A full days in Osaka, Japan. After celebrating Mass with the sisters, Dinh and I  set off on different paths - Dinh to Kyoto to visit a friend and Sister  Christina and I making the rounds of the RA ministries in Minoo, an upper middle class area, and in Osaka City, where a community of RA's serve the large  homeless population there.  The first stop was a brief talk to the Junior and Senior High girls at the Assumption school in Minoo at their student assembly. This is a K-12 school, all girls except for the kindergarten, with a decided minority of Catholics and Christians, reflecting the demographics of Japan (.03% Christian).

We spent part of the morning visiting offices and a few classrooms, including some first graders who stood up and read aloud from the story they were reading in class. This sort of thing is a big-time melt for me. Less warm and fuzzy was the visit with the man Christina calls "Mr. Panasonic," the Chairman of the Board. Panasonic has its world headquarters in Osaka, and Mr. Panasonic brings a hard-nosed business acumen to the operation of the school, which faces the challenge of a dwindling pool of students and formidable competition from other, more well-heeled schools in the Osaka area. Suffice it to say that Mr. Panasonic has ruffled a few feathers, especially among the leaders of the teacher's union.

After a delightful lunch at a tempura restaurant, we took the remarkably clean and quiet subway to Osaka City. (I've never experienced a large city as quiet as this, a sharp contrast to the loud scooter drone of Saigon.) (to be continued)

Entry Two

The missionary work of the sisters takes place in a multi-block section of downtown Osaka City populated by jobless and homeless men.

The almost exclusively male population contributes to the surrealistic feel of the enclave, with down and out men slowly walking the quiet streets or huddled under blankets or sleeping bags in certain designated areas. Those day-time "shelters" are closed at night, forcing the men to find some place to sleep. Many of them find a place outside or the more fortunate in one of the cheap boarding houses in the area. More critical even than shelter is having enough to eat, and the sisters join forces with other religious groups in the area not only to watch out that the men are warm enough in the cold of a winter night in Osaka, but also in soup kitchens that serve hundreds of meals several days a week.

The size and profile of the homeless population is a reflection of hard economic times, where close to half of even recent college graduates are unemployed. In the homeless enclave, certain day jobs, especially in construction, are available by lottery, but preference is given to the increasing number of younger, able-bodied homeless men. That consigns the older men to another government-sponsored job lottery for cleaning the streets - a typically Japanese kind of program. The most moving aspect of the visit was seeing the room full of the cremated remains of the homeless who are honored by a photograph and/or by some memento of their life on the street.

Our Asian adventure comes to a close later today when Dinh and I meet up at Kansai airport for the long ride home.

By Fr. Dennis Gallagher, AA
Regional Superior of the United States Region

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter I

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter II

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter III

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter IV

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter V

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter VI

A Vietnamese Diary: Chapter VII