Earlier this week, I got an email from one of the assistant scoutmasters for the Ube Boy Scout troop. I had gone to a meeting a few weeks ago and told them I would be interested in attending some of their activities to help where I could. The email invited me to participate in their “inekari.” In Japanese, “inekari” is the word for a rice harvest. Because it was written in quotes just as I have written in here, I figured they must be using it as a euphemism for some type of work day. I forgot I was living in the land where “meal” and “bowl of cooked rice” are the same word.

The scouts met at 9:00 and drove to a rural area about 20 min away. After we gathered our things from the car, we took a short walk up the road and sure enough, there was the rice field. A group of the leaders had arrived early and were already starting to prepare the field for the kids (scouting in Japan, like many other countries, is co-ed). Because this was just a small plot rented by the scout group, they didn’t use the big combines that would be used on industrial plots. Instead, they had a small walk-behind version that was similar in size to a snow blower. This machine would gather up the stalks, which had been planted in rows of clumps and chop them up and tie them in bundles. The kids would then carry the bundles over to the edge of the field where the adults were hanging them on bamboo poles to dry. From what I could tell, they would stay there for a week or two until they were ready to be taken to the machine that ground the shells off. After harvesting most of the field, they gave the kids small sickles and allowed them to finish cutting the remaining five or six rows by hand.

See a video of the rice harvester in action
See a Google satellite image of the actual location

It was interesting to compare this rice harvest to the spiritual harvest here in Japan. At first, the thought of cutting all those plants seemed like a very difficult task. Indeed, rice cultivation is thought to be one of the most difficult types of farming in the world. But with the right technique and a lot of people to do it, it only took about two hours. The spiritual harvest here could be the same.

Pray for wisdom for many people (like Theresa and I) ministering here in Japan who want to strike out in new directions in order to find better ways of “harvesting”. Pray that we would have wisdom and discernment about the most effective ways to connect the message of the gospel to the Japanese culture. Pray also that God would send more people like this to the fields of Japan as well as raise up more Japanese people who share this vision.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Life in Cross-Cultural Ministry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.