An interesting thread on retention rates of Japan missionaries closed before I had a chance to comment. In particular, someone noted that Japan will soon be down to 5 or 6 missions, even though at its peak it had 10. Even for an ex-member, something about that makes me sad.

My wife is Japanese, and we lived in Japan for several years. (I met her many years after my mission.) It does seem like the Mormon Church in Japan is dying. And missionaries in Japan do seem to fall away more than others. But it is hard to tell.

Anybody else from the Goro Yamada years in Fukuoka? In the two years I was there, we had six Elders sent home for having sex. In the three years of Arthur Nishimoto as Mission President before that, no one got sent home. The mission went from laid back to strict as hell.

Many Elders I knew left the Church fairly quickly after returning. One, sadly, who was gay took his own life a few years after. One other Elder I knew is a Stake President now. He's good with people, not at all cocky, and in my mind is the ideal Mormon that seems so rare in the Church.

For me, this temple building craze, in Japan and elsewhere, seems crazy. Why a temple in Fukuoka? To me, it just demeans the temple experience. Might as well make every stakehouse a temple.

Agreed, rampant temple building may very well be the death of the Mormon Church. Once the average member worldwide knows exactly what goes on in the temple and begins to experience cog dis of one kind or another from the experience I don't think it can really last.

This is akin to an MLM letting everybody in to the next to highest level-level (i.e., Second Anointing is still another carrot after Temple sealing...). There will be less exclusivity for members (particularly members in the UT/ID/CAN areas) to wield over members in the mission field as temple access becomes more democratized. I think this drives some of Church activity etc. Building more and more temples can't be a good thing in the long run.

Let me ask you this: why is the world "more wicked" today, with all of 140 operating temples (and 28 more under construction or announced) than it was just a few decades ago with only a handfull of operational temples? I was always under the impression that their overwhelming power for good would drive a renaissance of righteousness or some such.

...maybe the Church could buy and re-purpose the Fukishima power plant. It just needs a bit of sprucing up. The patrons could actually come away with that "spiritual glow" they always talk about.......

Im a Japan Okayama alumni... (now Hiroshima mission) And I do believe that Japanese missionaries may fall away a bit more than the average.. I believe the same for certain European missions. But.. its just a generalization,.

One reason I believe is that we had this amazing experience in a culture that is really non religious.. in the sense that we understand religion. But.. the Japanese are very spiritual in a secular way.

How can anyone of at least average intelligence.. live amongst such people and see that something is possibly flawed with the message we were trying to share?

> One reason I believe is that we had this amazing
> experience in a culture that is really non
> religious.. in the sense that we understand
> religion. But.. the Japanese are very spiritual
> in a secular way.
>
> How can anyone of at least average intelligence..
> live amongst such people and see that something is
> possibly flawed with the message we were trying to
> share?

Speaking as someone who lived in Japan as a TBM, I can say that the reasons you outlined were some of the final nails in the coffin for me. I loved my Japanese-speaking ward and made a lot of friends there, but I really liked how non-religious most Japanese people were. The "spiritual secularism" there was like a breath of fresh air, and Mormonism's claim to all the answers just felt more extreme and arrogant to me as time went on.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/17/2012 06:25PM by faboo.

I have yet to go to an Exmo event and not meet a France RM.

Why does the closing of missions "make you sad"?

Sort of off topic but wife and I lived just north of Fukuoka in Wajiro while I was in the US Army serving at a long gone base called Brady Air Base or Hakata. We had our first child born at Itazuki an Air Force Base in Fukuoka. We lived among the Japanese and loved them. At one point we had LDS missionaries at our house to name or bless our child. Wife was active mormon at the time. But that was long ago back in 1960-61.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/17/2012 08:46PM by mckay.

The missionaries here seem really desperate. After my family forwarded my papers along, they showed up at my door for six Saturdays in a row. They've finally stopped coming, but every time the doorbell rings and I'm not expecting a package, I worry it's going to be them. A lot of Japanese people are mistrustful of new religions in general after experiences like the Aum Shinriyo sarin gas attack, and when they find out they're getting bait-and-switched with English lessons I'm not surprised that a lot of people feel disgusted with Mormonism.

How well I remember both these guys! We lived in Okinawa (under the Japan Fukuoka mission) for 5 years and I remember Nishimoto going out and Yamada coming in. I seem to remember that Yamada and wife had emigrated to Canada, and were called from Canada (somewhere in BC, I think) when he was a ward clerk. Everyone was charmed by the fact that he had been a lowly ward clerk. He was fond of shaking up the district, putting all new people into all the various positions, then saying from the pulpit, "Make you wondah which is Reorganized Church!"

