts hit Madison Avenue and sociologists started paying serious attention to the church's growth numbers. These studies famously culminated in Rodney Stark's 1984 calculation of a 64 million to 267 million growth in membership over the next century.

Ah, here was "independent" confirmation of the inevitable Mormon hegemony, cementing Mormonism's "fastest growing religion" status (an error that continues to this day). Buoyed by these dubious statistical projections, church leaders convinced themselves they were going to convert the world.

Except the numbers Stark and others were using in their models came from the church itself. The public membership numbers the church publishes each year don't count butts in pews. They're derived from open-ended accounting methods based the accumulation of unexpired membership records.

The truth is way out there.

In other words, if you got baptized and never attend church again, you would still contribute to the membership totals until you reached a hypothetical life expectancy and were deemed statistically dead.

In fact, the church does count how many butts are in the pews every Sunday. Otherwise it'd end up building chapels that sat empty and unused. But like Fox Mulder, they want to believe. And like the Cigarette Smoking Man, they keep the numbers that matter close to the vest.

In any case, wishful thinking eventually ran into the brick wall of reality. To start with, consider the workforce. The more they stressed the hard sell, the more missionaries figured out how to game the system.

Stage II. As these get-big-quick schemes began imploding in missions like Tokyo South, the church decided that not enough young men were serving missions. And it cost too much. The answer was to match mission lengths for men and women at eighteen months.

Mission financing was taken over by the church and quasi-socialized (and then tweaked to preserve the tax incentives) so everybody faced the same up-front costs.

Sounds good in theory. Except a whole lot of twenty-year-olds were more than happy to take a six-month discount on "the two best years." The church was suddenly faced with the challenge of keeping the spiritual sales force intact during its most productive period (the last six months).

That idea was deep-sixed. The cost-sharing measures were preserved.

Stage III. Instead of greasing the skids, maybe it was time to borrow from those Marines Corps ads: "The few, the proud." Raise standards. Toughen the requirements. Emphasize quality over quantity. Missionaries were an elite group, not the hoi polloi.

But once again, too many kids decided that this was good excuse to give the whole ordeal a pass. Especially when dealing with theological cannon fodder, there's strength in numbers. Quantity matters more than quality (because you're never going to have that much quality).

Stage IV. In the meantime, the cruel world was intruding all over the place. Years of cultural diplomacy with China never paid off, delivering a blow to the multi-level marketing strategy I was taught in the MTC. (Seriously, with a few script changes, it could have been turned into any sales pitch.)

The convert-the-world true believers no longer believed quite so much, accepting the stark reality that, in real terms, church membership growth tracks closely to the natural rate. By "natural" I mean the birds and the bees. Mormon boy meets Mormon girl and a bunch of Mormon kids result.

Behind the scenes, the number crunchers at church headquarters were doing (more accurate) butts-in-pews analyses that pointed to a strong correlation between "served a mission" and "shows up to church on Sunday."

That meant maximizing the number of Mormon kids going on missions, which had the best odds of turning them into Mormon adults. It didn't matter if they converted anybody on their mission as long as they converted themselves. Think of it as an institutionalized sunk cost fallacy in action.

It was time to grease the skids again, but with a different set of variables. Knock one year off the start date for men, two years for women. Guys wouldn't have to red-shirt their freshman year and women wouldn't be taking themselves out of the college (BYU) dating market.

Plus, an eighteen-year-old is that much more susceptible to peer group pressure. What are you gonna do straight out of high school? Answer: go on a mission. What joining the military used to be.

This time it looks like they got it right. So far, the new program has been hugely successful. Pay no attention to the slumping conversion rates. Missionaries now spend less time proselytizing and more time trying to be useful. It's turned into the Mormon Peace Corps.

Frankly, that's what the missionary program should have been all along.

Related posts

How it began
The truth is worse
Tokyo South is alive
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Labels: books, ebooks, lds, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south

Accommodating the surge in missionaries brought about by lowering the age requirement, 18 for men (down from 19) and 19 for women (down from 21), the Mormon church has added 58 missions (mostly by dividing existing ones), bringing the total slate to 405.

Hearing that news, a light went on in my head. No—it couldn't be—but it did make sense—so with baited breath I checked the official list. And wouldn't you know it: Tokyo South is back!

Tokyo South was born in 1978, a few months before I arrived in Japan. After a three-decade long roller-coaster ride, it was shuttered in 2007, merged with Tokyo North to create the original entity from which it had sprung. Now it stalks the earth once again.

Tokyo South is the zombie mission. It won't stay dead!

But while the new rules (especially for women) will push up the total missionary workforce numbers, I have to wonder if these levels can be sustained once the current surge washes through the system.

