The Shaking of
Japan
 The Great Hanshin
earthquake did more than shake Kobe. It struck at the very heart of Japan.
Jerome Mouat talks to a missionary couple who survived the
earthquake and now work amongst students in Kyoto.
One
year after the Great Hanshin Earthquake which devastated the city of Kobe,
killing 5,500 people and reducing 70,000 homes to rubble, Japan is still
being shaken.
Recent political
scandals, the exposure of massive corruption in business, the collapse of
a major banking institution, the assassination of a high-ranking police
officer and the nerve gas attack on commuters on the Tokyo underground by
members of a doomsday cult have all rocked the nation which once believed
it was untouchable.
‘God is shaking the
Japanese out of their complacency,’ YWAM workers Nicholas and Ioanna
Sillavan told me in January, shortly before their return to Kyoto where
they minister amongst the city’s vast student population.
The couple are
well qualified to comment on the current situation there. Nicholas, a
British-born graphic designer, came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ
whilst working in Tokyo in 1983, joined Youth With a Mission, and has been
there ever since. His wife, who cohosts the Harvest Time Christian
television programme in Japan, is the daughter of a Swiss missionary and a
Japanese mother who still pastors the church he founded in Oike. Nicholas
and loanna, and their three young children, all miraculously escaped harm
when their house was shaken by the Kobe ‘quake. The family had returned
from Britain
just three days before the earthquake struck at
5.46 am on
January 17, 1995. Their story is a remarkable testimony of prophetic
insight, intercessionary prayer and God’s protection —and how
subsequently he has used the Kobe disaster to reach into the hearts of
many Japanese. Joanna recounted the events, starting from 11 o’clock on
the night before the earthquake.
‘We were both jet-lagged
still after the long and exhausting journey. We sat down to pray before
retiring for the night, thanking the Lord for the wonderfully refreshing
time we had in England and started praying for our neighbours. We asked
for renewed vision and love for them so that we might be able to reach out
more effectively and prayed especially for those who seemed to be so
close to the Kingdom.
‘Suddenly, the Holy
Spirit took over my prayer. With intense desperation and urgency, I
started to call out to God to protect each and every member of the nine
houses in our cul-de-sac from any physical danger. We were in the practice
of doing spiritual warfare for the community as we were surrounded by
Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, but this was different. The prayer
was specifically for physical protection and for each and every member of
our family and immediate neighbours.
‘Then I prayed, “Please
send your angels to walk up and down this cul-de-sac to protect us.” As
soon as these words left my lips, I clearly saw in my mind’s eye three
angels dressed in white; two walking towards me and another passing
between them going in the other direction. While I watched them, a feeling
of security and peace flooded my heart. I shared my vision with Nicholas,
and we both went to bed with a real sense of awe as to what had taken
place.’
Less than six
hours later the earthquake, which registered 7.2 on the Richter scale,
struck, causing devastation in Kobe and Japan’s second city, Osaka. Ever
since the Kanto earthquake struck
Tokyo in 1923, killing 140,000 people,
Japan has been conducting
annual earthquake drills and preparing for another disaster. Modern
buildings are suspended on shock absorbers of iron and rubber to make them
‘earthquake proof’ while roads and bridges are designed to flex rather
than collapse. But all to no avail. Besides claiming 5,500 lives, houses,
offices, roads and train tracks were all ripped apart. Gas, water,
electricity and telecommunications were cut off for weeks in some areas.
 Joanna then told me what
happened to them when the tremors started. ‘We were violently jolted up
from sleep, pinned to our bed by the intensity of the shakes and forced to
endure the full impact of the deafening cacophony of destruction all
around us. Calling out the name of the Lord and pleading for the lives of
our children was all we could do, as we heard books and other objects
falling and smashing, furniture crashing down, glass shattering, things
banging against walls and into each other, the house creaking, the earth
rumbling and the children in their bedroom screaming.
‘After what seemed like
many minutes (which actually turned out to be a mere twenty seconds),
everything became silent except for the cries of our children. The sun had
not risen yet and all the shutters on the windows were closed. With the
electricity cut off, it was pitch black in the house. We felt our way,
scrambling over fallen furniture, debris and shattered glass trying to get
to their door. The door was stuck and I yanked it open, only to be met by
more unidentified stuff blocking our way to the children. It was a
blessing that they were crying as it assured us, first of all, that they
were alive and, secondly, helped us to locate each of them stuck behind
fallen pieces of furniture.
‘We crunched shattered
glass under our bare feet as we carried the children down the stairs. The
front door was also jammed, but we finally managed to get outside and into
our van. Nicholas wisely drove it out onto our narrow road, making sure it
would not get crushed by the eave under which it was parked. In the bitter
cold of the January morning, what an amazing oasis of warmth the van was
for our shivering, pyjama-clad bodies. As we began to warm up, we sang our
praises and thanks to the Lord for sparing our whole family.
‘The sunrise seemed to
bring with it an incredible promise of hope and quiet assurance of the
Lord’s presence amidst the chaos. Quite contrary to how we felt inside,
however, we began to see some of the awful scars of destruction in our
neighbourhood. Our rented house had suffered severe structural damage. It
had sustained cracks the entire length of the house as well as running up
and down the walls in several places, and the concrete pillars that
supported the eaves had shattered at the top and bottom. The balcony of
the house directly in front of ours was helplessly hanging down over the
front door. Large portions of the outer walls had peeled off of several
houses.
