Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Tuesday August 28, 2012


Herro Family!

David was able to make it okay to my house and thank you so much for everything! We had an awesome brownie and nacho eating party last night in celebration of the new transfer!

BTW, I have been in Japan for a transfer! It's crazy, it has been a way fast two weeks.  Elder Gallacker and I are still in the same area, but one of us will probably leave next transfer.  But one of the elders that we live with got transferred.  Elder Hamada got transferred to the Mission Home to be an AP and we are way excited for him.  The elder who came here is Elder Cook and he was the last AP, so basically they switched places, ha.  Elder Cook is on his last transfer and he is a way cool guy from Ohio.  He is super wise and incredibly friendly, but not trunky in any way which is good.  He is a mission legend, just a way awesome missionary and helps a lot of people. 

This past week was awesome for us, we had a lot of lessons with members and focused on building the ward.  This week we are focusing on finding and sharing little lessons.  Our good friend Bishop Kyodai, the one who took us out to the crazy expensive sushi, took us out to a yakiniku place for lunch.  He moved up north this past weekend and wanted to say goodbye to us before he left, haha.  Yet again, I won't tell you how much he spent on that lunch.  We had quite a few mogi's(members pretend to be investigators) lessons and got a lot of potential referrals from people. 

This last Friday, we taught a shokai lesson (introduction about what the church is to English class students) with a Chinese guy.  He spoke a little Japanese and even less English, but it was incredible.  He is what we call a "Chinese Kinjin" which means a Chinese golden person, a golden investigator.  We watched "Finding Happiness" in Chinese and afterwards he said that recently he has had questions about the purpose of life and how to find a forgiveness of his sins and how to improve his life.  To which we were like "Yessssss"! We can answer your questions! That's our Job! He was totally awesome.  We taught him the whole first lesson and emphasized the BOM.  We gave him a Chinese copy, read the intro together and taught him how to read, ponder, and pray about it.  He was super genki and was really grateful and super excited about the BOM.  BUT, this past weekend he moved back to Beijing and said that he won't be able to come back for a few years. :(  This kind of thing happens very often actually.  Chinese people come to Japan for a few weeks for business, they run in to the missionaries somehow, they get converted to the Gospel, then they move back.  There are probably hundreds of thousands of people that have read the BOM in China.  Japan is the gateway to China and this kind of dendo has been happening for a long time. 

We are meeting with Ryo again this next week for a second lesson and follow up.  Thomas and Audrey are doing fantastic back in France.  We are very close to reactivating a less active member who is an RM and like 50 years old.  Sato San has been pretty flaky this past week, but we might have another lesson with him soon. 

I got in to a 20 minute argument with a drunk guy and talked to a guy wearing a speedo in the middle of a park. I'm doing a 10 day nato challenge (google what Nato is), deep cleaned our house yesterday 'cause it was transfer day, ate a lot of kimochi (Korean kimchi) this past week, and got more things for the package I'm sending home soon :D

Love you guys and I look forward to hearing what classes are going to be like for everyone! Also, two things.  1.) Kelsie's address please send me :)  2.) So a really big thing that Japanese people do is show off family and friend pictures.  I use the album you gave me like twice a day, haha.  Could you send me some fun pictures via email of like me and my friends and our family doing fun things please :) I have access to a printer across the street and what not.  Anytime during the week would be great :)

Love you guys so much and think and pray for you everyday!

Elder Crandall

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Monday, August 20, 2012





AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
No WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Omedeto Gozaimasu! Congratulations!
Oh man, I'm way too excited right now.  I don't even know what to do.  Cameron is so cool.  Quinton will be my brother-in- law-ish.  We will forever have a connection with the Burdette's.  This is so cool.  I'm so excited.  And I think that December is a great time.  It's gonna be busy though, haha. Please send me lots of pictures and updates of everything as it happens, like the dress, the colors, the venue, the food, everything.  Who knew this day would finally come! Ya know, who knew that she would end up finding the guy in her hometown and then move to Provo with him and get married in Seattle, haha.  I'm so unbelievably happy that she is getting married in the Temple.  I don't think she completely understands yet how critically important that is, and I'm just beginning to understand that myself.  I promise people everyday that they can live with their loved ones for eternity, and they want it, but they don't want to change their lives to get it.  Kelsie doesn't have to change hers to get it, she already has an eternal family, and the love in her life doesn't have to change either to get it.  Its absolutely wonderful!
Okay, getting off my soapbox, うれしいですよね!おめでとございます、ほんとに。これはすばらしいです。じゃ、(Huh, I'm glad! Congratulations there, really. This is great. Well,). Tell them that I wish them the best of everything in the whole world.  And that I'm going to start writing my wedding speech! :) (in Japanese, hehe)

Well, sounds like you guys had a chill week, except for the engagement.  I'm glad the boys are enjoying the summer and having a great time and what not.  Is Kyle close to his Eagle? Is he getting his license soon? What are his and Connor's classes like this year? Did they get any new games?
Also, are there any big things going on in the world right now? Like any new wars, how's the economy doing, Presidential candidates, scandals, just some things that I can talk to people on the streets about.  Like, if China went to war with Russia, I would be like the last person to find out, but if that happened I would like to know, haha!

