Passion

While wearing my black Passion shirt yesterday, my friend Laura and I were stopped by some Christian "missionaries" here in Tokyo. We had seen some American girls earlier in the day, who had asked us if we wanted to practice our English. We told them our English was fine and continued walking. They had been nice enough and had been holding signs that said, in Japanese, free English practice.

I figured that it was probably a decent enough way to meet people and learn some Japanese as well and that's why these girls were holding these signs.

Fast forward an hour or so and we walk past another group of kids holding these same signs. We walk past them completely and then one of them calls out "Are you Christians?". So then we're sort of reeled into a conversation with these kids. I reply automatically that "Yes we are," because it saves you so much time and effort talking with people like that to just agree with whatever they say.

She had guessed we were Christian because she saw my Passion shirt and once she read the back "This is our salvation" she was sure we were.

She then proceeded to ask if I had heard of the Passion movement, to which I just said I had to speed things along. Laura didn't realize to just agree with everything, and said no. So we got to hear about this big organization of Christians in the US, etc.

We then learned that this girl had been in Japan for a year helping with the Christian churches in Tokyo. She described her work as "Hanging out, talking to people about Jesus." She was maybe 18 or so. There were two other kids with her that must have just been on some type of missionary trip, because they were staying in hostels and looked like they were about 13.

We finally snaked our way out of the conversation without too much effort and walked away. It was only afterwards that I remembered the best way to get out of talking to Christians is to tell them you're Catholic.

I had tried to explain to the girl that Passion was a band I was friends with. But didn't want to try to explain to her that the name Passion and the line "This is our salvation" didn't have anything to do with Jesus.

In the process of all of this, we got distracted and walked the wrong way and nearly had to walk past them again to get to the subway, but were able to find an alternate route.