Week 20-June 17 - 23, 2013 - Fukuoka Japan Mission

This week we had some interesting activities.  We had a quite preparation day with normal classes Tuesday and Wednesday.  Things are going well with teaching English Class and the Japanese classes we are are taking.  We do a lot of studying these days, because: "Language is one of your most powerful tools" (Missionary Handbook p. 12) and "The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth." (Doctrine and Covenants 93:36). It is a real debilitating to be virtually deaf and dumb in the Japanese Language.

Thursday we went to Yatsushiro and inspect the apartment there. Everything looked good and we didn't even have to buy anything. It was raining this day but here are a few of the photos on the way:

We loved to low hanging clouds touching the mountains.

We have a grand-daughter named Naomi, so we loved this English School.  It seems that a lot of english speaking foreigners make good money teaching English Conversation in Japan.  The church offers this for free, as a community service.

The current stage of the rice fields are always of interest.  We are told that it has be a relatively dry years and rice is not doing as good as it should.

We got to experience our first typhoon here in Japan.  It was going to hit Koushou Island (where we are) Late Friday.  However it finally stalled just off coast and reduced to a moderate raid storm.
 
Here is our favoite grocery store that has an outside area which is normally sun shaded with tarps, but here the tarps are being used to prepare for the storm.

Here is the steam next to our apartment, with increased water flow from the rain caused by typhoon Tembin. We got quite a bit of rain, but as monsoon's go it seems to have been rather minor. Glad for that, but I'm sure we'll see more before the typhoon season is over, in the fall.

Saturday night we had a Missionary activity of taking investigators and new members to see the local soccer team.  It was an impressive stadium, but very few in attendance.  The team name is Roasso.

We had a visit from Kumomon the Kumamoto promotional character and the team mascot.

Sadly they lost 4 to 3, a very high scoring game for soccer.  An unusual event is when the team members had to come before the crowd.  In our section the fans were fairly quite, but when they went to the sections dressed in all red with big banners and flags, who created the most noise in the game, they showed their displeasure with them for losing the game.

Here is a video of the routing section.  They were amazing with how hard they yelled for their team.

That was a very fun night and there was only sprinkles as we walked to our car.

Sunday was as always a great learning experience with 6 hours of complete Japanese immersion.  We hear more and more words as we study and the weeks go by.