Preaching in the Open Air at Tsuruhashi
[Adventures in Faith: Japan; the late 1980s] After open-air preaching in a popular location called Shinsaibashi, our next open-air preaching destination was Tsuruhashi.
At Shinsaibashi, Tom and I preached in the open air. We preached in a foreign language, in a nation that was foreign to us.
All things considered, Shinsaibashi went pretty well. What was next?
We had heard that there was a big population of Korean people in Japan.
We heard that they were looked down upon by mainstream society. And we heard that they lived in a place called Tsuruhashi.
We wanted to reach out to these people. We decided to preach in Tsuruhashi.
The Japanese word is 鶴橋. It is a combination of two characters:
- 鶴. This is pronounced Tsuru. It means “crane,” like the bird.
- 橋. This is pronounced Bashi. Or in this context, Hashi. It means “bridge.”
So Tsuruhashi means “Crane Bridge.”
When the day arrived, Tom and I met at Umeda Train Station. That was a major station for the Hankyu train company.
The Hankyu train lines were the ones closest to my apartment near Kansai University. And they were the closest to Tom’s apartment in the Kobe area.
So we both rode Hankyu, most of the time.
To my eye, it seemed that Hankyu kept its trains in the best condition. They were a showcase of shiny and gleaming, flawless performance and perfect punctuality.
You could set your clock by the arrival of any Hankyu train at any station.
From the Hankyu train station at Umeda, we walked to the JR train station.
The abbreviation “JR” stands for Japan Railways. Like all things Japanese, JR was punctual and efficient. It just didn’t seem as sparkly as the Hankyu trains.
At the JR train station, we bought tickets, then rode from the north of Osaka by a train ride aboard the Loop Line.
The Loop Line is a train that loops around the heart of the megacity of Osaka. It’s like the Loop Line in Chicago, but a lot bigger.
Conveniently, the train station where we boarded the Loop Line was called Osaka.
Looking from above, Osaka Station was at the 11:00 position of the Loop Line. We boarded the train that went clockwise, when viewed from above.
We rode the Loop until we arrived at Tsuruhashi, which was at the 4:00 position of the loop.
We disembarked, and we were in Tsuruhashi! We had arrived!
We scouted the area, spent some time in prayer, figured out where we’d preach, and began.
We preached and we handed out pamphlets.
Our reception was like it was at Shinsaibashi. A few people accepted out pamphlets. Other people listened a tiny bit.
One man listened to us for a while, accepted a pamphlet, looked it over, and then continued on his way.
Were we the only street preachers in Japan?
We didn’t set out to do anything unusual. But it turns out that what we were doing was indeed rare.
We kept our doings as hidden from our Evangelical friends as we could, lest we draw their condemnation.
We never understood why Evangelicals condemned a ministry of Evangelism that is so thoroughly attested to throughout the Bible.
But occasionally, word leaked out.
Of the few people who found out, most had never heard of anybody doing such a thing, although they knew it was in the Bible.
They were pretty excited for what we were doing.
We were told a rumor that there was one other person in Japan who was preaching in the open air.
They thought he was in the north island of Hokkaido. We never learned if this legend was factual or apocryphal.
After we finished at Tsuruhashi, we didn’t know if we’d made a difference in anybody’s lives.
Maybe we did. Maybe we didn’t.
But again, the victory was in trying. We tried. We tried something that turned out to have been quite unusual.
Whether our preaching and pamphlets were excellent or awful, our modest efforts were more likely to have make a difference in somebody’s life than if we had sat around in our apartments.
RESOURCES
At Wikipedia:
Tsuruhashi (Ikuno-ku)
ADVENTURES IN FAITH
NOTE. Names, dates, and locations may have been changed.
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