This week was pretty good for us.  I was able to go on splits with the zone leaders that we live with.  They are such cool guys and such awesome missionaries.  I went with Hamada Choro and we were able to contact a lot of members and we ended up getting 4 new investigator referrals in one day! Which is insane in Japan.  Like, my doryo has barely even seen 4 referrals his whole mission.  The people we watch in the training videos shoot for like 20 referrals a week, and we shoot for like 2, haha.  The members here in Japan are new, they are not like the members in America and they don't really know what is expected of them.  And the culture in Japan is usually that of people don't talk about religion often, especially not with people who are not good friends. 

We gave a man named Ryo a church tour, a Book of Mormon, and committed him to read, pray, and be baptized when he knows that it is true.  He works for Newskin and the Ceo of Newskin is a member, so Ryo went on a business trip to Utah once and visited Temple Square and had a spiritual experience there.  When he got back to Japan, the missionaries contacted him on the street and he agreed to meet with us and take a church tour this last Thursday.  He had a lot of questions about member life and how it would be different or not different if he joined the church.  His goals are to get married and start a family soon and to live a happy life, and we are like "yes we can help you with that!" He told me afterwards through broken English that he feels happy right now, he was glad he came :D

Other than that, it was a pretty busy dendo (missionary work) week.  We ping ponged a lot of houses, talked to a lot of crazy people on the street, visited the largest intersection (most people there at one time) in the world, rode the worlds fastest elevator, which goes 75m/s, ate at one of the worlds best Ramen shops, visited a Pokemon Center! inside of a mall! Legit! and made a lot of new friends and hopefully some of those new friends will turn into investigators. 

I'm working on a package to send home.  I've got some small things I'm sending, I don't know exactly when I'll get those off, in a week or two probably.  But ah, yeah, TokyoTemple was amazing and legit!  It is absolutely beautiful and everything was in English which was nice.   

Great week, we have a wonderful week planned with lots of member visits scheduled, it will be a good time. 

I will send you my SD card with my package and you guys can check out all of the cool stuff that I have been doing and seeing! Yosh!     

Love,

Elder Crandall

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Monday, August 13, 2012


Hello Everyone! I am glad to hear that all went well with the trip and everyone is safe and had lots of fun! Well, things are great over here in Kohoku. Every Monday, we basically go out and try to find cool shops and I've found some crazy ones so far. We are going to Yokohama city today, like downtown shopping at recycle shops and cool little stores. My letter wont be super big this week 'cause we have a full schedule today, but let me tell you about my week and what I learned. 

On Tuesday, we had lunch with an awesome member named Bishop Kyodai.  He is 32, a financial analyst for one of the top financial consultant companies in all of Asia, single, an RM, and was raised in the US.  He loves the missionaries and loves discussing deep, fundamental doctrine with us.  He took us to this super nice sushi restaurant on the tenth floor of a massive train station/ electronic store/ mall/ business lunch place.  Dad will like this, the building has 3 floors dedicated to selling anything and everything electronic.  It's crazy.  Anyway, he ordered the most expensive thing on the menu for us (I'm not going to tell you how much it was, haha) and it was the best sushi I have ever or probably will ever taste on the mission.  I ate shrimp, sea urchin, caviar, sponges, tons of salmon and tuna, squid, octopus, etc.  But the best thing that we ordered was this foot long slab of eel.  And I don't know what they did to it, but it was one of the best things I have ever eaten in my life.  It was incredibly soft, really really sweet, and was a dark yellow. grey color, but man, it tasted so good! 

We are helping Bishop Kyodai get married, haha.  We are helping him make important decisions like whether or not to move closer to his girlfriend, how to help his girlfriend's conversion process 'cause she is a non member, important life changing decisions you know.  Which is crazy to think that two 19 year old kids are giving a much older and wiser man life changing advice.  But that's my job, haha. To be a doctor of the soul. 

