There's lots of temples in Japan, but that doesn't mean there's a robust percentage of active members. Most on the books probably inactive. (my mission was southern Japan- Fukuoka)

It's not surprising that many LDS locations in Russia have completely closed down (Ukraine . . . duh . .)

These Japanese cities/towns range in population from about 25,000 to 460,000. What do they have in common? LDS church gave up and closed down the place - closed all wards or branches - couldn't justify trying to maintain any organized LDS group.
Abashiri
Ako
Amagasaki
Ebetsu
Hirakata
Kakogawa
Maizuru
Miki
Nabari
Nemuro
Tanabe
Shingu
Sumoto
Takatsuki

also:
Stakes/districts in Japan discontinued:
3 discontinued in 2021
5 so far in 2022
What's going on? Japanese folks don't want to be LDS any more?

Probably they just overreacted to Covid-19 . . .

I'm sure they're planning a rescue mission.  Is MP Groberg still alive?  He can return in glory to Tokoyo South and read his Ph.D. paper to the Japanese and get them back into the pews.

elderolddog Wrote:
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> Probably they just overreacted to Covid-19 . . .

They did in many places, and they're still paying for it. Their baptisms went down, they abandoned and lost some people, and the church's authoritarian tendencies came out... instead of challenging illegal discrimination in many countries as some churchmen have done, and succeeded, they went and agreed with everything that was done. I can't say more, because it will P.O. some people, but their absolute obedience to secular authority has cost them dear.

I've always felt that Japan is one of those countries and cultures where Mormonism is fundamentally incompatible.

summer Wrote:
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> I've always felt that Japan is one of those
> countries and cultures where Mormonism is
> fundamentally incompatible.

Telling 100+ year olds that drinking tea is bad for their health. Good ol Joe was smarter than them! Lol

Or, trying to sell one religion to a culture that has a very fluid notion of religions, and in which Shinto is woven very deeply into the culture.

messygoop Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> summer Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > I've always felt that Japan is one of those
> > countries and cultures where Mormonism is
> > fundamentally incompatible.
>
> Telling 100+ year olds that drinking tea is bad
> for their health. Good ol Joe was smarter than
> them! Lol

Meh... the church did well enough in the UK for a while, where plenty of old people drink tea to this day.

I'm not convinced it's very healthy. Not only does most tea taste of the plastic/paper tea bag these days, I'm sure it was a contributing factor to my mother's bowel cancer.

The reasons lie elsewhere I think. A church which does not allow you to bring your non-church relatives to a wedding is going to annoy people. Their inflexibility and refusal to listen to local knowledge also sets them back, because they locate chapels in the wrong places.

Summer's comment is not entirely true. That is a western stereotype of Japan. There are substantial numbers of atheists in Japan for example. There is a substantial Christian minority in Japan which rarely accepts "fluidity" between religions and has been in Japan for several centuries. I think they are the best candidates for conversion. Japan has also had a lot of baseball baptisms.

Yes, irreligiosity is growing, and may even be dominating. But polls vary wildly about the prevalence of Buddhism vs. Shinto. Many polls show substantial overlap between the two, i.e. the 2020 Agency for Cultural Affairs research which has 69.7% of Japanese people affiliating with Shinto, and 66.7% affiliating with Buddhism, and states, "Total adherents exceeds 100% because many Japanese people practice both Shinto and Buddhism." So that is still true.

In any poll, Christians never exceed 1.5%. So that small minority represents Mormonism's best hope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Japan

I can’t imagine how mormonism fits into eastern culture. Not that I know much about it. Also, it would be strange listening to mormon church meetings in Japanese; sort of like something beautiful being corrupted by something creepy and alien in some kind of twilight zone.

This is all based on a lazy stereotype I have in my head of Japanese people being independent, sharp-witted, goal oriented and having a dark sense of humour; so I can’t imagine them gossiping, judging and doing mental gymnastics just to get through the day. Then there are the eastern religions which I also really like, especially when comparing them to Christianity. Just my two cents :-)

Japan is a nation of people who don't think religions are mutually exclusive. The vast majority of people are de facto atheists, or more accurately agnostics. If asked, they say they are Buddhists although they celebrate some Shinto rituals--Sumo is steeped in Shinto, coming-of-age ceremonies are Shinto--and some of them also profess Christianity. There is great flexibility in those matters of a sort that Westerner believers would find curious.

Japanese are also highly personal, so they form friendships and will do a lot for their friends. Get baptized? Sure, as a gesture of respect. Do things together on Sunday? No problem. But that doesn't mean a fundamental change in lifestyle.

