Eric's Mission, Tokyo, Japan

This week was way crazy!  We are meeting with a ton of Chinese students and helping them learn English and Japanese for the various tests and stuff that they have for school.  Unfortunately, they are not so interested in learning about the gospel at this time. T... keeps telling me that it is only a matter of time and when they finish their tests they'll be more interested. Elder Maki is doing a wonderful job teaching, even when we teach almost everyone in English.  His English is way better than my Japanese.  It's not fair, we need to find more Japanese people to teach! Tell Andrew that side bags aren't that bad.  But no one in Japan wears them but us.  Also, we have to wear helmets when we ride our bikes, and no one, I mean no one, wears helmets here.  For English class we usually teach in just English and hope they pick it up by listening.  Probably not the best way to teach English but we are teaching it for free, and d...

  Hello everyone! Once again this is Elder Stevens reporting live from Japan.  And I have breaking news...I have been asked to be senior companion to my first Japanese companion and I am also the district leader of the Togane district!  My new companion Elder Maki, is from a place near Okinawa and looks pretty gaijin.  His English is pretty good so whenever I have no idea what is happening he switches back to English. But I need my Japanese to improve a lot so I try to have him speak Japanese all the time.  Unfortunately, he wants to get better at English too so he speaks in English a lot.  There are 8 missionaries in the Togane district, 4 Elders and 4 Sisters and they are all super amazing!  The scary thing is that I am older than half of the people in the district and I'm not even that old!  I've been out for less than a year and I am one of the older missionaries in the mission.  Wow!  Also i...

Hello Everyone, This is another report from yours truly Elder Stevens. Japan hasn't changed much this week except that all of the cherry blossoms or Sakura have died. :(  It was very sad but I am glad that I was able to see them. How have all of your weeks been? We officially got transfer calls this morning and guess what, Elder Cannon is leaving.  I will miss playing music with him. We met with another Chinese person yesterday named W... He is super nice and is getting baptized on the 11th of May. He is really good friends with K... and T...so I think this is going to go by very smoothly. Fingers Crossed. We set the baptismal date with him yesterday when we were teaching him with K... I think that this helped K... a lot because he asked us what would happen if he couldn't get baptized because of his parents. I think that it probably put baptism in the front of his mind again. Yes! We haven't had any baptisms yet this month or since T...

Dear Family, Well it has been another wonderful sunny day in Japan today.  For the past few weeks the weather has been getting better and better so now I don't have to wear a jacket or anything.  The only downside of all the sun is that I'm getting a white shirt collar tan.  It looks pretty weird. lol  I'm sure the fam will be happy to know that I have started a diet because I want to start getting in shape.  I'm not very happy about it but I've sworn off carbs, (mostly bread from the amazing bread shop in our apartment) and sugar.  That means I can't eat rice, spaghetti, udon, or yaki soba!  those are like the missionary staple foods in Japan.  But I bought a lot of vegetables  and tofu so whenever my companion eats food on rice or any other of the forbidden foods I just put the food on Tofu.  It's actually not that bad.  You'll be very proud of me to know that all I had for dinner last night was vegatables ...

Dear Family, So guess what I just did, I spent over $80 on buying emergency water for the future earthquake that may strike us.  The worst part is, that it was only 20 L of water.  You can buy 20 L of milk for $20 so you know it's sad when water costs more money than milk.  Sorry about my rant right there but I hate to spend too much money, especially in Japan when you can't really haggle the price.  And I just spent the last of my missionary funds so I have no money for the rest of the month.  Which is really bad cuz we have to take a train to Narita tomorrow for a big meeting and it costs like $10 to get there. I may have to take money out of personal funds to make it through the month... Now to the funny part.  Remember how I was just complaining about how much money it was to buy 20 L of water, well it turns out that that wasn't really water.  It was vodka.  So now the alcohol is sitting on the kitchen table o...

Ok so you know our friend A..., he bought me a $100 kendo sword the other day and gave it to me as a present.  Isn't that crazy! And then I felt really bad because the next day he came up to me and said that he was super poor.  But don't worry I bought him $100 worth of groceries and left them on his door so hopefully he will have food.  The kendo sword is super sweet and now nobody can mess with me because I am protected. lol So I don't know if all of you have heard the update on K..., but his parents said that he couldn't be baptized.  It's super sad and now he is really discouraged and sad.  He has really changed the past few days after the phone call and I hope that he's doing ok.  We are meeting with him later this week so hopefully we can help him out. In other news, T... is doing super well.  He helps us teach so many Chinese people that we are finding everyday and he does awesome.  He considers them all his marsh...

  This week was pretty fancy.  We had transfers and I am now working with a guy named elder Griffiths.  He's quiet but whenever he says something it's pretty deep.  Good for lessons.  K... doing very well. He has his baptismal interview on Wednesday and  he should do just fine.  It's pretty awesome and he is even teaching me how to free style dance.  I'm improving but I'm still not very good yet.  He's just such a great guy and we hang out with him every day for like 8 hrs.  He even does dendo stuff with us.  He considers himself the key to the progression of the Chinese branch that we are trying to make here.  He's just a fun guy to be with.  Well yesterday I asked him why he wanted to be baptized and this is what he said, tell me if you think this is a good reason to be baptized, "I'm curious.  In China we never had anything like this and I'm like a kid who wants to learn more about thi...