in Tokyo this week

Image via WikipediaI'm in Tokyo this week on business, visiting a customer for a project where I have been the slow, under-delivering sandbagger due mostly to commitments to other projects. I hate letting people down, especially when their expectations are reasonable.

I love visiting Japan. I forget between visits how much I love being here.

As a Christian I find that this orderly, clean, relatively crime-free, almost entirely Christian-free nation gives me pause. Especially given the population density, and the tiny spaces individual Japanese people live in. And the expectations society has of the average individual: achievement, conformity, and self-sacrifice.

Frankly any Christian religious professional who goes on about "individualism" and "consumerism" would do well to visit Japan; Japanese people tend to believe in a corporate or communal identity constituted in a federal head that would put a "man of God" and his "sheep" to shame, and apart from their wedding days and Christmas average Japanese people betray no evidence of cultural Christian influences at all.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying.