August 8, 2010

Dear Family,

This week was an all right week. It was super tiring though. Last Monday we ended up just buying food and then trying to visit our most promising investigator. We’ve been trying to get a hold of her several times a week for the last two weeks and finally met her on Saturday. We were praying so hard she’d say she could come to church because she had said that she would if she had time. Unfortunately this week is a Buddhist holiday where the dead revisit earth. So she had to drive to some family member’s tombs yesterday. It was too bad. We had found out that President Baird was coming to our sacrament meeting so we really wanted an investigator there so we didn’t look like bums and so that they could listen to President Baird. So Suzuki fell through but we were still hoping for Sakaguchi would come and she had already said that this last Sunday would work but then when we called to confirm she backed out and said she was busy. It’s so frustrating.

Tuesday we woke up at 6:00 am to get ready to be picked up at 7:00 to go up on Mount Fuji to go to the scout thing. He called at 6:15 and said he’d be there at 6:30. So it started off as a rough day. We drove up to a gas station type place. In Japan at gas stations you just get gas. If you want snacks or low grade food you go to a “conbini” which is Japanese for convenient store because they can’t say the v sound. So it was a conbini we went to. When we got there we met two men in scout uniforms that told us to get into their car. Since we aren’t serving in Eastern Europe we just did what we were told. One guy asked us how long we had been in Japan (in Japanese) and I said “what?” because I couldn’t hear him and he jump to the conclusion that I couldn’t understand the simple Japanese that he spoke so from then on he thought our Japanese was terrible. He said it in English and I answered in Japanese. From then on he wouldn’t talk to us in Japanese so we had to put up with his crappy English. It was so frustrating. Japanese people think that if we ask them to repeat themselves because they don’t speak very loud then we must not understand.

So we went to our little tent thing that we didn’t know we had and it had a bunch of church materials in it and a bunch of Book or Mormons. There were these way weird posters that I don’t think are church approved because they had some weird pictures on them. I’ll send you a picture. We then had the English speaking guy explain what we would be doing. He was very vague. We were kept in the dark on everything so it was quite frustrating. At this point we found out that the two guys we were with are members (that would have been nice to know before hand). Then a scout guy came a told us some things (which were translated into English for us which made it even harder to understand because we just wanted the Japanese).

Then we were told that the Prince of Japan was going to show up for a bit. We started to fix some fallen pictures around the tent and make it look nice. We then realized the two members were gone. We decided that’d we’d go find a bathroom before we had people start to come. We couldn’t find one and I decided I could just hold it for a while. We went back to the tent and the two members asked why we didn’t follow them to go see the prince. They said they told us but we were too busy trying to make the tent look like it wasn’t put together by 4 year olds. It was frustrating. Then kids started to come and the members were teaching a weird lesson about Jesus and his life and then had them pray. It wasn’t what they should have been teaching. Our unique message is the restoration. There were other tents that were teaching the exact same thing as us so we should have been teaching the restoration. We were at the tent all day and it was pretty boring. We went home exhausted.

Some kids came up to us and wanted to take a picture so there were a couple people with cameras and Elder Wilson and I gave our cameras to the guy that we had the previous conversation with and I wasn’t paying attention and they took the pictures and I got my camera back and there wasn’t any new pictures. It was the same with Elder Wilson’s camera. Then another group came and said the same thing. The dude went to take our cameras and then when he said he was taking the picture I looked and his finger wasn’t even close to button. He just held the camera, counted, and then said he took it. I had to go explain to him that you have to push the button. It was super weird. I guess the most technologically advanced country in the world can’t even produce someone over the age of 50 that can use a camera.

Wednesday we tried to visit some people and get some work done. Thursday I was hoping would go a little better. I prayed a lot that Elder Wilson wouldn’t just sleep the whole time in a chair at the back of the tent like he did on Tuesday. We had to give that talk in front of a couple hundred kids, along with two members of the Area Seventy. It was funny because the institute people there had a bunch of different pictures of Jesus and did their same little bit about stuff that was all over the place and then the two Seventy members taught lesson 1. It was very nicely done and they spoke simple plain Japanese. Elder Wilson started to give his little thing on scouting and I had a couple things I was going to say. Then one the Institute Directors who I like a lot (different guy than who I’ve been talking about) told me to just do mine in English and have someone translate. I then had to swallow my pride and have the English speaking institute guy translate my talk for me. It ended up going alright.

