This is a photo I took of my little girl, Lily, then 4 years old, when we lived in Kamakura city Kanagawa prefecture. The photo is on the Shonan coast, near Inamuragasaki. I was taken with black and white film, and developed and printed personally by me. Back in those days I did a lot of B/W photography with my 35 MM Minolta SLR, and had the availability of a darkroom.
Lily Arendt, 4 years old, Kamakura city Kanagawa prefecture, Shonan coast, near Inamuragasaki, 1989.
I would like to thank Darryl Rollins in the USA for sending $20 toward the relief fund. This is the first donation via Paypal from a person who saw this web site.
Darryl’s donation will be part of other donations listed on Help Japan 2011 of which yours truly is the webmaster. I previously had my Paypal button on that site, but was asked to take it off because my Paypal account is not registered with the Leap High 28 NPO. They are hoping to get their own Paypal account.
Charles Begley before van stocked with food and goods for friends in Sendai
On March 26, Charles Begley and I drove to the city of Sendai to bring supplies to a small Christian community of 6 adults and 7 children. It was a 4 hour drive along the Banetsu and Tohoku expressways and was through Fukushima prefecture. As you see from the map, the Tohoku expressway is about 58 kilometers or 36 miles from the two troubled nuclear power-plants in Fukushima.
Route from Niigata to Sendai
Charles’ van was completely filled with supplies, thanks to friends in Niigata and a donation of money from the director of NPO Leap High 28, Yoko Ishikawa, with whom I am working with in building the Help Japan 2011 web site. In all we took approximately 80,000 yen or about $1000 US worth of food and goods. This included 105 kg of rice, bags of white radish (daikon), potatoes, carrots, eggplant, onions, noodles, curry and stew ingredients, can goods, 24 packs of nattou, 2 camping stoves, 35 cans of can fuel for the stoves, 90 liters of kerosene for heating, clothes, blankets, and shoes. Most of these items are now hard to find or buy in Sendai, a city of one million people, the largest city of northeast Japan and the closest to the epicenter of the earthquake on March 11th in the Pacific. Some materials like clothes, shoes and blankets were not immediate needs of my friends in Sendai, but items they would distribute to others in need.
Cars lined up to get gas at the Bandaisan service area on the Banetsu expressway in Fukushima
The Tayama family was very grateful for the food and the means to cook it. They had no vegetables the past two weeks. Until a few days ago, they had no electricity. They still have no running water or gas.
Much unlike my visit to the city of Ojiya in Niigata after the October 2004 earthquake when I saw destruction in any direction I looked, I saw no destruction or damage of anything whatsoever. The roads were not broken as they were in Niigata, and no houses fell. The only sign that something had happened was many convenience stores where closed. That is not to say there was no direct destruction at all from the earthquake. One friend reports his apartment was damaged to the point of becoming unlivable which forced him to move. But the overall direct damage from the earthquake seemed to be minimal. The real destruction was caused by the tsunami along perhaps 500 kilometers of the Pacific coast, up to 10 kilometers inland. This is roughly 5000 square kilometers of devastation!
It was cold and snowy in the mountains of Fukushima, but there was no snow in Sendai and not too cold in my friend’s house even without the heaters on. But it was still daytime with a clear sky. The sun helps warm the houses. The Pacific side of Japan has a much higher percentage of sunny days than the west coast along the Sea of Japan. I’m sure it does get colder at night, and all that donated kerosene will be used for heating.
We came to a point in Sendai about 14 kilometers or 8 miles from the Pacific coast. My friend Charles did not want to purposely drive close enough to see any destruction. He said he saw enough of it on TV.
Happy recipients of goods
Mrs. Tayama with one of the three 30 kilograms of rice donated by friends in Niigata
Charles with the Tayamas
Yours truly struggling to hold the 30 kilogram bag of rice waiting for Charles to figure out how to use the camera.
The children rejoicing over the box of bread products donated by a bakery in Niigata
The Tayama family with some of the supplies they received.