Back in the day, missionary service was considered a Mormon male rite of passage, like the military draft used to be. And then, as I observe in the introduction to Tokyo South, the church shifted to "the few, the proud" mode.

Now it's gone back to casting a wide net. Well, if big numbers are the goal, the only question is how low the common denominator can go. As Tokyo South shows: pretty dang low. And yet, I've since concluded, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

From a purely practical standpoint, the mission should not have become the venue of choice for Personal Growth and Rehabilitation. But we are an imperfect species, and if not now, when? More importantly, the church remains in short supply of what universal conscription supplies the nation in times of crisis (an organized religion, by definition, being constantly in a time of crisis): a common cause and experience that reaches simultaneously across generations.

Still, for every "spring forward," there's a "fall back." Call it the "Daylight Saving Time effect." I won't be surprised if Tokyo South goes back on the chopping block in a few years. That it was axed in the first place shows how tenuous the church's hold has become in Japan.

Related posts

How it began
The evolution
The truth is worse
Tokyo South is dead
The weirdest two years

Labels: lds, religion, tokyo south

The first thing that struck me about the church's lowering of missionary eligibility to 18 for men and 19 for woman (from 19 and 21) is that it's an exact reversal of the "quality not quantity" push from a decade ago (to say nothing of the even earlier 18 month scheme).

This move is expected to kick up the quantities big time. Purely in marketing terms, a "flood the zone approach" is probably the most effective, though I have to wonder where more missionaries would make that big of a difference. What zones need to be flooded?

In places like Japan, the missionary presence has collapsed over the past two decades. Back during the Tokyo South heyday, "flooding the zone" raked in big returns until whole thing burst like Japan's real estate bubble, and long-term activity flattened to single digits.

It could well be that the church is finally getting into China and needs to be able to crank up the numbers quick. Though the church has been on the verge of getting into China for the last forty years.

More likely that Romney's coattails are proving long and wide indeed, and the church plans on riding them well past the election. Though the Hawthorne effect suggests that recruitment (on both sides of the equation) will regress to the mean once the novelty wears off.

A pragmatic and publicly-stated explanation, especially for men, is that it's an effort to rationalize the U.S. missionary system with existing exemptions for non-U.S. institutions that don't accommodate a two-year sabbatical in the middle of college or military service.

For the sake of simplicity, why not just rationalize it for women as well? Perhaps that's a tiny attempt to keep missions from turning into massive gôkon (group dating) outings.

Making missions more amenable to matchmaking will do more for long-term church growth than proselyting, though it's bound to produce the inevitable moral fallout (randy missionaries not waiting to start hooking up). An acceptable operational cost, I suppose.

I definitely foresee a big demographic impact on the BYU matrimonial scene. Mormon sociologists should start collecting data now.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if the church did a study and discovered that 18 year old boys were slightly more pliable and less jerkish than 19 year olds. Because (and I speak from personal experience, not excluding myself) being jerks is one thing 19 year olds excel at.

Labels: lds, tokyo south

And now to the root of my baptism bubble. It's all about (it usually is) statistics (including the lies and the damned lies).

The beginnings in my case trace back to the late 1970s, when sociologists began paying serious attention to the Mormon church's membership growth. These studies culminated most famously in Rodney Stark's 1984 calculation of a 64 million to 267 million growth in membership over the next century.

Even if the church didn't directly, apologists didn't shrink from pointing to these studies and crowing about "independent" confirmation of inevitability of Mormon sectarian hegemony, and trumpeting the Mormonism's "fastest growing religion" status (an error that continues to this day).

There's one big problem with these rosy projections: the numbers Stark and others were using came from the church itself. The "official" membership numbers the church publishes don't count butts in pews. It's a number derived from membership records. It's a derivative.

Remember what happened the last time we treated derivatives like real things?

Every person a membership record has ever been generated for is included.⁽¹⁾ Because there are more "inactive Mormons" not attending church than "active" members, the database administrators have a problem: when to retire an entry. Answer: when you hit 110, you're officially dead.

In other words, Mormons who never attend church are, according to the church's membership database, the healthiest people on the planet.

Add to this "children of record." Although you don't "officially" become a Mormon until you are baptized, records are generated for children under eight. These records can be canceled at the local level, but that supposes somebody being around to remember (or care) to actually do so.

When my father was a membership clerk, he played private detective and went around tracking down these lost souls. That kind of fastidiousness is extremely rare.

Many COB (Church Office Building) watchers are aware of this, and try to invent other statistical proxies for church membership, such as the number of stakes. But outside Utah, stake and ward sizes are anything but a constant, the result being another loosely-derived derivative.

It is a very human problem. All bureaucracies behave like bureaucracies, and all bureaucrats behave like bureaucrats, whether church or state, whether the Boy Scouts or the Communist Party. Once you hint at measuring success using numbers, the Bernie Madoffs come out of the woodwork.

