Monday

We continue to rise early.  The sun comes up about 3am, and the walls of our apartment are paper thin.

The group split into pairs for a 7am prayer walk around the local campus.  We prayed that the seeds God plants through us this week would blossom into Bible studies among students on campus. 

We regrouped back at UpTen, and everyone had a chance to check their email (I am the only one who brought a laptop!).  Here is a photo of UpTen:

Then we all piled into our little car for a group trip to Yamazawa (grocery store).  We will be cooking lunch and supper at UpTen on Tuesday for about 15 students at each meal.  Each of us had a good think-on-your-feet lesson when we couldn't find all of the ingredients that we needed for our recipes! 

After we returned and put away all of our groceries, we walked to the cafeteria on the local campus for lunch.  It was so crowded that one student sat down right in the middle of our group.  We tried to talk with him, but he was more interested in eating quickly than in practicing his English.  He was kind enough to write down the name of the food he was eating so that we could try it too.

Ogawa-san picked us up after lunch in his van and drove us to the downtown campus.  This university, Tohoku Gakuin, was originally all downtown, but it became crowded, so they built the local campus for Freshmen and Sophomores and now have only Junior and Senior classes at the downtown campus. 
Tohoku Gakuin University: http://www.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp/en/index.html
The local campus is called Izumi, the downtown campus is Tsuchitoi, and there is a third campus called Tagajo that is located in another city.

We got to meet many Guys Club members, but they said that it was difficult to come now that they are at the upperclassmen campus.  Rumiko, a former Guys Club member and a graduate of Tokohu Gakuin Univeristy, now works in the Facilities Management office at the downtown campus.  She showed us all of the buildings and introduced us to some other former Guys Club members.  We talked with one girl, Mei, for a while in a student lounge.  Mei is going to join us on Wednesday for girls' night at TopThree, and she might come for another visit next week.

I learned that Tohoku Gakuin University was founded in 1886 as a Theological Seminary for the purpose of training Christian preachers and still has a Christian Theology department.  There is another huge chapel building on the campus downtown as well.  Tsuchitoi has an American-style house on campus that the founders built to live in.  We were allowed to walk through it, and for once I didn't have to duck through the doors!

From there, we went to The Christian Martyrs' Monument.  The plaque reads:
"The Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in 1613, and by 1620 persecutions of Christians began to be seen in the fief of Sendai.  In the winter of 1623, a Portuguese priest named DIOGE de CARVALHO and eight Japanese men were arrested in the Ou mountains and sent to Sendai.  They were half-sunk in the freezing water of the Hirose River.  Two of them drowned on the last day of the year and the rest died near where the Ohashi bridge now stands on January 4, 1624."

Here is our tream: Joe, Josh, Michael, Amy, Evie, Rebecca, and Steve:

Our last stop downtown was a Christian bookstore called Oasis Gospel Shop, where we each bought Japanese tracts to pass out on Saturday morning, before our downtown shopping trip. 

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