Trains, trains and more trains! Our team completed our work leading the children’s programming at the retreat, said farewell to the WONDERFUL children and families we’ve met this week, and boarded the high speed bullet train toward Tokyo, and then another bullet train north toward Sendai. One more local train and we arrived near Shiogama.
Our host, Robert, took us to a fun restaurant where a small train delivered all kinds of foods to our table, and then we headed to Robert and Roberta’s church to stay in their Hope House, a small guest quarters which the church built to host teams of relief workers who came to help after this area was devastated by the March 2011 earthquake/tsunami.
As we traveled by train from Karuizawa to Shiogama today, Robert told us more about the religious/faith landscape in Japan. He said that only about .3 percent of Japan’s 129 million people are Christians. It is the second largest unreached people group in the world.