But that's unfair. The ones causing the most damage aren't the Mr. Potters in It's a Wonderful Life chortling as they screw over the little guy, but those convinced they're doing God's work (while screwing over the little guy).

The irony here is that the church knows exactly how many butts there are in the pews on any given Sunday. The ward clerk does a head count (one butt per head). By now, though, the disparity between reality and fantasy has grown so large there's no easy way to paper over the differences.

This "butt number" is one of the best-kept secrets in the world. The CIA could learn a thing or two.

I can imagine that Bernie Madoff never set out to run the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. But when it became apparent that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, he didn't want to disappoint people or appear foolish, not unlike the bozos at Long Term Capital Management, who should have known better.

Madoff was once chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. The board of LTCM was graced by two Nobel laureates. This isn't about being smart enough, it's about knowing when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run. Yep, a Kenny Rogers ballad may be all the wisdom we need.

Alas, even on a good day, very few of us are as smart as a country-western ballad. So the bean counters in the COB don extra-big blinders and gallop onwards, looking forward to the day when the entire world has converted to Mormonism but nobody shows up to church.

---

1. If you have your records "removed," are you counted or not? Dunno. But the record is never actually removed, especially if you're an excommunicated polygamist whack job. The church doesn't want you hopping to another ward and sneaking in through the back door. You can check out of this church anytime you want, but you can never leave.

Related posts

The evolution
Blowing bubbles
The truth is worse
The weirdest two years

Labels: lds, religion, social studies, tokyo south

Burrowing further back into my memories, I find another reason that made my "weirdest two years" so strange.

Shortly after arriving at the MTC, all the new missionaries headed to Taiwan, Japan and South Korea were shown a film (pretty sure it was 16mm, that's how old I am) featuring Spencer W. Kimball. In it he outlined the proselyting strategy in the Far East for the decades to come.

The impression I took away is certainly stronger that my recall of the precise details. The general idea was that the church would pour thousands of missionaries into those countries, baptize zillions, and then an army of Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean missionaries would invade China.

It was world conquering time. Hoorah! (Being a Mormon missionary reminds you why nineteen-year-olds make such good cannon fodder.)

Okay, not in those exact terms, but that's what the Risk board graphics implied. Including both Korea and Japan in the equation was culturally naïve, to say the least. And politically, China—which would be welcoming the church with open arms any day now (thirty years ago)—obviously didn't get the memo.

But as Oddball says in Kelly's Heroes: "Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves?" So thousands of missionaries were sent to Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Missions divided and subdivided like bacteria in a petri dish.

Thinking about it now, it was exactly the same earnest spiel that every multi-level marketing business plan spells out: exponential growth is only a lot of hard work away. So when missions started delivering the big numbers, everybody was primed to believe it, proof that God was on our side.

Nobody wanted to know how. Caught up in the heady good times of any bubble, nobody does (except the cynics with the negative waves). Until the whole thing went pop and plop. And then came the inevitable Emily Litella moment: "Never mind."

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The evolution
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Labels: autobiography, lds, religion, social studies, tokyo south

I previously mentioned leaving the really egregious stuff out of my missionary memoir. Here is a glancing summary.

Aside from nineteen-year-olds being their normal idiot selves, and the mission president taking the New York City teacher's union approach (short of felonies being committed, nobody was getting "fired"), the weirdest stuff was ecclesiastical in nature.

Specially, I'm referring to what I describe as the "small district" concept.

Essentially, we created mission-run "districts" within already established wards where we could dump converts (at month-to-month activity rates in the teens), without them showing up on the ward membership roles and incurring the expected pushback.

This practice was far more widespread than I indicate, and was sanctioned up to the GA level. We created a baptism banking bubble and the equivalent of the SEC and the Federal Reserve enthusiastically signed off on it.

To avoid the tackiness of baptizing people in bathtubs, the mission distributed "portable baptismal fonts" (made out of blue plastic tarps and plywood), despite an actual chapel rarely being more than twenty minutes away by mass-transit.

Again, the point was to rack up the numbers without the locals—who would eventually be shouldering the "fellowshipping" responsibilities—getting in the way.

I met very few idealistic missionaries "bending the rules" with naive but good intentions in mind (what Parker and Stone posit). The ones justifying twisted means were doing so in order to accomplish the perverse ends they were called on to achieve.

Or got so burned out and disillusioned they didn't care, and neither did the mission president (as long as they weren't committing felonies). I was too confused to get disillusioned. What killed me was being an introvert trapped in an extrovert's world.

There is a certain bliss that comes from being completely out of your depth. I had a zone leader who got physically ill from the stress. I went with him to Tokyo Adventist Hospital, where he was diagnosed with ulcers, like an overworked Japanese salaryman.