A lot of the Mormon "success" in the 1960s and 1970s owed much to those cultural predilections. Those traits remain strong in Japan, but patience with demanding religions has diminished. People are too busy and too content at this point to care about the strange couples of young men out on the streets every day.

The USA's image has taken a beating during the past few years. Being part of a jingoistic America-centric church doesn't have quite the cachet that it used to.

Trying to impose 1955 Provo culture on 2022 Japan isn't going to work, but the church has yet to understand that.

I think it’s been mentioned before, but MP Groberg died recently. (March 23, 2022 to be exact.)

Someone posted his funeral service. Was that you? [ETA: Nope, it was Mankosuki!]

It was remarkable. His last 16 years were spent away from his family and two of his four children spoke of him as a profoundly flawed man.

From what I have read and heard, he destroyed the church's reputation in Japan.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2022 05:47AM by Lot's Wife.

https://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon555.htm

I'm guessing the Groberg effect has been like one of those slow acting poisons - by the time you notice anything it's probably too late. No one could speak out because the church is a dictatorship.

Groberg is a classic example of a bureaucracy which is obsessed with hitting targets. Numbers mean nothing. People do. As soon as anyone starts looking at people as groups or types, not individuals, it ends in disaster.

As someone who lives in Japan, walking distance to the Tokyo temple, I'll chime in.

As far as Japanese members, I do remember some converts in the 90's. They were the typical cult targets. Loners, going through a crisis, or just socially awkward. The members in Tokyo love-bombed them, invited them over for dinner, and showered them with praise.

There are some foreigners in Japan who were sent over by their companies. The company has a massive housing budget, and they want their executives to be comfortable, so they put them in huge homes that are not accessible to all but the richest of the rich in Japan.

My apartment, for example, was about 250 sq feet when I first moved to Tokyo. The kitchen was in the hallway between the front door and the bedroom. There was no living room or dining room, no dishwasher, a washer but no dryer, and the bathtub was ½ the size of an American bathtub.

Most foreign execs have at least 2500 square feet, with a living room, dining room, full American style kitchen with a dishwasher, and a laundry room with a washer and dryer. Most Japanese in Tokyo don't have a car. If you do have a car, a parking space can cost upwards of $500. Visiting execs get a car, gas allowance, and free parking in the building.

When Japanese members get invited over for dinner after church to one of these homes, they are blown away. The foreign members, who usually were usually missionaries in Japan, explain that if you follow the gospel, you'll be blessed, too. This was a huge recruiting tool for the LDS church in the 90's.

These days, there are fewer and fewer foreigners in Japan getting the royal treatment. And it has really hurt the recruiting.

As far as Japan being a fertile ground for cult recruiting, it's it and miss. There are some very charismatic cult-types who get into MLMs and have giant networks. Japanese seem to like following someone who tells them what they want to hear.

But when it comes to Mormonism, the LDS church ain't selling what Japanese want. Who wants to go to church on Sunday when you've worked all week? Many Japanese kids go to school on Saturday and have homework on Sunday. Most office workers use Sunday as a day to catch up on sleep.

Japanese LOVE LOVE LOVE to drink. In fact, if you don't drink it's hard to do business. And they don't see anything wrong with drinking. There's no shame in it. Recently, I saw a woman pick up the phone and ask the person on the other end, "Where are you drinking tonight?"

Japanese also don't see anything wrong with premarital sex. Of course, it's not good to be promiscuous, but when people are getting married at 30, they most likely didn't wait for marriage.

Japanese don't see anything wrong with p*rn, either. It's not celebrated, but it's not a career-breaker. There are some famous actresses who got their big break in the adult film industry. There are transvestites on TV. Look up Matsuko Deluxe.

In other words, there aren't many taboos in Japan. We hear that Japan is a shame-based culture, but it's quite different from the shame-based culture in the US. In the US, where Mormonism started, shame comes from personal sin. A boy at BYU visits a "dirty" web site and touches himself? He's not worthy to go to the temple. A girl and her boyfriend go all the way? They'd better get married or nobody is going to want them. They're damaged goods, according to Mormonism.

In Japan, you don't do anything that will bring shame to your family or your company. You don't fail your team. If you don't hit your target at work, you'll hear about it. If the teacher tells your parents you aren't doing your homework, you've brought shame on your parents. Don't embarrass them. Speaking of embarrassment, some Japanese women say they don't care if their husband cheats as long as he doesn't fall in love and he doesn't embarrass her by getting caught. And he'd better not spend money that the kids need for school on "that woman".