Mrs. Tayama: “I work as a maid in a large hotel in Sendai. I was on the 10th floor in standing in front of the elevator when the earthquake hit. As soon as I pushed the down button to call the elevator, the building started to shake. It shook so bad I couldn’t stand up without falling. I crouched down on the floor and stayed there till the shaking stopped.”
Mr. Tayama: “The night of the earthquake we all slept with our clothes on. Tremors continued through the night. We knew we all may have to evacuate the building at any time. ”
Tomorrow, Saturday March 26th, Charles Begley, the director of Begley Productions and I will travel to the city of Sendai, the largest city in northeast Japan that was affected by the earthquake, to bring supplies to a large family of 4 adults and 7 children. They are sitting in a cold house wearing their winter coats for lack of kerosene for heating.
So far we have acquired,
They also requested we bring can meat, fresh meat, natou, and ingredients to make curry and stew.
It’s unfortunate that we cannot bring more kerosene to this family. That 72 liters may last them only a week. But it will soon be April and warmer weather.
Sixty kilograms of rice is enough for at least two months of meals. By then it may be easier for them to buy rice locally.
The route to Sendai will take us within 57 kilometers of the nuclear power plant in trouble in Fukushima. But this is well outside the danger radius. I’ve heard people within 20 kilometers of the nuclear reactors have been evacuated.
I received the following email from a friend about the situation of the nuclear power-plant in Fukushima.
Dear everyone,
I have an urgent request for prayer. Right now there are people who are giving their all to save our country, its people, and you and your family at the risk of their lives at Fukushima atomic power plant.
Please pray for the success of their work.
The Soldiers of Special chemical troop of Defense army (those who are working at the plant now) are volunteers who are above 55years old, who believe that their responsibility to their families (raising their children) is nearly over. They have volunteered to do this work. There are 50 such volunteers.
This is an excerpt from an article in JIji-tsushin：
Tokyo Electric Company has asked different cooperative firms for help of volunteers who would be a suicide squad to do the technical work inside of atomic power house.
One of the volunteers who has been working at an atomic power plant in West Japan for 40 years volunteered saying he would have only one year till his retirement and his children are grown up now.
His family couldn’t dissuade him. He is quiet but firm in his determination that such a difficult job should be done by veterans like him. His daughter said this is a side of her father that she has never seen before.
The next day, 20 more volunteers left their homes for this mission as if it was a usual morning of going to work.
Working under such conditions at atomic power plant, it is usual to be exposed to radiation. The allowed amount of contamination during such work is limited by the government to 100msv.
But this number was changed from 100msav to 250 msv because those volunteers have requested to lift the limit so that they would have enough time to do their work. So they were prepared to risk high doses of radiation.
The peace that we still enjoy now is due to their sacrifice….
Please everyone, pray!
Please pray that the mission can be completed.
Please pray that the future missions awaiting will be successful.
Pray for the safety of these workers.
Please tell all of your friends, family members, and as many people as possible
Ask them to join us in prayer for this.
Fukushima Daiichi (meaning #1) Nuclear Plant
My brother Mike sent me the following link:
Each photo has a slider in the middle. Move the slider back and forth by putting your mouse pointer in the middle of the center bar and holding down the left mouse button, and you will see the tremendous difference and amount of destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Simply awful! Seeing the difference of before and after is simply heartbreaking. I’ve been to that area frequently back in the mid-1970s. It was one of the most beautiful areas of Japan. Now it’s a wasteland.
The red line shows the route I took back to Niigata. The right arrow points to one of the nuclear powerplants in trouble.
March 16, 2011: While in Kobe I joined a NPO project and worked nearly all my waking hours for two days to setup a new web site, Help Japan 2011, to help raise aid for the earthquake victims. The next day I traveled back to my home in Niigata partly by train but mainly by hitchhiking. I started off at Kanda parking area on the Hokuriku expressway in Shiga prefecture. It was surprisingly cold and snowing the front license plates of the cars where covered with wet snow and unreadable. I brushed off the snow from several license plates to determine how far the driver may be going.
