Elder Landon Paskett's Journeys in Japan: November 28, 2017--try the yakiniku!

To my amazing, beautiful, exquisite, superb mother,

The snow is real. We went to Sendai for splits and it was raining--on the bus back, we saw the rain turn gradually into snow and then into the blizzard that was consuming Yamagata. It actually warmed up the past few days though, so it hasn't been too bad.

Our splits in Sendai were good! I was with Elder Ito, my "grandson." We met one guy who expressed some interest and exchanged LINE with us. That night was Thanksgiving and we were somehow able to compile a Thanksgiving dinner out of random foods in the apartment--instant mashed potatoes, instant stuffing, jello, biscuit mix, and a rotisserie chicken. It was a glorious feast!

S san has been doing well! We are so busy traveling all over the place so we have been teaching him over LINE video chat. It's great because we are able to meet almost every day for a 15-20 minute lesson, which is sooo much better than long lessons with lots of time in between. As he has been learning the commandments, he has accepted so many of them with such strong faith; his only concern is the first of the 10 commandments--to have no other Gods before Heavenly Father. He lives with his Dad who it seems is a pretty active Buddhist, so S san is concerned that he can't just stop being Buddhist. We are trying to help him see how he can keep the good teachings in his life and still participate in the cultural aspects of Buddhism, but just needs to keep Heavenly Father as the only focus of his worship in order to keep that commandment.

To try and be able to help him, I have been studying about the 10 commandments and ancient Israel a little more--it has been way eye-opening to me. What is also interesting is that all of the conference talks on the subject that I have read say "you might not think that idol-worship is a problem in this day...but we make Gods out of our cars, jobs, reputation, etc." or something along those lines. Which I think is great and definitely important, but the problem we have here is literal idol worship, haha. And their butsudan has been part of their family for generations and is very important to them. So that has been an eye-opening experience for me.

We met a man on the street yesterday who is in his last year of college--we had a good normal conversation, but each time we started to talk about our actual message, he would say how he is Buddhist/not interested/doesn't know about religion. He was very friendly though, and willing to talk. I asked him if he had a favorite food--he said he loves meat, and yakiniku. I asked him what he would do if he had a friend who had never eaten yakiniku before--obviously, take him to yakiniku right? But no matter how well you describe it, hey won't really be able to understand what yakiniku is like until they try it for themselves. I told him that our message was exactly the same way--we can try and explain it, but it won't really do it justice. I asked him if he would just be willing to try it out for himself, and then decide whether or not he is interested. At that point he said we had piqued his curiosity a little bit! He accepted a Book of Mormon and agreed to start reading it that night.

On Monday we were invited to family home evening at Yoshimura Family's house with 2 recent converts. They fed us way spicy mabodofu and it was delicious! Brother Yoshimura is orignally from Hawaii so he speaks fluent English as well as Japanese. Elder Watanabe was struggling with the spicy-ness, so Sister Yoshimura offered him some mayo to put over it. Brother Yoshimura turned to me and said, "that's what you call weak-sauce." It was he first time I had heard him speak English and no one else understood it, which made it just sooo funny for some reason. Man I laughed so hard. It was much funnier in person, I promise.

So the meetings and the busy-ness is more than normal, because we have a 5-week transfer and the last week is a mission-wide Christmas conference, so we have to fit into 4 weeks what we usually have 6 weeks to do. We normally just have 1 District Training Meeting every week, but the ZLs have to visit the other districts' DTM once a transfer. So that's why we're doubled up on DTMs. And the splits are normal, but just crammed together since we are short on time. We go on splits with the APs, DLs, and new missionaries, and in Yamagata Zone that means splits with every single Elder companionship haha. Add to that MLC and interviews with the President and basically our transfer is full to the brim. It's great though!

Elder Watanabe is great! He is from Tokyo and goes home at the end of next transfer. We have been getting along great and working hard. It's also nice to be able to speak Japanese all the time!

Thanks for the email! Love you so much!

パスケット長老

Elder Paskett