Spik and Span!

Wow! The turn out was great! (though no comments to the blog, but hey, I would rather have folks who 'do' rather than just 'say')
We probably had 60+ people in all, 40 or so being youth and Catherine Ho, from Student Ministries, says we collected 114 bags of garbage! Thas a lotta trash.
I have to tell you, manual labour is absolutely necessary for the human spirit! Working hard, working together, leading and inspiring each other on and the 'spectators' around us: this is community!
A lot of weird stuff happened, some interesting comments were heard and hearts cleaned along with the streets. My friend Trevor and I spent two hours cleaning a gutter between the highway and subway entrance that had, I'm fairly sure, never been cleaned. I found a piece of computer paper at the bottom that I know was from 1987.
One homeless fella changed my whole attitude on the unemployed of Tokyo. As several of us were gathering near Shibuya's Hachikomae, this short, unshaven, unkempt and fairly smelly fellow came up to talk about cleaning. Being tall, unshaven, unkempt and fairly smelly myself, he wasn't intimidated to talk to us. He was so excited to help and said he had cleaned Ikebukuro (a section of town just a few miles away) collecting several bags of cans and PET bottles. He felt that was his calling to clean up.

Anyone who has ever visited Tokyo comments on how clean the city is, especially for not having a large number of public trash recepticles. I know understand why.

Japanese people, particularly youth, are not especially clean. As we swept and picked up broken glass, found entirely unopened bags of bread and several new cans of beer, a lot of filth, etc, it struck me that the only really clean places on the streets, I mean really spotless places, were around the areas where the homeless guys had their tents. Mountains of cans and old radios were neatly gathered, bundled and covered with tarpaulins, the areas around neatly swept dirt floors. 500 yards down the road futsal parks were littered with protein drink packs, cigarettes (?), and beer cans (??). I came to realize that the unemployed worked quite hard. And it was due in large part to their hard efforts that most of us "employed" people think the city a nice place to live.

I like the company of a lot of these homeless guys here. Some have no interest in working. Some work hard but have health conditions to which Japanese companies are averse (severe diabetes, epilepsy and the like are simply shunned like leprosy). Some simply have had a run of bad choices.

This is a hard country in which to help and witness. St. John's Anglican Church in Asakusa has a food-drive that has grown exponentially since the recession started and hands out around 500 plates of food at each serving (compared to the 50 or so from before). The neighbors complain. The Japan Probe has an article about it, "Feed the homeless, but don't do it in my neighborhood - ok?" if you are interested in understanding a little more about the culture (or being more baffled by it).

There remains a lot of cleaning yet to be done　here, but most of it isn't on the streets.
Clean our hearts, O God. Give us clean hearts.