Parts of the Hokuriku expressway run very close to the Sea of Japan. There was no threat of tsunami danger as they rarely occur on this side of Japan. However, on 26 May 1983, 104 people were killed in close to the Sea of Japan in Akita by a tsunami after an earthquake.
You can see from the map that I traveled back to an area closer to possible danger. But I do not believe Niigata will be affected much even if the situation in Fukushima worsens.
God was good to me and I saved thousands of yen getting lifts as far as Uozu city in Toyama Prefecture in 5 cars. It was past dark by that time and so I took trains the rest of the way. To save money, I took local trains. However at Joestsu the trains were stopped due to a plastic sheet that had wrapped itself around a power-line of the train. In order to get home that day, I was forced to take an express train from there for which I was charged an extra 1150 yen express ticket to Nagaoka city. For some reason I wasn’t charged for an express ticket the rest of the way.
The first driver was a young man who listened intently to the Bible stories I shared with him. The second was a father and son who run a Buddhist Temple. The son was dressed in a Buddhist monk’s clothing and had a shaved hear. They asked me to explain who Jesus Christ is and what He means to the world, and of course I was more than glad to do so.
You may wonder why I would talk of matters of faith at such a time of crisis as Japan is in now. Most Japanese are very apathetic to matters of religion, but now they are seeking comfort, and are open to hearing answers from the Bible about their problems. One man even told me to pray for the earthquake victims!
One of the drivers was a young single lady, Kana Chan, who lived in Australia for two years. Thank you Kana Chan for the ride!
The left arrow points to my location and the right one is the location of one of the nuclear power plants in trouble.
Two days ago I was finally able to contact a friend in Sendai, the largest city closest to the epicenter. He said that he and his family are OK and that their apartment building had only minor damage. Dishes have fallen off the shelf and many were broken.
The friend met up with news journalists from America and took them close to the towns of the Rikuzen coast that were destroyed by the tsunami. The towns are completely gone with only rubbish remaining.
Due to concerns of a possible meltdown of the nuclear reactors in neighboring Fukushima, he and his family will move from Sendai to avoid possible radiation contamination.
A family with 7 children who live next door to me moved to Nagoya, far from Fukushima. They had planned to move even before the time of the disaster and it gave them greater motivation to leave quicker than planned. But as I said in a previous post, I do not think nuclear radiation will come to the Niigata area where I live. The prevailing winds blow from the west to the east, and there is a mountain range between us and one of the Fukushima power plants, 180 kilometers away.
A family I know who has a house in Chiba just east of Tokyo has left the country entirely.
Fukushima prefecture is one of the neighboring prefectures of Niigata, where I live. Fukushima is one of my stomping grounds.
The Chinese ideograph of Fukushima literally means, “happy island”. Who is the author of life? Yeshua Hamashiach – AKA Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Who is the author of unhappiness and death – Lucifer, AKA Satan, the hairy one.
The Rikuzen coast was one of the most beautiful areas of Japan to visit. It became a wasteland.
The Tohoku or Northeast area of Japan is about the size of Lake Michigan. The earthquake moved this massive amount of land 2.4 m (8 ft) east into the Pacific! That's what caused the tsunami that killed 19,759 people.
It was an auspicious time for me to come to Osaka after the earthquake. I was contacted by a friend, Josh DeSantis, the chairman of Hiyaku28 NPO, to come to Kobe to set up a new website to raise donations for the earthquake victims. Josh participated in the relief efforts of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Kobe is only a 360 yen train ride from where I was in Osaka. I had just enough money to get to Kobe with 69 yen left in my pocket, the remainder of 5000 yen I started with a week ago. Please see the web site I put up so far: Help Japan 2011
There is no chance for me to have a direct face to face contact with the earthquake victims at this time. Authorities have been telling volunteers not to come! Rescue operations are still underway. Much of the devastated area is still under water. Only professional rescue workers are allowed.
I’ve been calling all my friends, especially the ones that live close to the earthquake epicenter near Sendai, Japan. Nobody I know was hurt during the earthquake in the slightest. Everybody in Northern Japan experienced the shocks of the quake, but nobody was close enough to the coast to be affected by the tsunami.
