Onigiri and Homelessness

Onigiri is a very popular Japanese food. It is basically a rice ball, shaped into an oval or triangular shape, that is wrapped in Nori (seaweed paper) and often has umeboshi (pickled plum) stuffed into it. Some onigiri is seasoned with different flavors, including salted salmon or katsuobushi. You can find onigiri at just about any food stand in the city, and even the ubiquitous 7-Elevens and Lawrence convenient stores sell these. If you need a mid-afternoon snack, why grab chips or an apple? Japanese love their onigiri just about any time of day.

Tokyo Union Church has a really incredible ministry to the homeless people of Tokyo, and one of the things they do is serve onigiri to the homeless in the parks every Monday-Friday. So every single weekday morning, the church kitchen is full of volunteers putting together the onigiri packages that will be distributed in various parks throughout Tokyo. One of the interesting things about Japan is the role that shame plays in the culture. I think this strong sense of shame has its pros and cons (one pro being that crime is very low here and it is a very safe city, considering how densely populated it is). People don’t want to shame their friends or family with ill behavior. But it also means that many people, particularly men, feel shamed when they lose their jobs. And so sometimes they end up homeless because they do not want to ask people for help, or admit to other people that they’ve lost a job, etc. So there are a fair number of homeless persons who, until very recently, had a really good job and were making a good deal of money. Having volunteered at a variety of homeless shelters in the states, homelessness in Japan seems to be a very different issue than the states. Certainly there are similarities, and homelessness anywhere is a tragedy. But it has been very interesting to learn about the different ways that homelessness plays out here. One of the differences is that not nearly as many homeless people here are struggling with drug and alcohol addictions. And I have yet to see any homeless person asking passersby for money. Another interesting difference is that the Japanese government, I have been told, does not really recognize the homeless population. So there are very few, if any, government-sponsored programs for homeless people. The main groups of people in Tokyo that feed and provide for the homeless are Christian groups. All the churches know which areas other churches cover, and they try to reach as many people as possible. It is really an amazing thing to know that a network of Christian churches, in a country where less than 1% of the population is Christian, is really the only group tackling the issue of homelessness in whatever ways they can.

Some of my favorite moments here at TUC thus far have been working in the kitchen making onigiri and chatting with the other volunteers. Many of the volunteers are Japanese, but there are also volunteers from around the world. TUC is truly an international church. It has been such a great witness to me to see these people coming together and putting their faith into action. Last week James and I had the opportunity to help prepare food for the monthly homeless dinner that TUC serves, and so we spent nearly 4 hours chopping vegetables and preparing food. And the unique thing about these dinners is that the main chef is himself homeless. He himself used to be the main chef at a restaurant, and I don’t know his fully story but apparently he comes every month and the church pays him to make the dinner. He brings some of his homeless friends so they can also get paid, and they work very hard all day preparing the food. And it was clear this man is a real chef – he could chop vegetables faster than anyone I’d seen. He also had high standards – James and I could not cut the cabbage as thin as he wanted. He kept laughing and trying to show us how to cut it thinner – but if we used his method I’m pretty sure we would have lost a few fingers. Apparently we don’t got no cookin’ skills! It was fun to watch him work, though. We were making Japanese curry and he was grabbing all sorts of spices and throwing them into these massive pots on the commercial-sized stove, in what seemed like an almost haphazard method to me. He clearly was not using a recipe. And when we were all done cutting up vegetables, he had prepared a special meal for all the volunteers – it was amazing! It was some kind of chicken spaghetti, but the sauce was not quite like anything I’d ever tasted before. It may have had some kind of fish sauce in it? But he had been cooking it on the side all along, although I didn’t realize it was for us. And he prepared these beautiful tofu salads, that everyone got on an individual plate. The tofu was mounded with thinly sliced and curly pieces of carrot and cucumber and ginger, and his homemade dressing. And I thought to myself – this man just created a gourmet meal for us, and he is going to go sleep in a park tonight.

It is mind-blowing to think about the way God works. Most of the time I don’t understand it at all, and sometimes I think God should “fix” things up in the world a little more than it seems he is. But sometimes, like the day we were working with the homeless chef, I just marvel at the seeming little ways that God coordinates things for his glory. God used this homeless chef to cook a fabulous meal for the 420 homeless men that showed up for dinner.