Lutherans in Japan

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900. Excerpt: ... IX. A MISSIONARY'S LIFE IN SAGA. "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." I hope in this chapter to draw aside the curtain and let the Christian people at home see just what kind of lives their emissaries to this far-away land live. So I am going to write about our home life, about social opportunities here, and about Saga as an intellectual and spiritual environment. In a former chapter I have already shown that Japanese houses are not calculated to make very good mission homes. The houses themselves are poor and inconvenient, but by long experience and much study, we have learned to fix them up so that our present ones are moderately comfortable and homelike. As far as possible, we furnish our homes in foreign style. Beds, chairs, tables, etc., are all provided just as they are in America. We can only get the roughest and cheapest furniture here in Saga, and must buy the better pieces at high prices in the ports. We can have a sufficiency of good, wholesome food here, but it costs high. All canned goods, cereals, flour, butter, etc., must be imported from the West. Besides the home prices, we must pay twenty-five per cent, tariff, and the importer's commission on these goods. Our butter costs forty cents a pound, and other things in proportion. Some food can be bought here in the town, and this is much cheaper. Beef, chickens, fish, oysters, rice, milk, and eggs can be had in abundance. Vegetables are scarce and poor. Beans, lotus root, burdock roots, coarse radishes, and sweet potatoes are about all we find on our markets. There is a good deal of native fruit, such as oranges, persimmons, plums, and hard pears. There are no foreign fruits or berries. Thus it will be seen that a housewife's re sources in the way of variety of food are ...