My family in Niigata reports that they all went outside during the earthquake, but then went back inside when it was over because of the cold. Simon in Misawa in Aomori Prefecture says he was without power for 40 hours. Sam in western Tokyo was also without power, but he has a generator that generated enough power for lights. Paul in Nasu, northern Tochigi prefecture said that he and his family were not at home during the quake. They returned to find many broken dishes on the floor. I tried calling friends in Sendai which is close to the epicenter, but their phones were not working. However, I heard from others that they are all OK.
I lived in Sendai from 1975 – 1977. During that time I used to visit the towns of the Rikuzen area that were destroyed by the tsunami. There is not a single city in the area I haven’t been to.
Saturday, March 11, 2011: The morning after the major earthquake in the Pacific not far from Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku area, I accessed the Internet news and saw more horrific photos of destruction by the tsunami. A friend with whom I stayed with said, “Over 10,000 people were killed!” I began to weep but learned later he got it wrong. So far the number of reported deaths is 1/10 of that number, but it will probably go much higher.
I have been to the city of Sendai many times, and even lived there once from 1976-1978. The year I left there was a major earthquake that destroyed part of the city. I used to visit from time to time the very towns along the Pacific coast that were destroyed by the tsunami.
The purpose of my trip is to search for employment to earn more money. Jobs are now scarce at home, and my previous source of income was terminated. I had considered visiting friends in Yaizu city in Shizuoka Prefecture, but because their house is right on the coast, I didn’t consider it a safe place to be at this time. Osaka was a better option for me. I had only 1500 yen left in my pocket, but I knew it would be enough to get me to Osaka. This is why I headed the opposite direction from the destruction in Tohoku. I am not running from danger. I know another earthquake can happen at any time no matter where I am, and I’m now in Osaka, not far from Kobe which was destroyed in 1995 by a major earthquake.
The trains in Tokyo all stopped immediately after the earthquake, but the next morning they were all running again. I took a 260 yen train ride to Fujigaoka station on the Denentoshi line and walked from there to the Kohoku Parking Area on the Tomei expressway. In just a few minutes a car with 3 men offered me a ride as far as Nagoya.
Part of the Tohoku expressway in Shizuoka Prefecture runs right next to the ocean, and there was a tsunami warning alert out. The police closed that section of the expressway till the alert was lifted. In spite of the alert, vehicles waited in a long line for many kilometers in anticipation that the alert would be lifted. I don’t know how long the first cars waited but we had to wait only 15 some minutes.
In order to keep some of the impatient drivers from speeding after the expressway re-opened, a police car and an expressway maintenance truck led the procession of traffic at a slow pace at first, only 60 kilometers per hour. A few kilometers later they increased the speed to 80. Finally both left at the next exit and the traffic took off! The driver in the car I was in started to cruse at 150 KM an hour and reached up to 180 KM an hour from time to time, 60 KM over the limit. It would have been a hefty fine and his license taken away if he was caught.
From Nagoya a 31 year old man took me to Kyoto. From there it was only a 360 yen train ticket to Osaka.
During times of major catastrophes such as the earthquake, the Japanese become more open to hearing about God and matters of faith. The man listened intently as I shared with him the meaning of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first 3 chapters of the Bible hold the key of understanding all the rest of the Scriptures. Most Japanese have no interest in religion per se, but are highly interested in history. I try to share faith with them from this point of view.
As i write this I am siting in my friend’s apartment in Osaka walking the news about the earthquake on CNN. I know as much as you do about it. Osaka is far from Sendai and nobody here even felt the quake.
The pointer on the left points to where I lived in Niigata City, and the pointer on the left is where the Fukushima nuclear reactors are that were damaged by the earthquake and tsunami.
March 11, 2011: At 2:46 PM local Japan time I was sitting in a MacDonald’s in Sangenjaya, only two train stops from Shibuya, a major commercial center of Tokyo. An earthquake began shaking the building. There are earthquakes in Japan from time to time that are strong enough to be felt without doing any damage, but this one was the strongest I have experienced in my life doing damage right before my eyes! It got stronger and stronger to the point that the women in the MacDonald’s started to scream and a few people ducked under the counters to protect themselves. A large picture window close to where I was sitting was shattered to pieces! Glass fell on the street and on the floor of the MacDonald’s, and one piece even landed on the counter where I had my laptop PC. I grabbed the laptop and the rest of my stuff, and went outside and watched as the police brought brooms and swept the broken glass. A police box is just next to that MacDonald’s.