During this time they also created a stake on Okinawa, which has since, as I recall, failed. But what I hated about the man was when he allowed a certain Doug D. to function as military district president (like a stake president where there is no stake) to run rampant with his fundamentalist ways, making the women wear long dresses, making the men shave off moustaches and sideburns, changing the questions on the temple recommend, kicking men out of meetings if they wore anything other than a white shirt, not allowing investigators to attend if they were not wearing a white shirt and tie or long dresses, railing against nursing mothers as well as the sin of oral sex, and forbidding nursing at church. Yamada was afraid of him and did nothing about the raft of complaints he got from the members.

Nishimoto had been a dentist or some such in the military, and fancied himself a military man. So he was always white-gloving the missionaries' apartment.

That's very interesting. Goro Yamada was from Calgary, as he often reminded us. He delighted in telling us his story of doing a Nativity scene outdoors at Christmastime in weather that was 30 degrees below zero. His English language skills were not great, as you noted, and his wife could hardly speak English at all. They were not bad people, but I think they were in over their heads.

Yamada considered me a "problem Elder" and almost sent me home. Considering all that went on in our mission--with six missionaries sent home for having sex--that seems funny now. My sin was just discouragement in my letters to the President, and occasionally (once a month or so) feigning sickness to sleep in and take a break to recover. But who knows. Maybe I did cause a lot of problems in the mission.

My last day in the mission was funny too. We had some building missionaries in our area who needed some suits, so I gave them my suits and other clothing (any that had some reasonable life left in them) when I left. I just took home the clothes I was wearing, which were a pair of slacks, a white shirt, and a tie.

When we got to the airport, Yamada told me to put on my suit coat. I told him I didn't have one. He pulled out his white handbook and read me the rule that traveling missionaries need to have on a suit coat. I honestly did not know that rule, and would have worn a suit coat had I known. But I didn't have one.

Yamada then threw a fit and told me I couldn't get on the plane without a suit coat! I'm not sure what he expected me to do. Luckily, someone calmed him down and we all flew up to Tokyo.

After all that, when we landed in Tokyo, there was a message for one of the missionaries telling him to call the mission home. He had apparently asked for and received several thousand dollars from a young woman member as a going-away present. Her parents found out about it, and hit the roof. Here was this missionary who had essentially extorted money, and Yamada was worried about my lack of a suit coat.

Sometimes it seemed like the inmates were running the asylum. I get the idea it was that way for you in Okinawa as well.

I think they were, indeed, in over their heads. Yamada was a sort of Casper-milquetoast, and he probably set about to try to compensate somehow. At any rate, he came along just when we needed help. I have not recovered from that era of having that district president, if only because it gave me insight into how a flaming a$$hole can be appointed to a position, but then leadership has to back him up 100% or risk looking like idiots. The man (the DP) destroyed the military church there, and it never recovered during the rest of the time I was there. To think that a church leader would not allow nursing mothers, or make us stop investigators at the door if they were not wearing white shirts. We also had a lot of Hawaiian and Samoan church members in the military on the island, and he HATED them. He forbade the saying of "Alooooooo-HA!" at the pulpit like all the Hawaiians did when they got up to bear their testimony or to give a talk, so the various Polynesians responded by just dropping out. Instead of trying to mend a fence or two to bring them back, he was fine with their disappearance. I think that he though good riddance to Polynesian rubbish.

I was in Fukuoka under Pincock and McArthur. The Japanese people will always have a place in my heart, but I can easily tell why the church has such a tenuous grip there, the Japanese culture will never be compatible.

Squeebee Wrote:
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> the Japanese culture
> will never be compatible.

I think this statement is key. Mormonism is a very Western religion with Western ideals and practices. It does not work well in countries like Japan or parts of Europe. The Mormon church is NOT respectful of cultural differences. The killing of culture is sad and expecting everyone to act just like the morgbots in Utah is just plain ignorant.

Unfortunately a lot of things in Japan seem to be in decline. The stock market is still 75% below the 1989 high. The national debt is equal to 237% of GDP. Japan's population demographic is skewing much older (adult diapers now outsell diapers for children). A nuclear disaster and six prime ministers in six years. And now Shinzo Abe, the new Prime Minister announced his first priority is to print more money. They may be headed toward Zimbabweland.

Japan's future does look bright right now, which is too bad because I love all things Japanese.