But all bubbles pop and this one barely lasted half a decade.

When I went back to Japan at the end of the 1980s, baptisms had fallen 90 percent. The proselyting techniques we "pioneered" weren't just "discouraged," they were banned. Several missions and hundreds of units were combined or shut down.

Even as the same scams were popping up elsewhere. It's a worldwide game of Whac-A-Mole. And many missionaries can't stop when they get home, which is why Utah is home to so many multi-level marketing empires.

Labels: autobiography, bomm, religion, tokyo south

Jared Farmer's review of The Book of Mormon Musical is one of those overly-analytical approaches that attempts to say more about a subject than the subject deserves, and so ends up being profound about the wrong things.

What he does get right in the process often ends up being right but in the wrong context. Which is not to say that I don't appreciate the effort.

To start with, Farmer is right that Trey Parker and Matt Stone treat the subject with kid gloves. The biggest reason is that they are mocking what they love, or at least like, which should be obvious from this classic Matt Stone quote: "I hate conservatives, but I really [expletive deleted] hate liberals."

Mormons are the kind of white, middle-class conservatives that are safe to dislike without wasting the emotional effort it takes to actively hate something. Farmer correctly concludes that Mormons are the new "retro-cool" group that anybody can make fun of, and Mormons should be very thankful for that.

But he goes off track when he complains that "Most egregiously, the play mischaracterizes Mormon theology," and then spends the bulk of his review telling us why in detail. Except that in a story like this, Parker and Stone only have to be in the ballpark. Getting the "look and feel" right matters a lot more.

In the mission field, the emphasis is on sealing the deal, not wading through the fine print. In places like Japan, where sectarian distinctions pretty much end at distinguishing between Catholicism (that has historical roots there) and everything else, the fine print evaporates into a colorless, odorless mist.

To be sure, Farmer's discussion of the nexus between Mormon theology and popular culture is more interesting than the rest of the review. I'd like to see him tackle the subject at length, quite apart from the The Book of Mormon Musical. But even there he tends to overreach.

Unlike evangelical missionaries who want to save you from going to hell, LDS missionaries want to help you reach your potential in heaven. Mormon eschatology is radically egalitarian, and very American: everyone gets a second chance, everyone wins. It would make a great, cheesy musical number.

Except even most Mormons wouldn't "get it," and those that did would likely be "offended" (meaning, not really, but as a sign of solidarity). Again, for the dramatic goals of this story, it doesn't matter. Getting the theology wrong in The Book of Mormon Musical is like getting the science wrong in Star Wars.

(Though while we're on the subject of accuracy, the rank of "co-senior" was common on my mission. And hell is exactly what is promised a "failed" missionary in Mormon culture. Such fears are in no way invented.)

I'm always amused by critics who care more about Mormon theology than Mormons do. Since such critics inevitably draw a blogospheric reaction from those Mormons who make a hobby of caring (and deeply), the combustible results may suggest that everybody cares, when the church only reluctantly does (in public).

Mormons don't have to care unless they really want to (in their own free time). Mormonism is surprisingly free-thinking in this respect: you can subscribe to almost any theory about God and the universe you want to if you don't (openly) buck authority. The church cares more about your behavior than your beliefs.

Which is why even conservative Christians are coming to the conclusion that Mormons are "mostly harmless." Because, the goofy theology aside, they behave well. When they grow up, at least.

Here's the real "problem" with the musical: based on everything I've read, heard and seen, Parker and Stone depict Mormon missionaries as far more naïve, idealistic, and well-intentioned than about ninety percent of the missionaries I have actually known (including me).

They don't go light on the theology. They go light on the dumb shenanigans Mormon missionaries and their leaders are capable of, that make the vulgar kids of South Park look urbane by comparison. The last thing the church wants is somebody writing a popular play about what really goes on in Mormon missions.

Which, again, makes The Book of Mormon Musical a godsend to the orthodox church. Look! Squirrels!

As cynical as my own missionary memoir is, I wrote it soon after my mission and left out the really weird stuff, mostly because my still-TBM self couldn't process how psychedelically bizarre the experience truly was. But here's an account of the same thing happening halfway around the world a decade later.

The first 15 minutes directly addresses the subject, and again starting at the 36 minute mark.



Imagine if Parker and Stone wrote a musical about that!

Related posts

The evolution
Blowing bubbles
Pelagius and the fools
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Labels: bomm, criticism, lds, religion, tokyo south, twilight

Introduction

If there is a genre of literature unique to Mormon letters in terms of the church’s social culture (as opposed to being unique, say, in terms of its theology), it is the missionary memoir—the autobiographical account of the two years a young Mormon man (and the occasional woman) spends spreading the message of the church in distant lands.