At first I thought the earthquake was local because only the MacDonald’s seemed to have damage, but I hear the main part was the Northeast of Japan, which meant the entire north half of Honshu felt the earthquake.
It was a good time to meet people and talk with them. It seems people are more willing to take time and stand and talk when something big happens that shakes them up!
Thirty minutes later there was an aftershock and more broken glass fell from the window. The police tried to keep the people away from the building, and the MacDonalds closed for business that day. It’s funny but that was the only business that closed from what I could see. Everybody else continued business as normal.
A few hours later in the evening, I heard for the first time how massive the earthquake was, all of northern Japan and especially the Northeast area, an area I sometimes visit.
As I write this post, I can still feel aftershocks from time to time.
A local company gave me a Pentium 4 class PC with Microsoft Server 2003 on it The hard drive is only 40 gigabytes, but big enough for what I wanted to do with it. I thought to use it to setup my own webserver to host a Japanese language site to promote my employer’s local English teaching and translation services.
I’ve been working with PCs since 1987 but I had no knowledge about setting up web servers. Any time I learn something new, it is always during a hands-on situation, actually doing it, and not just from books or web articles. This post documents what I learned and how I did it.
Using the PC as is would have violated Microsoft’s licensing agreement, so I promptly got rid of MS Server 2003 and installed Ubuntu Server Edition in its place. Ubuntu Server has Apache, PHP, and MySQL — everything I need to set up a WordPress site.
Following the tutorial on http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-setup-a-dedicated-web-server-for-free/ was pretty easy. However using Shorewall for the server firewall didn’t work for me. I added firewall rules using UFW instead. The tutorial was for an earlier version of Ubuntu Linux and the Shorewall configuration blocked SSH access. Specifically, I added the firewall rules to allow port 80 for web access, and port 22 for ssh access, by entering the following commands:
sudo ufw enable sudo ufw allow 80 sudo ufw allow 22
To assign the home webserver to a domain name, I got a free domain from dyndns.com and pointed it to the external IP address of the router. This was easy to do because it shows you the router’s external IP address when you register.
Installing the Ubuntu Linux server was pretty simple thanks to clear instructions on the tutorial page and Ubuntu’s typical user-friendly installation. In addition to what the tutorial had, I also installed PHPMyAdmin which is the configuration program to set up the MySql database for WordPress, and I installed ddclient which keeps my IP address in sync with the domain name I got from dyndns.com.
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin sudo apt-get install ddclient
To view PHP info on the new server, I created info.php in /var/www with the contents:
and opened the file in a browser on the network: http://192.168.1.9/info.php Cool! All sorts of information was displayed!
The part that took the longest was figuring out how to set up the NTT PR-200 NE router for port forwarding. The interface of the router’s control panel is only in Japanese. But I finally figured it out after much trial and error.
NTT PR-200NE router control panel. The circled sections show the configuration I enabled.
The next problem was accessing the webserver. Every time I tried, I would get the NTT router log in screen instead of the web site! After much googling for the answer, I found this from http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/hostmyown.html
“I followed all the steps and I get my router’s login page instead of my home page!”
You are trying to access your website by name from behind your router (from one of your own PCs). With some consumer-grade routers, this does not work because the router automatically assumes any web connection to itself from inside your network is an attempt to log into the router’s configuration interface. It’s a pain, but this fail-safe mechanism does prevent you from locking yourself out of your router’s web interface. So test from outside your own home network or have a friend do that for you. If you can access your home-hosted website from someone else’s computer, then you don’t have a problem. If you want to access your site from a computer behind your router, you’ll have to access it at its static local IP address instead of by name.