I am not surprised the church in Japan is in decline as well.

Very perceptive. Housing prices never recovered to anywhere near their highs either. My wife's family has certainly struggled over the past two decades, although everyone welcomed a new baby born to her niece a few months ago.

A friend of mine is a medium-level bureaucrat at the Bank of Japan. He added a handwritten message to the Christmas card he sent this year, which he has never done before. He sounded as discouraged as I've ever heard him about his work and the Japanese economy. He says he's optimistic, but he sure didn't sound that way.

I think you're right--that all that has an effect on the Mormon Church in Japan, and contributes to its decline. Given my exit from the Church years ago, why does the contraction of Mormonism in Japan make me feel sad? I don't know. But it does.

Even when the economy was better, Japan was not a stronghold for Mormonism. The culture is incompatible with it.

You're probably right. Among other things, Japan seems to be rough territory for all Christian churches.

I still remember one person I taught as a Japanese missionary. He was intrigued by the Mormon Church focus on the family. He had a wife, and a teenage boy and girl. He did well enough, since he owned his own small business, and he wanted to put more emphasis on his family than his work.

So what did we do? We taught him about Joseph Smith. We asked him to read the Book of Mormon. We quoted verses from the Bible. We talked about commandments and punishments. All with a slant that depends on some familiarity with all the stuff about Christianity that most Americans hear about from birth.

All of that confused him. He tried gamely enough, and he and his family came to church twice. (His wife wore a see-through blouse both times, which excited some comment afterwards but, thankfully, nobody criticized her to her face.) But it didn't work out.

As noted above, my wife is Japanese. She went to a Christian high school, and had to pray and read some Bible verses there. But that was the extent of her exposure. Like most Japanese, her religion is Buddhist, if you can even call it a religion.

But at heart, she and I are much the same. We talk about spirituality all the time. She has the same feelings about family as I do. She feels like there is a higher power in life, and maybe some form of life after death. She looks for meaning in her life.

To some extent, the failure of the Mormon Church to attract many converts comes, I think, from the same basic faults that drove away those of us on this board. That is, the Church has many programs and principles that build people up, that make us better, that strengthen our families and our communities.

But at its heart, the Mormon Church is a sham and a lie. That's such a shame.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/18/2012 08:19PM by johnsmithson.

I had a few companions I wouldn't be surprised to find here, anyone else from the McArthur/Pincock era?

Was assigned to Naha and Oroku, Okinawa; Miyazaki; Sasebo; and Hiroshima (the latter three, of course, up on Kyushu).

We typically worked in small branches (Naha, Okinawa's capital, was the exception, which had a ward). Membership retention was an ongoing problem. Older men (priesthood bait needed to run the local congregations) were hard to snare, meaning that the missionaries frequently ran the branch meetings and supplementally staffed the auxilliary sub-groups. The general meetings were largely attended by women (old and young). The youth members showed up primarily for the social activities, not because they were drawn to Mormonism's frontier-America doctrine. Baptisms were hard to come by; I saw 11 during my mission and I seriously doubt that many of those converts are active today.

We employed a lot of deceptive bait-'n-switch tactics that were taught, approved and encouraged by mission leaders in our door approaches, in our business contacting, in our street and train-station crowd-working and in our free English classes--all designed to lure the Japanese into letting us into their houses. I hated it.

The upside was that Japan is a beautiful country with equally beautiful people. I wish I had spent my stint there as an out-of-the-nest 19- to 21-year-old focusing on absorbing the culture. learning the history and appreciating the uniqueness of Japan instead of wasting such opportunties by peddling silly Mormon propaganda to a nation that really doesn't want it, really doesn't need it and really doesn't relate to it.

Haven't kept in meaningful contact with my former companions, nor they with me. I wouldn't be surprised if, for many of them, their missions were an early phase of life they went through as obedient, youthful soldiers for Zion but who now are far less involved, devout or even faithful at all.

By the way, my most memorable recollection of Fukuoka is not of any Mormon temple (there wasn't one back then, anyway). It was of an angry, captive chimpanzee spitting on gawkers in the city zoo.



Edited 18 time(s). Last edit at 12/18/2012 03:04PM by steve benson.

82-84, Came home, got released, had a cocktail, got laid, and never went back. Loved the people, loved the language and culture....

Apparently you lived my dream. I lacked a spine, however. Lacking a spine is such a terrible handicap.

John Smithson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> An interesting thread on retention rates of Japan
> missionaries closed before I had a chance to
> comment. In particular, someone noted that Japan
> will soon be down to 5 or 6 missions, even though
> at its peak it had 10. Even for an ex-member,
> something about that makes me sad.