For a kid from Provo, Utah, that “distant land” may well turn out to be Los Angeles. For a kid from upstate New York, it was Tokyo, Japan. This is certainly not to say that the narratives penned by ministers of other faiths possess less literary merit or a less interesting perspective. The Mormon missionary memoir measures itself only against its own historical standard: always the same, only different.

The typical missionary hails from North America and the suburban middle class, begins his service at the age of nineteen, and sallies forth with a thin comprehension of his religion (but making up for it with zeal to spare). In the end, he’s been there and done that with the rest of his peer group, been subject to the same institutional regimes and regimens, has dealt with the same heroes and jerks.

And yet the inescapable mystery remains—that these identical pressures and deformations, punishments and rewards, produce such wildly different products at the end of the spiritual assembly line.

The majority, to be sure, are spared any true physical hardships or trials of the soul. They carry purse and scrip and wear shoes made for walking. They are weekend warriors in a lay army. The work is the kind that prepares a young mind for the challenges of the post-industrial world: long, dull hours of often purposely pointless effort interrupted by occasional moments of inexplicable wonder and discovery.

These moments can propel them into the shocking embrace of a world completely different from everything they thought they knew. It can shake the complacency out of them, and a good complacency-shaking is what the average teenager needs.

This is not, of course, the stated purpose of the program—the stated purpose being Preaching the Gospel and Saving Souls. Alas, as a purely evangelical enterprise, the missionary program hardly constitutes the most efficient use of the church’s resources. The number of graduates from the Missionary Training Center has more than tripled since I spent my two months there—evidence of enormous success, one would think—except that baptisms per missionary have dropped by half over the same time period (and continue to fall).

And, as I illustrate in the largely autobiographical account that follows, those baptisms have only an abstract statistical relationship to the official membership numbers the church publishes.

Hence the admonition that “every young man” should serve a mission was, for a time, qualified to mean not every young man (and you slackers know who you are).

Similar and understandable objections are raised by professional soldiers when presented with proposals to reintroduce the draft—not to better fight wars, but in the pursuit of high-minded goals of social engineering.

But when it turned out that the slackers knew exactly who they were, and there were a lot of them, the church reversed course once again and declared that the admonition henceforth applied to every young man and woman. And shaved a year or two off the minimum qualifying age to encourage their parents to kick them out of the house and into the arms of their ecclesiastical leaders.

The mission was thus rechristened the church’s retention tool of choice. And why not? We are an imperfect species, and the modern church remains in short supply of what universal conscription supplies a nation in times of crisis (an organized religion, by definition, being constantly in a time of crisis): a common cause and a shared experience that bridges the social fault lines.

All politics is local, Tip O’Neil observed, and that is especially true of religious politics. A geographically concentrated church can only achieve “worldwide” status by uprooting its youth and sending them abroad—as metaphysical pirates, scavengers, and ambassadors of good (and bad) will—so that they will bring home with them a more expansive sense of the world “out there.”

Self-funded and run and staffed by rank amateurs, the missionary program is not sustainable as a proselytizing organization. But compromises must be made, and without the draw of a universal, shared (and occasionally exotic) experience, there soon wouldn’t be anybody left to spend two years even pretending to proselytize.

It is especially important for young men, who are provided by modern society with little in the way of canonized “coming of age” ceremonies. (Which is why I find it difficult to disparage missionary farewells and homecomings, their silly and self-aggrandizing tendencies notwithstanding.)

The exponential expansion of the number of missionaries means there is a lot more pretending going on these days (about what all these missionaries are actually going to accomplish). And, by force of circumstance, also a lot less lying about what teenagers are actually capable of when it comes to recruiting converts.

The rise and fall of the Tokyo South Mission (itself a Buddhist metaphor for the fleeting nature of things) set in motion a reactionary but rational response that, decades after the fact, still outlaws anything resembling “catch sales” street proselyting techniques.

At some point in the final decades of the twentieth century, the church was finally forced to abandon (without ever admitting it) the long-held triumphalist fantasy of becoming something other than an oddball fringe offshoot of Christianity.

This was the dazed and confused end of an era, when a naive teenager from upstate New York could mingle with the saints and sinners (meaning the saints and sinners found among his fellow missionaries) without anybody asking what in the world he was doing there or what he hoped to accomplish.

So I remain grateful for those two years when The Powers That Be shrugged at my real reasons—because I was supposed to, because it was what all my friends at church were doing, because I’d never honestly considered the alternatives, or, for that matter, deeply questioned any aspect of my religious life—and said, “Fine, if that’s what you want to do. Maybe it’ll do you some good.”

Well, it did. But not in the way I expected or the way they intended.

