Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The reason for the season

Kobe as a city has a significant Christian population, largely due to its extended history of foreign settlement and trading. Over the time we lived in its burbs I found a small, but larger than expected, number of churches in our neighbourhood. We had Japanese neighbours who were various stripes of Christian and had free Japanese language copies of the Watchtower off our next-door neighbours.
But a bit beyond that there were these black signs around the neighbourhood and on various walls around Kobe and Osaka. They always had some form of Bible sounding thing on them. Occasionally there was somebody with a megaphone standing outside Sannomiya or Umeda stations banging on like the rightwingers outside Yasukuni, the noise pounding out something or other about Kami-sama this and Kami-sama that.
Recently there's been a trend in Japan for somebody possessed of a sense of humour and a black paint marker to make a few alterations to the signs, changing the character for God to the katakana for cat with a few strokes.
Japanese Christian cat signs | CNNGo.com
I  wish I'd thought of it. It would have kept me pretty entertained.




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