Something about that makes you sad? Was it thinking about Missions in general? You specifically mentioned the decline in missions as the issue........h

Good luck on further exiting from MORmONISM and further throwing off such mind warping shackles. The more you recover the better Life gets and being sad about a declining number of LDS missions anywhere..... well that's just signs of lingering pathology.

I have the same kind of sadness about the ward where I grew up. It's gone now, combined out of existence and the building closed. Even the stake I grew up in is gone now.

I doubt if it's lingering pathology. I've been out of the Mormon Church for 25 years. But who knows.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/18/2012 02:42AM by johnsmithson.

At the time Elder Kikuchi and Elder Komatsu were in the seventy. One or the other seemed to visit for many of our mission conferences. They each had drastically different ideas on how missionary work should be done in Japan and it clearly frustrated Pres. Munns. It seemed like he was getting chewed out for doing exactly what the other one told him to do. Even as a TBM missionary at the time, it was obvious that the GAs don't coordinate very much with each other before these talks and were definately not on the same page.

I was in Fukuoka under Yamada. I got there after Nishimoto was gone. I remember some elders telling me how strict Yamada was compared to the prior Prez and they kind of missed those days.

By the end of my mission it was so strict that you could not even eat meals with members. When the church adopted the policy of requiring members to feed the elders a few years later, I just had to laugh. More proof of inspiration.

Of the 10 guys who went out with me, I would bet at least half are inactive or resigned. One former elder I stay in contact with to this day resigned about 5 years ago and some of my companions from those days I know have left.

There may be something to the observation that Japanese RMs don't tend to stay active in TSCC.

marcion Wrote:
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> When the church adopted the policy of requiring members to feed the elders a few years later, I just had to laugh. More proof of inspiration.

A little off topic but follow me. I had a friend serve in Boston. His mission president said that baseball games are strictly forbidden. Even on P-Day. Then that president goes home and gets replaced by, you guessed it, Dale Murphy. President Murphy orchestrates a "Mormon Day at the Park" and requires that all misionaries attend a Red Sox game and sit together on a non-P-Day.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/18/2012 09:38AM by peregrine.

Fukuoka late 80s here. Have been back a few times and the church is definitely shrinking. Less people at church each time I go. I still have friends and people I baptized there who know I'm apostate and gay (yet they are still active). I think most of them are still attending because of the social aspect and because they are in leadership positions and things would fall apart without a couple of them. A couple are definitely still TBMs, which I feel somewhat guilty about since I introduced them to the church.

As for fellow missionaries... I suspect that a few have dropped off. The mission was really clicking (at least for Japan) when I was there and fell apart a couple of years later, it appears. The members have mentioned I was there in the "miracle days" of the mission. Most of the other missionaries that kept in touch with me while I was a TBM dropped out of communication when I came out of the closet, but I'd estimate the retention rate from my mission and that era is well over 60%.

Of four I know of (Kobe - mid 80s) ... Two of us are out of the church, out of Utah and in the case of one former companion, out of the closet while the other two are still in and living in Utah County. So it's a 50% apostate rate here.

I lived in Japan for another four years later on with wife and kids and our youngest was born there. My DW, a Utah native, partially credits that experience coupled with living on an Indian reservation for a while for a job a few years ago with tipping her over the edge onto the exmo side. The Japanese people and culture were great despite their lack of religion and later despite the huge differences she repeatedly observed that American Indians even today are obviously more closely related to Asian cultures than middle eastern even from a layman perspective with the DNA and other evidences just being frosting on the cake.

A friends daughter is now serving a mission in Japan. She wrote me a card a month or so. She said the people were friendly and welcoming. However they didn't want to know anything about the Mormons, they just wanted to learn how to speak English, learn about America.

I live in a rural town near Kichijoji and never see missionaries out here...until I heard that a pair live in the same apartment complex as my friend, and just last weekend I was at a park and ran into to two tall, lanky, blonde missionaries from the US. They were desperately going family to family interrupting their family games and activities. Do they not realize that typical Japanese men only get weekends to spend with their families? No way on earth they'll spend one of those days sitting at church and then give 10% and more time on top of that. Plus give up green tea and beer. Those missionaries looked so out of place and clueless. I want the Mormon church (and well...all other foreign religions) out of Japan.

My niece went on a mission to Thailand and she spent most of her time tracking down "members" who stopped going to church after their baptisms and never came back.