This was the key to the problem! In order to view the website on the home web server, I had to access the site using a laptop with WIFI and connect to a wireless network in the neighborhood which is of course outside my own network. This worked! I also learned that I could access the site using Tor which is a proxy network to enable me to access the site from a remote computer. Later I saw the site from a PC outside the property. I learned that the only way I could maintain a WordPress site on the home web server is to access the Dashboard control panel from outside the home area network. Accessing it from within the LAN messes up the WordPress configuration for it will set the WordPress installation to the IP address of the Network rather than the domain name I got from dyndns.com.
In order to improve the server performance, I installed Alternative PHP Cache following a tutorial on http://www.ivankristianto.com/web-development/server/howto-install-alternative-php-cache-apc/1686/
After installation, I restarted the server with the following command:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
and then viewed http://192.168.1.9/info.php and saw that APC was indeed enabled.
The entire experience was a learning one for me. I now understand a bit better how a firewall works. I can now do things that I had only heard of doing before, things such as logging on remotely with ssh from both a command line and using an FTP program and the SFTP protocol using port 22 in order to copy files from one PC to another.
An external link about this subject: How To Host Your Website From Home (A Step By Step Guide)
I advised a friend to use the Mozilla Thunderbird mail archive feature to move all his email from his Inbox so that I could move his WordPress web site to a different server. He did that, but to our dismay, only email from 2010 was archived; all email he received this year had disappeared!
I immediately accessed the mail server via Cpanel and Horde webmail program, and saw all the email of 2011 was still on the server, but with a line through each of them. This meant they were in a deleted state. I immediately highlighted all email, and un-deleted them. However, for some reason though I could see all the email using the webmail program, my friend still could not download them in his Inbox! Every time he clicked on Get Mail in Thunderbird, he got the message “No new mail”. But I knew they were there. IMAP is a service that is supposed to keep the Inbox synchronized with mail on the server so that a person can read the same email on any PC with that IMAP email account setup on it. But because of some glitch that did not allow all of the Inbox to be archived properly, IMAP had marked the mail as already downloaded. My friend wanted all the mail back in the Inbox in the previous format as before for reference sake.
After an hour of searching the Internet for an answer and not finding any, I went back to the mail server and thought maybe I could trick IMAP to allow the mail to be downloaded again by highlighting them all and using the copy mail feature in Horde to copy them all on to themselves. I thought this may restore the IMAP attributes which would allow Thunderbird’s Inbox to synchronize again with the old email on the server. It worked! My friend’s Inbox was restored with all the email he received this year.
The other day I discovered that Linux Mint recently came out with a Debian edition with features that are still lacking in Ubuntu. One of the main features that caught my interest is the ability to install Linux Mint Debian on a PC with multiple hard disk drives. It has been my practice for a few years now to have the /home partition on a second hard disk, and to use the first hard disk for the OS on a 40 gigabyte first partition and the second partition as a backup of the /home directory on the second drive. Ubuntu’s installer still does not recognize more than one hard disk during installation.
Other features of Linux Mint Debian that interested me are said to be:
So far so good! The installation procedure is different than Fedora, but pretty straightforward and easy to follow. The PC didn’t boot after installation, but changing the BIOS settings of the primary boot drive fixed the problem.
I am now working in Debian for the very first time thanks to Linux Mint!
The good thing I’ve seen so far:
I read so far one negative user experience of an upgrade breaking Linux Mint Debian. He couldn’t fix it. Perhaps I’ll have a better experience.
I’ve been using Fedora since Fedora Core 3. So far Fedora has been the only Linux distro that has worked consistently well for me. Ubuntu live CDs have come in handy to fix certain Windows problems, but I never could quite get everything to my liking using a Ubuntu installation on my own PC. Fedora has had it’s own quirks from time to time, but I learned either how to fix them or they ironed out over time. Everything I need to do on a PC, Fedora and its friends have provided both the software and the know how. Will Linux Mint Debian be better overall for me? Will I eventually get sick of it and go back to Fedora? Will Linux Mint Debian eventually break so bad that I won’t be able to fix it? In a few weeks I’ll know for sure!