After that though we asked the institute director if we could do our own thing and try to talk to people in the ways that we want to while the other guys just handled the stuff in the tent. He said it was a good idea. From then on the thing was great. We talked with several hundred kids. They wanted to take pictures with us and then wanted to shake our hands. We gave them pamphlets and the numbers of all the different missions they were from. We felt like rock stars. They asked us to sign their shirts and their hats. I probably gave out 200 signatures. I still feel weird about signing that kid’s face (just kidding). We ended up getting tons of referrals that I sent in today. It was really good. Overall it was fun and a good experience.

I did get a terrible sunburn on my face that decided to start to peel yesterday when president Baird came to our sacrament meeting along with a different member of the Seventy. It was weird because I sat next to him at a meal after sacrament meeting and it didn’t even click that he was a member of the Seventy. I just talked to him like him was a normal guy. He was super nice and loves missionaries a lot. He was really upbeat and happy like I’m assuming most general authorities are.

So you could actually see Mt. Fuji for a couple hours this last week. It was pretty cool. Also, two week ago I forgot to mention that I beat a legit Japanese person in ping pong. Let’s just say it came down to a tie breaker and it ended with me running around the room with my hands in the air screaming “katta.”

We found a legit mall last week. It’s way cool. Now we know where people go on the weekends. It’s cool try be around tons of people and try to talk to them. Hopefully we can start to find new investigators again. It’s been kind of slow this last week. Is 3D TV as huge in America as it is here? It’s huge here. They have tons of displays at electronic stores and stuff. It’s way cool. I saw a little clip of the latest star wars movie and it was 3d without glasses. I’m not sure if I liked it though. It made it seem like it was some history channel reenactment or something. It seemed more corny than usual. I think it might have been some cool new LCD thing where they have the primary colors and yellow as their liquid crystals. The glasses ones are still sweet. They had some nature scenes in 3D and then a camera that actually took 3D video. It was way cool.

After we ate tacos last week Elder Wilson couldn’t handle the feeling he had in his stomach so he made himself throw up. I think he should now do public service announcements for teenage girls. He said it was a pretty bad experience. I was telling him the names of all the different things he discovered at the back of his throat. Turns out he got his finger back pretty far.

So I can’t do the audio thing today. I bought a cheap microphone and it doesn’t work so I’ll have to bring it back and find a new one. I really want to do it to send home audio things but I decided it would be most useful to speak Japanese into and then be able to hear myself. My biggest hang-up right now is my ability to sound like a Japanese person. I can’t get my intonations right and my pronunciation is a little weird I guess. I think it will be helpful to listen to myself and maybe record a Japanese person reading a scripture and then me trying to imitate it. I’ll try to get it going next week though so I can send something home. Just through email probably.

I looked up the word leadership in my electronic dictionary to use at the scout thing when I was talking to people. I’m glad I ended up doing it in English because I looked up the word later in a different dictionary and turns out it means a person who incites a riot. I guess that is a type of leadership but not quite was I was looking for when talking about how the church has taught me a lot in my life.

Well I found Mr. Miyagi (karate kid dude). A couple of weeks ago we rode past an old guy with an awesome beard who had a giant bottle of Japanese sports drink (it’s called pacari sweat). If you ask me, any drink with the word sweat it in just sounds gross but the people here like it. This old guy was just going to town smashing his hand against a cinder block, just a nice slow pace of whacking it. I rode by last week and saw him punching a brick wall. I can just picture his wife yelling out the window “Are you still hitting that stupid brick. When are you going to give that up? Your glory days are over.” and he just mumbles something about her not understanding him. It was something similar to Dad when he would be writing some sort of debate frontline imagining himself ripping into someone in a 2NC. This guy was imagining himself sinking his wrinkly old fists into someone’s face.

Well this last transfer it turns out two more missionaries that are on the same transfer as me and training, including my MTC companion. All the leadership is young. I think that President Baird doesn’t want new missionaries to be corrupted by the older ones. He is waiting for all the older ones to finish. President Baird’s new goal is 2000 baptisms by the time he leaves. We were the highest mission in Japan last year with 162. There are a lot of older missionaries that say that it’s crazy and impossible but us younger ones totally think its possible and not only that but that it’s going to happen. My trainer got pulled out of being a Zone Leader and is in a regular area and President Baird says that he is being called to perform a miracle of 20 baptisms in that area. On the train ride to his area he found someone that wanted to hear a lesson right then so then took him to the church and gave him lesson one and then committed him to be baptized. Then the next day Elder Insch found another person that already has a baptism date. I have the faith that we will see that many baptisms. The trick is just being obedient and right now our mission is having some trouble with that.

Will you thank grandma and grandpa Hooton and Miller for me. I love their letters. Thank you for your prayers. My Japanese is getting a lot better. I’m very thankful for that. I love you all.

Tyler