Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.” (Acts 5:38-39 NIV)
I fidget with the touch screen at my aisle seat on an airliner bound for Tokyo. There’s plenty of elbow room because no one is seated next to me. My entire row is empty. In fact, over half the seats on this Boeing 777 appear to be vacant. Though light on passengers, the plane feels weighed down with a viscous tension.
It’s March 18th, 2011.
Just one week earlier, on March 11, a series of catastrophic events struck the coast of Tohoku, or Northeastern Japan: a magnitude 9.0 earthquake– the largest in Japan’s recorded history– followed by a devastating tsunami, which reached a maximum height of 132.5 feet and triggered an explosion at a nuclear reactor in the city of Fukushima.
I’m a pastor and the leader of a 10-member mission team from our church in California. My nine teammates are on a different flight that arrives six hours later than I will. We had all booked our flights in January 2011 and had this departure date set two months before disaster struck.
A map pops up on my screen. A curved arrow traces our flight path from Los Angeles to Asia, brushing along the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean. Though our destination is Tokyo, the map indicates that we’ve overshot the world’s most populous city, cutting a wide berth as we round Tohoku, the Northeastern region of Honshu, Japan’s main island. It appears that we’re avoiding a substantial radius around Fukushima, and I assume that it’s due to concerns over radiation.
Throughout this 11-hour flight, my loved ones and I had been praying that if it was God’s will for our team to continue with our plans to go to Japan, we’d arrive safely at Narita Airport, but if this wasn’t God’s will, that our flights would be diverted.
I glance at the map. Our plane has begun a counterclockwise arc, approaching Tokyo from the northwest.
Looks like we’re going to land at Narita.
—–
I arrived in Tokyo on a half-empty plane, one week to the day after a 9.0 earthquake struck the northeastern coast, triggering a massive tsunami and causing damage to a nuclear reactor in Fukushima.
The lines were thin at immigration– there were hardly any international arrivals. I sheepishly approached my immigration officer, who was outwardly calm the way a mousetrap looks calm right before it springs. He took my passport, shuffled through the pages to check for previous entry stamps.
“Have you been to Japan before?” he asked.
“No, this is my first time,” I replied.
Quizzical look. Or maybe it was more bemused? Definitely baffled.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a pastor.”
Maybe he thought “pastor” meant “lunatic.” He didn’t shake his head, but he seemed like he was about to. He stamped my passport and handed it back to me.
I then had to get my bags through customs. Our team was hauling 14 donated laptops for relief workers, along with a case of emergency blankets, and the 10 of us spread these supplies among our luggage. I had two laptops in my suitcase, along with my personal laptop in my backpack.
I was all set to explain to the customs officer why I had so many computers on me, but he didn’t seem to care. He waved me through the line, his eyes vacant, shell-shocked.
Done with immigration and customs, I exited through the frosted glass doors and found myself in the arrivals wing of Narita Airport. I had taken an earlier flight than the rest of my team, so I decided to explore the airport to find out what I could do for the next six hours while waiting for them to arrive. As I stepped onto the second floor, I was met with throngs of people sprawled out in the hallways– they had camped out there for days to catch the next available flights out of the country.
Nerves were frayed. Voices were raised. Tension was thick.
Soon after settling into a vacant seat nestled between anxious wannabe-passengers and piles of duffel bags, a tremendous aftershock roiled the airport. I bolted upright, ready to run for cover, but I was the only one taking action: the others around me remained slumped in their seats, unfazed by yet another aftershock. My eyes met those of a man across the aisle, and he flashed me a weary nod of resignation as if to say, “Get used to it.”
I reluctantly settled back into my seat and decided to watch T.V., though I couldn’t understand a word of it. On-screen, a scene of controlled chaos as hundreds of people lined up for something, their luggage lining long, grey corridors.
It all seemed oddly familiar. How could this be, I thought, if this is my first time in Japan? That’s when it hit me that I was watching a live broadcast from the second floor of the airport, where, just moments earlier, I had waded through a sea of humanity waiting for the next available seats on any flight out of the country.
I bought a phone card to call my wife in Korea and my parents in California to let them all know I had arrived safely. It took me about an hour to figure out how to use the card, but at least it helped pass the time.
Later that afternoon, the arrivals sign updated to show that the Singapore Airlines flight from Los Angeles would be landing soon. My team was on that flight. I gathered my belongings and made my way towards the international arrivals area. While leaning on the rail, preparing to greet my team, I heard an announcement over the P.A. system in familiar English:
“Attention, U.S. citizens. If you have not yet secured tickets to depart from Japan, please meet us on the second floor. We have chartered an aircraft. Reimbursements may be made upon your return to the United States.”
Ironic, I thought. Here I was, waiting eagerly for my teammates to arrive in Tokyo while my country was doing its best to help our citizens leave.
What had we gotten ourselves into?
The first of our nine other team members emerged from the customs gate. Grins of relief as we made eye contact. The remaining eight followed, beaming with excitement, all clad in bright, teal-colored T-shirts with the word “hope” emblazoned on the front and back, in Japanese and English. They brought one for me, too, and I put it on over my shirt.
I don’t know if it was our eye-catching uniforms, our boisterous laughter, the high-fives and hugs, or the fact that ten gaijin were happy to be in Japan at a time such as this, but we got a lot of curious stares.
An NHK news crew was roaming the airport and caught sight of our group. They approached us and asked who we were and what we were doing in Japan. Our two Japanese-speaking members of the team informed them that we were from a church.
Uninterested, the NHK crew moved on.
We gathered our luggage and headed for the train station. The Narita Express was not in service due to the fact that there were hardly any passengers arriving to shuttle from the airport. Instead, we had to take a regular train that stopped at every station along the way. It would be a three-hour ride.
I had never been to Japan before and was expecting to see Tokyo as presented in the movies: a neon-lit, sensory-overloaded wonderland, teeming with humanity, where people crossed intersections in droves and squeezed into tightly-packed, hi-tech trains. Instead, we arrived to an eerie silence and intermittent darkness caused by rolling blackouts that left entire city blocks without power. The trains were nearly empty. It was more like scene from a post-apocalyptic zombie flick than one out of Lost in Translation.
Our plan was to spend one night in Tokyo, deliver the donated laptops to a relief agency based there, and take a bullet train to Kyoto, where we would serve missionaries and Japanese Christians. This had always been part of our original objectives for the trip, and with Kyoto being several hundred miles further away from Fukushima than Tokyo, we decided to spend most of our ten-day trip there, in large part to give our friends and family more peace about us pressing forward with this trip.
While praying for vision for this trip, I got the sense that “We aren’t going to save a single person in Japan. That’s God’s job. We’re just His children, tagging along in the back of the station wagon while our Father goes to work.”
Little did I know how true these words would ring: throughout our ten-day trip, ministry would happen all around us, without us even trying.
It was evident that the Holy Spirit was already at work in Japan, and we were called to simply show up.
2 Comments