So Mormonism ain't selling what Japanese want or need.

Recently, I told my wife, who is Japanese, that she'd be the perfect Mormon wife. She is loyal, faithful, thrifty, supportive, and she wants to have children. She retorted, "I don't need a religion to tell me that." I think I've seen her drink once a year since we met. I don't even think she drank at our wedding reception.

I don't have any hard numbers, but I don't expect the Mormon church to grow any time soon. They're too uptight. They have too many taboos. And who wants to get up on Sunday, give up drinking alcohol and coffee, give up premarital sex, and pay 10% of their income for the privilege of being told they're sinful. F*** that.

T-Bone is largely correct.

There was a period, particularly in the 1970s, when the church was growing rapidly. It was a time when Japanese were fascinated with American culture. For young missionaries it was as good a call as Latin America because you would experience a great culture and get a good number of baptisms.

That ended in the early 1980s due largely to Groberg's antics, which Kikuchi spread throughout much of Japan and even Korea. They had missionaries sprinting around the streets, aggressively accosting mainly young men, and baptizing them in days if not hours. The numbers skyrocketed--in the short term, which was all Groberg and Kikuchi, those ambitious men, cared about.

But by the time they left Japan in 1982 or 1983, the country was on the way to economic preeminence--for a decade people thought Japan had achieved a superior form of capitalism--and had developed a sense of resentment against the US. Mormonism had become a national joke, too, with comedians like Takeshi Beat regularly skewering the church and its members.

You could say that Groberg killed Mormonism in Japan--and he did in some ways--but what really happened was that the moment in which people there were interested in what the church offered reached its end. It has never recovered.

T-Bone, thanks for sharing your fascinating perspective.

Basics

(I know next to Zero about Japanese culture or ethics)

Are the Japanese comfortable with authoritarian decision-making?

What about the integrity of leaders?

How about financial transparency?

Those aren't the reasons the Japanese are not interested in joining Mormonism. They never come close to getting far enough into it to be concerned about leader integrity or financial transparency. Those may be reasons existing members are leaving.

I think LW has the right of it, above. Japanese are no longer enamored of American culture the way they were in the 1960s and 70s, and LDS Inc was riding the wave of American popularity.

I would imagine that the corporate attitude and structure of LDS Inc would have a certain appeal in Japan, but the rest of the theology and culture and the John Wayne swagger would be a huge turnoff.

I wonder how much of the church in Japan is kept alive by American expats working or retired in Japan. I was noodling around on the LDS Meetinghouse Locator map a couple years ago, and saw there was a Norwegian branch in Alsund, Norway. I had visited Alsund - fascinating small city. It burned down in the early 1900s, and was completely rebuilt around 1910, and has one of the largest concentrations of Art Nouveau architecture in the world, that being a popular style at the time.

I digress. I clicked on the branch info, and was surprised that the services were conducted in English. This was not true anywhere else in Norway. I checked. Not that many LDS congregations in Norway!

I checked again earlier this year, and there was no longer a branch in Alsund. My guess, a couple or three English speaking Mormon families were stationed there for some corporate jobs or whatever, and when one family got transferred out, the branch just folded. It did services in English because the foreign TBM backbone of the branch spoke only rudimentary Norwegian, and the few Norwegians in the branch spoke pretty decent English.

At least that is what I think happened. I knew some branches back in the eastern US that were only kept alive by Utah Mormon transplants brought there by jobs.

Edit to add: I missed T-bone's long post. Just read it. Thanks for the details on the cultural mismatch between American Mormons and the Japanese.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2022 05:26PM by Brother Of Jerry.

There are several English language branches and wards in Japan, particularly in Tokyo, and there is not much interaction between them.

This thread is really interesting.
Are any or all of mormon church meetings held in English, or are they spoken in the native language of the country?

Re: popularly of the US, it was similar (in my experience) for American culture to be hugely popular in at least the 80s and 90s and probably in the early 00s in the UK. It definitely helped in my conversion, because I naturally liked the missionaries and our ward was always full of wealthy Americans. It’s also true that mormonism is a prosperity gospel and I can imagine that held some sway with people.

I’m not sure the same thing could be said now in the UK. (I’m guessing I don’t need to explain that). So I wonder if this is an issue in many other countries? And if so, which ones(?)

Japan is one of the least religious countries on the planet.