First District: Senzoku

Chapter 1. Lost in the Works

Elder Thomas Thackeray pressed the glowing button. Nothing happened. He stared at the strange Japanese writing and wondered what to do next. He was supposed to buy a 270 yen ticket. But the machine had all his change and he still didn’t have a ticket. So he hit it. Hard.

There he was, an American in an off-the-rack, three-piece suit, beating up on a ticket machine in Shinjuku station. But the people standing in the line behind him seemed to approve.

He was winding up for another try when the machine surrendered with a metallic thunk. The copper and silver coins jangled down into the smooth metal tray.

Thackeray scooped up the coins and shoved them into the adjacent machine, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Elder Patrick shepherding the rest of the missionaries down the staircase to the subway platform.

“Wait!” he shouted. He punched the button. The ticket spit out into his hand. He sprinted to the turnstiles and stumbled down the steps to the platform.

Subway cars waited on each side of the platform, pneumatic doors gaping wide open. Thackeray froze. WHICH ONE?

He ran down the platform, searching frantically for the navy-blue suits and pale Caucasian faces. A bell clanged loudly above his head. The conductors blew their whistles. Red running lights flickered to green. The doors hissed shut.

“WAIT!” He held out his arms as if he could bring the trains to a halt through shear force of will. The couplers pulled tight with a dull thud. The cars rolled away from the platform.

“Wait—” he said again, his voice fading to a taut whisper.

Thackeray paced the platform in a daze. For an hour he watched the subways come and go. But after each arrival and departure, after the crowds dispersed, he was still alone.

Finally he walked back up the stairway to the concourse. “I should have gone with Elder Carpenter,” he muttered to himself. Carpenter had carted the luggage back to the mission home in the mission van. Two new missionaries went with him.

He looked up and stopped. A policeman was standing in his path. “Excuse me,” he said, backing up a step. The policeman frowned and said something. Thackeray shook his head and the policeman repeated himself.

Thackeray concluded he was asking for his passport. He produced it from his suit coat pocket. The policeman snapped open the booklet, peered at Thackeray, then at the photograph in the passport.

“Nyu Yoku desu ne!” The policeman raised an eyebrow and said something Thackeray took as a reference to New York City. He wasn’t from New York City but figured the best tactic was to agree with whatever the cop said.

“Can I help?” said a voice in heavily-accented English.

“I think I’m lost.” Thackeray didn’t know who had spoken to him, but the English was gracious music to his ears. A college student walked up and introduced himself. He and the policeman exchanged a few words.

“Where you going?” the student asked.

“I’m not sure. I think—I think maybe I have something—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope Elder Patrick had given him at the airport. “Will this do?”

The two Japanese men examined the return address on the envelope. The policeman’s eyes lit up. “Ah! Hiro desu.”

He knows the address,” the student explained. “It’s not far from here.”

The policeman sketched a map on the back of the envelope. He traced over the coarsely drawn lines with his pen as he spoke.

“Go through the turnstiles over there,” translated the student, pointing. “And take the right subway. Hiro is the seventh stop. Go up the stairs and left. About a hundred meters down the street.”

Thackeray didn’t stop to think why the subway to Hiro was in a completely different direction than where he’d last seen Elder Patrick. All he knew was that he could get from here to there. The icy desperation in his gut began to melt.

“The policeman will change the ticket,” said the student.

Thackeray turned to thank him but he was already gone, lost in the crowds.

“Come, come,” said the policeman, assuming an impatient, official tone. He approached the ticket taker sitting in the booth between the entry and exit turnstiles and spoke briefly. He turned and snapped his fingers. Thackeray held out the ticket. The ticket taker marked it with a transfer stamp and handed it back.

“Uh, domo arigato.” Thackeray stuck out his hand, then corrected himself and bowed. The officer grinned and nodded in return.

Thackeray pushed through the turnstiles and walked down the stairs to the subway platform.

Hiro was the seventh stop, just as the student had promised. The station name was written in bold romaji letters on backlit signs along the station wall.

Up on the street, the city was dark and quiet. It was past ten at night. Thackeray vaguely remembered eating breakfast in the Missionary Training Center in Provo twenty hours before. But he wasn’t tired. He set off down the sidewalk.

The mission home was an office building, five stories of gray metal and tinted glass that glistened in the rain-streaked darkness like black, polished granite. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Thackeray read aloud. The lettering was etched into the glass above the entranceway. He walked up the short flight of steps to the landing and pulled on the door handle.

It didn’t budge. The door was locked. He pushed. Definitely locked. Had they forgotten about him altogether?

“Hey! Anybody home?”