Walls of snow along road in Japan
February 1, 2011: I started out very well with the first ride on my trip to Noda city in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo. The purpose of this trip was to attend a fellowship meeting at 7 PM. It was good weather and I left home at a very good time, just after 10 AM. Tokyo is 300 kilometers away but it usually takes me less than 6 hours, only half a day. I found that weekends are best for hitchhiking, but today was a weekday, a Tuesday. I finally arrived in Noda at 8:25 PM!
After waiting only a minute, the first driver took me all the way to Sanjo city, the entrance of the Hokuriku Expressway. He kindly went out of his way to do so. From there I took a 180 bus ride to Sakae parking area on the Hokuriku. The preponderance of the traffic was local. Hardly anybody was going to the Kanto plain.
After waiting at Sakae PA in Sanjo for over 90 minutes, I accepted a ride from a young single couple to Ozumi parking area. This is further down the road but just past the Nagaoka junction going towards Joetsu city which is not the direction I needed to go. However I knew I could walk to the other side of the expressway and catch traffic that could go toward Kanto.
I found my situation at Ozumi even worse than it was in Sakae! There was much snow and ice in the parking area, and most of the traffic was going back in the direction I just came from. After waiting another hour and a half, I accepted a ride from a lady going to Nagaoka city. Normally I would not want to get off the expressway in Nagaoka, but the situation was so that my only hope was to hitchhike from Nagaoka down National Highway route 17 and get back on the expressway — this time the Kan’etsu — to catch a car to Kanto.
The lady took me only as far as National Highway route 8, too far to walk to route 17. Snow was pilled up so high along the road I had very little room to stand between it and passing cars. A police car approached me and the officer said in very good English, “Don’t enter this road! There are many truck accidents here!” Oh my, things could hardly be worse! It was already past 2PM and I have yet 250 kilometers to go. I couldn’t walk further down the road without disobeying the police officer. The only option was to stand at a rather poor intersection with more room to stand hoping to catch a car. Cars whizzed past me. Drivers coming to route 8 from the road perpendicular to it were only 2 or 3 every few minutes.
Finally, after waiting there for about 20 minutes, an older man in a pickup truck took pity on me and offered me a ride. He went out of his way to take me to route 17.
At route 17 I caught the next ride within a minute! The driver offered to take me to the Yamaya Parking area on the Kan’etsu. I had never been to Yamaya before because it is a rather small parking area with few cars. It took a while to find it. Snow in that area is one of the deepest in all of Japan. Walls of snow higher than our heads lined the roads everywhere making navigation harder than it would have been without them.
The driver, being a local man, was able to figure out Yamaya’s location and took me to the back entrance. As soon as I got there, I saw a man and told him I needed to go to Kanto. He looked at me warily and asked me who I was, and if I didn’t have anything dangerous in my luggage. He was a Yamazaki bread truck driver with a load of bread going all the way to Tokorozawa in Saitama and offered me a ride to Higashi Tokorozaka station. But because of company rules, he couldn’t go any faster than 80 kilometers an hour which meant at least 40 minutes longer than most cars would take me. But in this case, it was a “bird in the hand” situation and I was happy just to get to Noda. It turned out being an hour and 25 minutes late wasn’t such a big problem after all, for the meeting continued to 10 PM, and I had a good time and made new friends. The trip was worth the effort.
My return trip was the exact opposite of the previous day. It only took one car with hardly any waiting to get all the way back home. A 25-year-old man named Takuma who sells wasabi offered me a ride to Niigata station but then decided to take me a bit further to my area.
The first hour of our conversation was just asking him questions about his life and background. It didn’t seem to be leading to anything deeper. I feel I owe to every driver who picks me up a message of Salvation in knowing the Author of life, Jesus Christ, but because Takuma wasn’t asking me anything about what I do, I didn’t see any openings to the subject of Biblical/spiritual things. Finally, I got the inspiration to ask him if he knew the story of the Garden of Eden. This worked and lead to deeper talk! Most Japanese are open to hearing bible stories, and Genesis chapters 1-3 is a good place to start because it explains so many things about why the world is as it is today.