Moving From Tokyo to Sapporo

Not knowing what to expect, but with a great deal of prayer and hope, Debbie and I made the move to Sapporo city, the largest city north of Tokyo.  We drove north to Hachinohe where we loaded our car onto a ferry bound for Tomakomai, a port city on Hokkaido island.  Trying to save a little money, we stayed in the general passengers section with our new baby girl for the eight hour ferry ride.  One funny thing on the ride was that Marcia started crying either because she was tired or wanted to be fed and would not stop no matter what we tried.  The passengers were beginning to get a little irritated at her crying and some of the crew members were especially frustrated, wondering what they could do with the "gaijin" (foreigners) and their crying baby.  As a result, they quickly decided to give us a private room away from the general deck, if we would just move her out of there so things could quiet down.  Everything calmed down again and we were back to normal.  We never could convince our friends that we didn't try to "pinch" our little baby to make her cry on purpose.  But we did count it a great blessing to have a room to rest in.

    In Sapporo, one of our first challenges was finding a place to live.  We found a small house in Nishioka where we lived for one year as we adjusted to the new city, got to know our co-workers, the Steve Hasbrouck family and the Billy Smith family, and met other church members as well as our new neighbors.

   That first year in Sapporo, a young Japanese Christian man and his Christian fiancee we had met in Tokyo, called to ask me to perform their wedding in Sapporo.  It was actually the first and only wedding I've ever performed as an evangelist.  But I was especially happy about Bro. Kuwabayashi's wedding because he was the son of a Buddhist priest who had become a Christian and wanted to have a Christian wedding.  So I did my best to brush up on my Japanese marriage vocabulary so that things would go smoothly.  We were happy that they were able to establish a home in the Lord.
   We also got to experience our first big snow during the winter in Sapporo, something which was to become normal for us for the next nine years.  The Hasbroucks decided to go on furlough the following year and asked if we could move into their house in Kitano in October of 1981.  We didn't know at the time that this would become the place we would live the longest during our stay in Sapporo.