Thackeray paced back and forth on the narrow landing. He felt stupid, the same way he’d felt his first month in the MTC. Boy, was he glad that was over. Eight weeks memorizing discussions and cramming vocabulary lists. By the halfway point, four groups of Japan-bound missionaries had come in behind him. At least they knew less than he did. By the time he left he was an old sage. Knew everything about the MTC, everything about Japan. Or so he thought.

Now he didn’t know a thing. He was losing IQ points by the minute. He stepped down to the sidewalk and stared up at the obsidian-like glass.

A man strode down the sidewalk. He was wearing a bowler hat and a charcoal gray overcoat. Even more unusual, he was a good two or three inches taller than the missionary. He touched the rim of his hat as he passed.

“Good evening,” he said in a clipped British accent.

“Good ev— Hey, wait!” Thackeray ran down the sidewalk after him.

“What is it?”

“I—I think I’m lost.”

“So where do you want to be?”

“The Tokyo South Mission?” It was as much a plea as a statement.

“South?” The man chuckled. “You definitely are lost. You found the right place on the wrong side of town. These are the offices of the Tokyo North Mission.”

“Tokyo North—”

“Yes. President Atkinson’s children attend my school.” The man asked, slightly puzzled, “How did you get here in the first place?”

Thackeray handed him the envelope.

“Ah, yes. That’s the address. Do you have anything else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there might be something in this envelope.”

“I guess,” said Thackeray. He’d only looked inside the envelope to get traveling money. Dumb and dumber.

The man sorted through the contents: a letter of greeting from the mission president, a handful of proselyting leaflets, and several thousand-yen notes. The man pulled out one of the leaflets and turned it so the light from the street lamp fell on the paper.

“There you go.” He pointed at two telephone numbers and a small map printed on the back of one of the leaflets. “Those are probably the phones at your office. Give them a ring. They should be able to help.” He handed the envelope and leaflet back to the missionary. “Good luck, eh?” he said, waving off. “If you get lost again, find a koban—a police box—and give that slip of paper to an officer.”

“Where’s a phone?”

“There’s a cafe up the street.”

“Thank you!” said Thackeray. The Englishman waved back without turning around.

The cafe was closed. A single bulb burned in an overhead fixture. An old woman, wearing a pleated white smock over a faded kimono, was meticulously sweeping the floor in the warm, yellow light. She looked up with squinted eyes when Thackeray rapped on the colored panes.

She opened the door a crack and peered out.

“Denwa?” said Thackeray. At least he remember the word for telephone.

The cleaning woman slowly opened the door and stepped back into the middle of the room, giving him a wide berth. She pointed at a pay phone in a small nook behind the cash register. There was a single slot on the top of the phone, a large “10” stamped into the chrome. Thackeray dug into his pockets and pulled out several coins, but he had none in a 10 yen denomination.

“Uh, sumimasen? Excuse me?” He held up one of the silver coins and pointed at the phone. The woman took the coin and walked over to the cash register and scooped out ten copper coins. Thackeray nodded and returned to the phone.

The phone at the other end of the line rang once.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Who is this? Thackeray—is that you!? Where are you!?”

“A cafe about a block from the North Mission in Hiro.”

“WHAT!”

“Uh, that was the address on the envelope I got at the airport.”

“THAT’S OLD STATIONERY!” wailed Elder Patrick.

“Oh.”

“You found our address, didn’t you?”

“Well, there was this leaflet in the envelope and—”

The phone clicked and went dead. The dial tone hummed.

“Hello?”

Thackeray pushed another coin into the slot. He dialed the mission home number. Busy. He looked at the leaflet and dialed the second number. The phone rang several times.

“Hello!” wheezed Patrick, having sprinted from the clerk’s office back to the secretary’s office. “Listen, Thackeray Choro, how many ju-en do you have? That’s those ten yen coins.”

“Ju-ens? Oh, eight.”

“Put them all in.”

Thackeray slipped the coins into the slot. The receiver clicked as each coin rattled down through the mechanism.

“Listen,” Patrick went on. “Can you remember how you got to Hiro from Shinjuku?”

“Shinjuku?”

“The place you got lost.”

“Oh, I think so.”

“Go back to Shinjuku and get on the Keio train, outbound. That’s the one on the right going down the stairs from the ticket machines.”

“How do I know when to get off?”

“Just ask someone,” said the exasperated Patrick. “Just ask, Fuchu desu ka? That’s where you want to go. Fuchu.”

“Right.”

“You got that? If you get lost again, call!”

The line went dead. Thackeray hung up the phone. Three coins rattled down into the coin return slot. He picked them up and turned to leave.

“Domo arigato,” he said, bowing. The woman smiled, likely in relief at his imminent departure, and bowed in return.

The Shinjuku-bound subway was more crowded than the one to Hiro. A pack of teenagers wearing copycat James Dean leather jackets milled together at the far end of the car. They were surprisingly unintimidating.

