austraLasia #3147 Salesian
Mission Day - Japan and elsewhere
ROME: 21 October 2012--
Saturday
evening, 20 October, was a special occasion for the Japanese
Province
and the Salesian House at Chofu: the celebration of Salesian
Mission
Day for the Province with some 150 people, most
of them young people.
An added bonus for them was the presence of Fr Vaclav Klement
who, in
rather typical fashion had come from Bueons Aires via Rome,
with a
handful of hours between flights... added to, courtesy of
Alitalia (the
handful of hours, that is)!
Young members of the DBVG, the Don Bosco Volunteer Group,
swelled the
ranks. They had spent August in Tetere, Solomon Islands, by
now a
favourite destination for the DBVG. For the Chofu occasion
they had
prepared an insightful and entertaining presentation of their
volunteer
work. The DBVG is particularly supported by the Salesian
Cooperators,
who later prepared the usual sumptuous repast for everyone
attending.
The evening included a paraliturgy of the Word during which Fr
Klement
in his role as General Councillor for the Missions managed a
concise
message in three terms: 'Thanks', 'One Big Happy Family', and
'Prayer'. Fr Klement will be preaching a retreat to the
Salesian
Family before returning to Rome.
The celebration of Salesian Mission Sunday comes at an
interesting
juncture in Japan's history, and not only Salesian History as
represented by the list of prominent names of missionaries in
the pic
above. An article in the Japanese Times today (Sunday October
21) puts
its finger on the quandary Japan now finds itself in. The
article is
headed 'Only
immigrants can save Japan!'. The phrase is not Michael
Hoffman's, author of the article, but comes from the lips of
the
retired Tokyo Immigration Bureau head, Hidenori Sakanaka, who
is
currently executive director of the Japan Immigration Policy
Institute,
a private think-tank he founded in 2007.
Sakanaka focuses on sheer demographics. Japan's population
peaked at
128 million in 2004 and has been in rapid decline ever since,
so rapid
that "no nation, barring war or plague, has ever shrunk at
such a pace
and as for ageing, there are no historical precedents of any
kind. The
nation needs a fountain of youth". Sakanaka's solution is
music to
Salesian ears - 10 million immigrants between now and 2050.
But of
course this has to face up to a Japanese history, and many
would say a
present, where "Japn's foreign-born population... at 1'7 per
cent
compares with 10 percent in other developing nations. Refugees
have
been cold-shouldered to an extent widely regarded as
disgraceful".
In the late 1980s and 90s Japan actually did experiment with
Sakanaka's
thinking, welcoming 300,000 Japanese Brazilians in the
country's
first-ever mass-immigration program. We Salesians know that
this meant
a completely new and fruitful direction for mission in the
country and
we welcomed, amongst these new immigrants, a number of
Japanese-Brazilian Salesians to help look after them,
especially since
many had been baptized in Brazil. Now in 2013 a Salesian not
of
Japanese ancestry but from Brazil, is joining that team.
There are other reasons why the Salesian work with this group
in
particular is a demanding one, but a particularly Salesian
one. As
Hoffman point sout in his article, "Officials who had had
assumed the
Brazilians' Japanese ancestry would smooth the transition were
soon
disillusioned. The Brazilian culture of exuberance clashed
with the
native culture of restraint. The language barrier proved hard
to
breach. Kids with minimal Japanese dropped out of school; some
turned
to crime.
A salsa boom in Japan became a symbol of the cultural
cross-fertilization some had hoped would come more naturally,
but by
2009 the experiment was over. The government offered to pay
migrants'
air fares back to Brazil — if they agreed in writing not to
try to
return to Japan to work".
All of which makes the celebration of Salesian Mission Day,
the active
involvement of young Japanese, many not Christians but active
sympathizers, an especially important and poignant one.
