Two Mormons
On Tuesday I met two Mormons. I was on my way to Japanese class in Toyooka - an hour’s journey from my town. I have two choices of train to get there. One arrives 90 minutes before class the other two minutes after. Toyooka is, by rural Japan standards, a good town to kill time in. It has two shopping centres, a Uniqlo, a variety of tasty restaurants, and McDonalds and Mister Donut.
I had paid my phone and internet bills (￥12,600/60 quid), window shopped in Uniqlo, bought a folder in the ￥100 shop and was going to eat dinner at an Italian restaurant when I met some foreigners. Seeing anyone other than Japanese pensioners or school kids on the country roads is a rarity so when I see a foreigner (someone who doesn’t look “Japanese”) I usually talk to them.
These two guys were from Australia and, I think, America. They had been in Japan for about 6 months and would be here for a further year and a half traveling around, working in different locations.
They asked if I was religious, I told them I wasn’t. They said that was cool. They told me they were Mormons. I said that was cool.
I have to admit that I am not an expert on the Mormon religion. Until recently I had often confused them with those guys from that Harrison Ford movie and Kingpin, but as they didn’t appear to be carriage driving techno-phobes I could confidently reason that they weren’t Amish (also cool).
They said there were a number of Mormon places in Japan and they would be putting in work at most of them during their two years. They were off to teach English and I was going to study Japanese so we said our goodbyes. They told me their names but I can only remember the first part of each, which was Elder. The two Elders were good people.