The train jerked forward. Thackeray grabbed a strap. A girl with blue and red hair held onto the strap next to him. Unique, he thought. It was all unique. He was from upstate New York. He’d never been on subway before. He’d never been lost before. He’d always known where he was going. Until now.

The train pulled into a station. Thackeray glanced out the window to check the destination sign, but it flashed by too fast. I missed it! he thought. He leaned over the seats and craned his head to look down the platform. Was this stop five or stop six? It couldn’t be stop seven—could it? The girl with the rainbow hair eyed him curiously. He looked at the open subway doors and back at the girl. He took a deep breath.

“Is this Shinjuku?”

“Chigaimasu.”

What does that mean? The bell clanged. He stepped towards the door.

The girl grabbed his arm. “No! No!”

“The next one?”

She nodded. When the subway arrived in Shinjuku, the girl touched him on the shoulder. “Shinjuku desu,” she said.

“Domo arigato,” said Thackeray. He wanted to say more but didn’t know how.

He found his way back to the concourse, back to where he’d started. He was no longer afraid of the city. In fact, he was enjoying himself and was sorry that the adventure would have to end. He bought a 270 yen ticket and walked down to the Keio line platform. The train arrived several minutes later.

“At least I know my way around Shinjuku Station,” he told himself as he found an open seat.

At the next station a young boy, no older than fourteen, boarded the train and slid into a seat across the aisle from him. The boy wore a dark blue suit that Thackeray recognized as a school uniform. He held a small black leather attaché case on his lap. The salaryman training started early.

The train pulled into a station. Thackeray turned around to see the destination sign. When he turned back, the boy blurted out, “Are you American?”

Thackeray nodded.

“Where are you from?” The boy strained at each word, but his accent was better than the college student’s.

“New York.”

“New York City?” said the boy with wide eyes.

“No.” Thackeray laughed. “Upstate. Uh, the country—” He gestured with his hands trying to mime the word.

“Oh. Inaka,” said the boy.

“Yes. Hai. Inaka desu.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a missionary. Senkyoshi desu.” Thackeray handed him a leaflet.

The boy took it eagerly. “I don’t know Morumon Kyokai,” he said, studying the small map on the leaflet. “You going here?”

“Yes.”

“Lots of Americans here.”

“Yeah. There probably are.”

The train slowed as it approached a station, the sharp hiss and squeal of the air brakes. The boy jumped up and stood by the exit doors. “Can I keep?” he asked, holding up the leaflet.

“Sure.”

The train shuddered to a stop. The doors hissed open.

“Fuchu wa tsugi no tsugi. Next after next.” The boy hopped down onto the platform and scooted away into the night.

Thackeray listened carefully as the train coasted into Fuchu station. “Fuchu de-gozaimasu, Fuchu de-gozaimasu,” the conductor’s voice squawked over the loudspeakers.

Thackeray stood by the door as the boy had. The train stopped. He stepped out into the cold night air. As he walked down the short flight of stairs from the platform, he could see Elder Patrick and another missionary waiting next to the turnstiles. He handed his ticket to the ticket taker and joined them.

“Well, tell me, Thackeray,” said Elder Patrick. “What was it like getting lost in the biggest flippin’ city in the world?”

He shrugged. “Not so bad, I guess.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty station platform. He could still feel where the girl with the rainbow hair had grabbed his arm.

 

Tokyo South will be republished on this blog at a later date. 

Labels: ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, lds, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south, utah

Long live Tokyo South!

I haven't been keeping up on church reorganizations in Japan, so this news comes to me rather late. But an email from a recent Tokyo South RM confirms that the mission is no more. A bit of research turned up this note in the Church News, February 10, 2007:

Portions of the Japan Tokyo North Mission and Japan Tokyo South Mission are being consolidated and will be known as the Japan Tokyo Mission. The newly aligned Japan Tokyo Mission will be concentrated around the greater Tokyo metropolitan area and its 10 stakes.

Essentially, the Tokyo mission structure has returned to the state it was in when I stepped onto Japanese soil thirty years ago, a few months after the creation of the Tokyo South mission out of the Nagoya and Tokyo missions. My first senior companions were from the Nagoya mission.

My correspondent describes the final days of Tokyo South as a mirror image of its opening days (a good thing, by the way). In another strange turn of events, Kobe mission was reopened. I'd kept the Kobe mission alive in The Path of Dreams for purposes of plot. Now it's alive for real.

Sociologically, this is a curious move. It's like closing the Los Angeles mission and opening one up in Bakersfield. An effort, perhaps, to save the church from the missionaries.

Related posts

How it began
The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Labels: BYU, japan, peaks island press, religion, tokyo south