I went on splits with my DL's companion this week and that was fun.  His name is Pope Choro (Elder Pope) and he is from the Redmond/ Kirkland/ Bellevue area.  He is only on his second transfer so he is pretty new too, which made getting around the place pretty fun.  While we were on splits, we had a full mission conference up in Shibuya.  So the two of us had to find our way around one of the most densely populated places in the world during morning rush hour, hahaha.  You will not believe how crowded the trains are during rush hour.  Honestly, like fish in a can, packed to the ceiling.  And there is nothing worse than the person next to you farting during rush hour in Shibuya, hahaha. I have been on 100 times more trains in the four weeks that I've been here than in my whole life.  Almost everyday we ride the trains and it is some of the most fun dendo (missionary work). At the mission conference, President Budge spoke a lot about the mission goals, our standard of excellence, and how to be more unified as a mission.  President Albrecht had a big push for self consecration during his era, and now that everyone is consecrated, the push is to be more unified as a whole.  It was wonderful to see my friends from the MTC and to see how much success everyone is having. 

Those were kinda the highlights for the week.  Other than that, we just did a lot of study and a lot of finding.  We are working on increasing our pool of investigators so we are doing a lot of streeting, housing, and different kinds of work.  I've met a lot of very interesting people with a lot of very interesting beliefs, but no one too interested in hearing more about our message. 

Love the people, love the work, there is nothing I would be rather doing than what I am doing! 

Love you so much and my prayers are always with the family and our friends back home :)

Elder Crandall  

Monday, August 6, 2012

Monday, August 6th, 2012


It looks like you guys are having tons of fun on your trip! I wish I could be there too, it's probably not the same without me.  Maybe a little cheaper though, haha.  Things are going great over here.  This week was so much fun, busy busy busy, a lot of missionary work and a lot of quality time with the members.  I had my first okonomiagi experience the other day.  Okonomigi is like a really thick cabbage and bacon and mushroom and onion and fish and BBQ sauce pancake, haha.  It's crazy looking, but really good.  A member in our ward owns an okonomigi shop next to the college and he let us and the sister missionaries come over and make our own okonomiagies for lunch.  The next day, we went to a Yakiniku place for lunch.  Yakiniku is where they give you a big plate of raw meat and vegetables and there is a grill in the middle of the table where you cook the meat yourself.  Totally unsanitary, it would never work in America, but it's really popular here, haha.  For dinner that day, we met up with Audrey and Thomas and went to a local diner and had a lesson/meal.  One of the pictures I sent has us at the restaurant with 4 Book of Mormon's in 3 different languages and 4 hot fudge sundaes, haha.  Classy. 
The day after that, I went on splits with my District Leader Miura Choro.  He is Nihonjin, from Hiroshima, 21, a total boss, speaks pretty good English, but I basically had to only speak Japanese, ha.  He is like 5' 9", 130 lbs, looks really young, but is a great people person and people just like talking to him, idk, he has a gift.  We went to a members house for lunch that day and I have no idea what we ate.  A lot of mushrooms and cake, it was weird.  They had us pull weeds for like half an hour before we came in which was nice 'cause Japanese people will not let you give any kind of service what so ever.  They will go way out of the way just so that we don't have to do anything for them, it's weird.  After we ate lunch, we sang hymns for like 20 minutes before they would let us share a spiritual message with them.  Just an absolute bizarre experience.  That night, I taught Eikaiwa, English class, in Kawasaki 'cause I was on splits, and I met the craziest guy ever.  He called himself Rocky, though I highly doubt that is his name 'cause he is totally Asian, and he is a huge, huge, huge wannabe hippie.  Huge wannabe.  He is like 50ish, has long grey hair, told me he is a lover not a fighter, but he speaks almost perfect English.  He said that English is his hobby and that he misses the 70's.  He wore a sugarcane white stripped conductors hat, John Lennon sun glasses, a Tokyo Band Camp wife beater, womens 70's bell bottom jeans, and womens heels that had flowers all over them.  A crazy guy.  He knows everything about everything with the Church, loves everything about it, reads and prays every day, but is what we call an Eien no Kyudosha, Eternal Investigator.  He has been investigating for like 20 years but won't get baptized.  He drives like 2 hours everyday just to come to this specific Eikaiwa, no one knows why, there are tons of classes all over the area but he insists on this one. 

