H4J Forum

Dear Friends,

Just to create a quick attention to you all about these posts in the H4J forum: 
1. Japanese Churches Recommendation
2. Great Resource for Christmas
http://www.heart4japan.net/forum/index.php?board=8.0

You might wish to input in these areas!

Love,
Roseline

Japan = Suicide is a MYTH

There is always a myth about suicide. When people think about Japan and suicide, we thought about "harakiri 腹切り" , the story of "Chrysanthemum and the sword", and the incidents of suicide of some famous people in Japan. The general perception commonly appeared to the general folks and missionaries while respond to the Gospel call to Japan, we tend to relate death with the Japanese.

In fact it had been true that Japan has a high suicide rate. One hundred people kill themselves by their own choices, perhaps perceiving death as the only solution to their circumstance. Yet, if we based our assumptions on what we thought is true/classical novels/legends, then our work will always fall in deception.

In Japan, the reasons to suicide had been classified as follow: Some, due to mistakes that they had made that would eventually lead to shame. Some because of being badly bullied perhaps including physical assult and rape. Some because of financial difficulties involved loan sharks. Most ended their lives because of a huge health burden. (Health burden = "cost for treatment" as well. )

For more detailed graphs and info, http://rose-risk.blogspot.com/2008/11/suicide-rate.html

There are so many things that we could discuss and drill further into. As our initial interest focus on Japan, the conclusions that we could obtain from this graph are:

1. "Japan's culture is uniquely associated to suicide" is a myth. (we will discuss this further in next article, you are welcome to contact me personally in this matter.)
2. "Japan has the highest suicide rate in the world" is a myth.
3. "Japan has the highes suicide rate in Asia" is a myth.
4. "Japanese people is suicidal people while compare to others" is a myth.

There are many reasons that tie to suicide. We should not neglect the very foundation issues of bread and life. Prof. Hedley sounded us that "Poverty is the greatest disease". In a movie production by Akira Kurosawa, Akahige 赤鬚, had said the samething.

Poverty in physical or spiritual, are equally deadly factors!!!

Another point taken home for my dear Heart4Japan people, Japan being NOT the nation with highest suicide rate does not hold you from responding to the Lord about the needs of Gospel and Salvation in this land.

We, as a responder to His heart, should had been responded by having sensed His heartbeat, His strong desire to see His people in this land to be saved!

Nov 7, Prayer Meeting

I understand that to many people, overnight prayer is stressful! The same thing happens here! If you can get a time to fellowship with each other (quality) once a week or twice a month, that will be really great! But I could encourage you to fix a time. So that the other people who are not in your network will perhaps join you as the Spirit leads them to. The best is to have a fix time, fix date, fix address, so that you will become a lighthouse that draw people for this mission/in this network. 

Over here, we are expecting three new people to join us this Friday, and we might have Yu to join us. Please pray for all these people, especially Yu. He had a lot of experience in the field, dealing with a lot of people who had went through ups and downs in life, and witnessed changes of waves in ministry. I am hoping that the other youth workers who joined the Global Summit will join us too, but the notice was just too short and the conference had been just too exhausting. Nevertheless, please, pray for these people! I can't name all of them, but they are great people who are ploughing the ground. Japanese and non-Japanese had dedicated their lives to Japan. 

Let's pray that the research that I done on Hikikomori and the data that I collected on Suicide will help us to understand a little bit more about the phenomenon and getting closer to the truth!

May the SPIRTI moves!