Mitsuko

20 May 2018

Dear Phyllis,

Last week I wrote you about Betty Whewell and the Mino Mission. I enjoyed that so much I decided to write another testimony letter today. The other morning the Lord woke me up thinking about a girl that hadn't crossed my mind in probably several years.

In the fall of 1970 a pretty young girl got on the train in Nagano. She knew that there were many gaijins (foreigners) living in Karuizawa. Her ambition was to become a JAL airline stewardess, but to do that she had to pass an English test. Her best chance to learn English was to live with a gaijin family. She got off the train in Karuizawa and started walking up the street to the famous part of town, “kyudo”. As she walked past Tanaka's motor bike shop she stopped and asked if they knew any gaijins. They told her her best chance was to go to the Japanese language school and talk to Bill Cook. Twenty minutes later, Mitsuko  walked in my office.

She explained to me that she would work for free as a maid if she could stay with me. I would have taken her but Rosemary and I had just been married and had a little Nepalese boy, Ritu, living with us. But Dick and Millie Dennis lived in town. Dick Dennis was one of the finest missionaries I ever met. Dick was a very ordinary man with no special gifts. His preaching, at best might, have gotten a C+, but he only had one sting on his banjo. The only thing he was interested in was the Gospel and getting people saved. They never had a lock on their door and would take anybody that came along. So Mitsuko wound up living with them for almost two years. And that was the beginning of a legend.

She was as much apart of their family as there own children and Dick was like a father to her. Although she never lived with us, in view of the fact that it was through me that I introduced her to the Dennises, and we were very close, I was like a Dutch uncle to her. She later told me how much she feared me. She hadn't been in karuizawa long before she came to visit the language school one day. Mitsuko had on a shocking mini skirt. I told her, “Get that skirt off and put on some clothes. I don't want to see you walking around here half naked.” One day she was wearing a sweater with a Playboy bunny insignia on it. I asked her, “Do you know what that insignia on your sweater means?” Of course she didn't. When I told her about the meaning of Playboy she immediately got rid of that sweater and wore something more modest. She was always very intimidated by me, but I liked her very much, and we were good friends.

Dick was as consistent about Bible study as any man in town. If you lived in the Dennis house it was determined that you had to be at every Bible study every day. Dick seldom sat at a table that he didn't have the Bible open and everyone in that house got as solid a grounding as students in a Bible school. Dick was constantly going out for dendo (evangelism), and it was a rule that everyone had to go with him. If you lived in the Dennis house you didn't have much choice but you had to get saved. Mitsuko hadn't been living with Dick and Millie long before he came to tell me that Mitsuko had been saved. That lasted about a week. Over the passage of time we lost track of the number of times she got saved, but it seemed like it would only last until she had her next monthly period.

After living with the Dennises for a couple of years Mitsuko felt ready to take her test to be a JAL airline stewardess. Surprisingly she failed the test, but somehow another job opened up for her to be the receptionist for the JAL CEO. All she had to do was look pretty, greet the people who came to see the CEO, and pour tea for them. It really was a pretty easy job, but a good one and stable. The biggest problem was that his office was at the Narita airport; that was 70 km from Tokyo and over 200 km from Karuizawa. That was more or less the end of Mitsuko and we seldom saw her after she moved to Narita.

About that time Rosemary and I went to the states for furlough and were there for two years. Shortly after we got back to Karuizawa we had a call from Mitsuko. The Dennis family were in the states at the time but she wanted to come visit us on Saturday. When I went to the eki (train station) to pick her up I was shocked. It had been two or three years since the last time we met and I almost didn't recognize her. Previously she had been one sharp chick. She had been a contestant in the Miss Nagano beauty pageant and she had all the equipment to be a high runner-up. But now she was totally transformed. She was a very plain girl. Unexplainably the outward attractiveness was gone. She looked just like anyone else you might see on a train. There was nothing in her that would turn your head. And yet there was an inward quality that you seldom see. Inwardly she was gorgeous. She was a rare spiritual beauty. I was stunned. I asked her, “What in the world happened to you? You look radically different.”

Mitsuko told me when she was in Karuizawa she had no option but she had to behave herself and be a Christian. She was constantly propped up and couldn't be anything else. There was no way she could fall when she was living with Dick and Millie. But when she moved to Narita her world was totally different. She was on her own. There was no one around her looking at her and she was responsible to no one. For the first time in her life she was completely free to do anything she wanted. There she faced a crisis. What was she going to do with Jesus? Was she going to follow Him or go the way of sin? It was then that she made her choice to be a genuine follower of Christ. She told me, “When I started walking with the Lord by myself at Narita it was then that Jesus became a reality in my life.”

Oh my goodness, I never saw such a radical change. For a long time after that, if I was ever talking about spiritual beauty I would always use her as an illustration for anyone her knew her. Mitsuko worked for JAL for a couple of years and then felt the Lord would have her quit and go to Bible school. It was there she met an outstanding young man who was going to be a pastor. Like many other young ladies from Bible schools she became a pastors wife, and they were a terrific couple. He did extremely well and they wound up having a very good church in Kobe.

It had been twenty years since the last time I had seen Mitsuko. They were living in Kobe when the historic Kobe earthquake struck in 1993. Bill Reese called me and told me that Mitsuko had called him asking if he could come down and help them with some damage to their property. I made arrangement to meet Bill at Miskito's house. What a time warp! Here we were in a pastors home with a faithful pastors wife who had a daughter just about the same age as that girl who first showed up at my office in Karuizawa. Oh what Jesus had done! This is exactly the way the Gospel is supposed to work. The Lord lays His Hand on lost wandering people and transforms them into beautiful spiritual objects to use for His Kingdom.

One of the most wonderful post scrips that came after that happened a few years later when I was working for NLL. We had a fine young girl from Kobe working at NLL. I asked Yuri chan how she got saved. She told me that her mother was a Christian and Mitsuko had led her mother to Christ. You talk about a good investment; there is one that bore fruit for three generation. That wandering young girl walking up the street in Karuizawa looking for a gaijin family had become a great witness for Christ. She had led another woman to Jesus and I had the privilege of working with her daughter 30 years later. Wish God would provide more Dick and Millie Dennis and a world full of Mitsukos. Isn't Jesus great?

             bill