The next day was Elder Gallacker's Birthday! We split back from Miura Choro and decided to go to Lala Port Mall to try and find a less active member that no one has talked to for a long time.  All we knew was that his name was Jimmy and that he owns some sort of painting shop in the mall.  So we get there and the mall is enormous, absolutely huge.  We are looking for a needle in a hay stack.  After a few minutes we were able to find his shop.  He owns a chain of cartoon painting shops, the ones where they draw you as a cartoon with a blown up head and everything, and he was working that day.  So we walk up to him and are like, "Jimmy San desu ka?" in Japanese of course and he was like "Elders, hey!" in English with a thick Spanish accent.  His name is Jimmy Roes and he is from Mexico city.  He grew up in the church but stopped going often after he moved to Japan about 7 years ago.  He was studying art in the US when his visa ran out and his Japanese girlfriend convinced him to move to Japan and finish school there.  He got married not long after he came to Japan, has two kids now, is a great guy, only like 27 or 28 and is just super busy with work, like all Japanese people, and can't come to church.  He speaks Japanese pretty well, but his Spanish accent carries over in everything, haha.  He painted my companion as a cartoon and said that he will paint me next time we visit.  He has a goal: by the end of the year, he wants to move up to a higher mgmt. position so he can take the weekends off and come to church with his family. He really is a great guy and we will check up on him about once a month and try and help him reach his goal. 
We had Krispy Kremes that day, went to a Curry shop for lunch called Coco's Curry, it is a huge chain in Japan, really popular, went to the city center and got my residence card so now I'm official, scrubbed the baptismal font, and met up with the sisters and their investigator and the zone leaders and went out to a shabushabu tabehodai! It is an all you can eat buffet, totally fun.  What you do is you grab a ton of vegetables and noodles and raw meat from a designated room and then you put all of your food into a pot of boiling sauce and water that is in the middle of your table, everyone at your table, everything, into the same pot, and you let it cook for a few minutes, and it turns into a community free for all pot and you just go hard and eat for days.  Super easy, tons of fun, and we can do it as a family when I get back!













Then, the next day was Thomas' Baptism!  We got to the church super early and started filling up the font.  The water was warm thankfully.  At about 9:30, Thomas and Audrey showed up and we had a chocolate chip pancake breakfast together at the church.  The service started at like 10:45, everything went smooth. President Budge and his family came and spoke at the service. My companion, who is an amazing singer, sang "I Know That My Redeemer Lives" in three different languages, and then Thomas got Baptized! Yaaaay! After the baptism we went and ate at a local ramen shop with the Sisters and the single adults in the ward.  After that, we went back to the church and ended up waiting there for like 2 hours because all of the Single Adult women and Audrey and the Sisters changed into traditional Kimono's and got all fancied up.  Once everyone was ready, we all headed out for Yakosuko.  That day was called Friendship day, it's a national holiday, so every year there are a ton of celebrations on that day.  So Yakosuko is the American Naval Base in Japan.  It was about a 40 minute train ride away and we had our residence cards and they let us onto the base.  The base is basically a little slice of America, completely Americanized, just straight cut out from America itself and placed into Japan.  It was awesome! They had tons of American shops every where, American food, white and black people, people that spoke English, and it was refreshing.  At around 7:15ish, they put on a huge firework show out on the bay on naval ships and man, let me tell you, Japanese fireworks are the coolest things ever! It blew my mind, I can't even describe it to you.  It was a pain getting home, 20,000 people were leaving the base at once, but everything went well and everyone was safe. 

Then yesterday, I confirmed Thomas at Sacrament Meeting and gave him the Holy Ghost!
It was a great moment, just completely awesome, it is the reason I am out here in Japan, way far from home, away from my old life, the ones I love, the language I know, the culture I know... I will forever have a connection with the people in France and with the Missionaries who taught Audrey the Gospel so that she could be a good influence and help Thomas. 
After church, we set up a ton of appointments with members in the ward, 'cause now they are excited about missionary work, and then ate a French lunch with Audrey and Thomas.  They made stinky french cheese sandwiche,s which are totally nasty, but we had a good time anyway.  And then we just did missionary stuff the rest of the day.
Today is P-day.  And today was the my first Daiso experience.  Daiso is the Japanese dollar store and it is legit. I got a sweet blue koala bear tie and some Japanese letter paper.  Excited desu. 
Let me tell you more about Japan.  They don't have any dryers so we hang dry everything, the people are obsessed with Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, idk. People are starting to pick up on the Hipster fashion trend, but for the most part they are stuck in the early 2000's.  There is anime stuff and advertisements everywhere you go. Every one has two cell phones, one has really good Internet, the other has a really good texting plan. The trains are tons of fun to ride and people hate it when you talk on the trains, but that is all that we do. You see shirts with American swear words on them a lot but they have no idea what it means, everyone is surprised when you talk to them in Japanese, anyone older than 50 says that they are Buddhist, it's hard for Mormon women to get married 'cause there are so few men members, we are not allowed to talk to women on the streets, there was a car accident outside our house last night, not a bad one but that is the first one I've seen in Japan so far, they are actually way good drivers here, cops do not do anything cause there is basically no crime, every 4 months they elect a new prime minister 'cause the old one quites after 4 months, if you do not say shitsure shimasu when you are trying to end a conversation, you will probably end up saying thank you have a nice day thank you so much thank you, for like 10 minutes, everyone uses umbrellas, everyone works like 6 days a week, and money is the God of Japan, it is the thing that they worship.  People either loves us 'cause we are American, or they hate us 'cause we wear white shirts and ties and wear helmets and break all of the social norms and are nice to people.  It is hard, but it is fun, and at the end of the day, I feel good about everything that I am doing.   
love to you all,
Elder Crandall