‘As the neighbours began
to huddle together in our familiar road, we exchanged stories of the
terrifying experience. The incredible thing was that none of the 28
people in nine ruined houses, with the contents strewn everywhere, had
even suffered a scratch! A sizeable piece of plastered wall crumbled down
on our neighbour, Mrs Kishi’s head; although dusty, she was unharmed. Most
of the people had things pile down on them as they lay on bedding on the
floor or on beds, but none had even a bruise to show for it. Nicholas and
I had walked barefoot on broken glass throughout our rescue of the
children, yet we did not even get a single, tiny nip on our feet.
‘Our son Josiah’s baby
bed was filled with books that came flying down from the shelves as they
toppled, but a cover we had placed on the bed to stop him climbing out,
had slid down, giving him a triangular shield under which he was
unharmed.’
Joanna and Nicholas then
recounted a number of ‘near miss’ stories before concluding, ‘How good
and merciful our Lord is. We sure do not know ”how we ought to pray as we
should” — especially when it concerns the unforeseen future. God himself
gave us the prayer on his heart and answered it. Hallelujah!’
Many of the Shinto
shrines and Buddhist temples were destroyed and in some areas the church
was virtually the only building left standing. The churches were able to
provide a place of sanctuary for many people as well as running soup
kitchens, some feeding up to 500 people a day. Nicholas said the
earthquake had brought in a new sense of unity among believers and a
spirit of love and cooperation. The walls between the evangelical and
pentecostal churches had also come down.
A baptist minister,
Pastor Ojima lost his son in the earthquake while his wife and two younger
children were buried in the debris for seven hours before being rescued.
He opened the church building to the neighbourhood and housed about 35
people for several months while accommodation was found for them. Pastor
Ojima was able to draw from his own personal tragedy to minister to many
Japanese who had lost members of their families and he conducted a special
memorial service which had a profound effect on the hundreds of unsaved
relatives and friends who attended. The churches are making a real impact
on the people, Nicholas told me.
‘There is still so much
pain that still needs to be healed — and Jesus is the only one who can do
it. People’s lives have been shattered. Houses, shops, offices and
factories can all be built again. The physical things are not as difficult
to repair as the hearts of the people.
‘We have been asked
several times whether it would have been better if we had not gone through
all this if we had been delayed a couple of extra days in England and
missed the earthquake? But I believe God wanted us to go through it — and
to experience his divine protection. It has made such a difference being
able to share that hope in Jesus, when there appears to be no hope. I
believe it was part of God’s plan that we were there then,’ Nicholas said.
Kobe, literally
translated, is the Gate of God and we had all been praying that God
would blow through this gate by his Spirit. On several occasions we had
prayed that God would shake this society which was so dependant upon its
material wealth and its technological advancement. We certainly did not
expect this to happen.
The Sillavans were forced
to move out of their house, which was condemned by the authorities as it
had suffered structural damage, and stayed with another YWAM couple for a
week before they felt the Lord calling them to Kyoto.
‘We really did not want
to go there as Kyoto is such an oppressive place spiritually. It is the
centre of the old religions and the stronghold of the Shinto faith. It
plays an important role in the religious and cultural life of the
Japanese. Like
Mecca is to Islam, all Japanese feel they have to make a kind of
pilgrimage to Kyoto at least once in their lives. We really felt that it
was the stronghold of Satan,’ said Nicholas.
Darryl Webb and
his wife Kathy, who also work with YWAM, were based in Kyoto and had been
called to plant churches in the old city. But for a whole year they had
been involved in spiritual warfare, with the Lord leading them to
different parts of the city to pray and ‘bind the strongman’. What they
had not realised was that centuries ago the Shinto priests had received
permission to divide up the city on a grid and build their shrines at
strategic places. The YWAM group had been given a vision that they needed
to plant a stake at a certain point in the city and they were led to a
tiny Shinto shrine which was guarded by temple guards. They knew that this
was the place and one of the group grabbed the stake and hammered it into
the ground with three hard blows. He told the others afterwards that with
the first blow, he heard the demons screaming. With the second blow, he
heard the chains breaking. And with the third blow, he could hear the
praise of the saints. A Japanese Christian, Akira Takimoto, who had
conducted a great deal of research into the Shinto faith, later confirmed
to them that this shrine was at the very centre of the grid marked out by
the Shinto priests.
‘We know that God has a
plan to release
Kyoto from that stranglehold, so that we can be free to preach his
word and plant new churches there,’ said Nicholas.
‘We see the Lord’s hand
in the way he has provided for us. Through a Christian friend, whom I
interviewed for our Harvest Time broadcast, we have a wonderful house in a
“new town” suburb of Kyoto that does not come under any Buddhist temple or
Shinto shrine,’ said Joanna. It is in a very affluent part of the city and
God has led them into a new phase of their ministry, reaching out to
influential people who are their neighbours.
‘A couple of weeks before
we moved to Kyoto the television programme was broadcast for the first
time there. So our neighbours already knew that we were Christians.
Because we were classified as “earthquake victims” our neighbours have
been both very sympathetic and curious about us. We have held several “at
homes” to thank them for their welcome which has provided a wonderful
opportunity to speak to them about the Lord.”
The couple hold regular house group meetings and Bible studies at their home and
Nicholas has been busy working amongst the science and law students who
attend the various universities in
Kyoto
as well as running marriage seminars and conducting weddings at weekends.
Again this has given him the chance to speak to all their unsaved
relatives and friends about their need for salvation.
At the end of last year
they were given a prophecy that God would provide them with keys to open
up new opportunities to witness. Pray that God continues to give them
these opportunities. Nicholas and Joanna specifically asked that we
should pray for courage on behalf of young Japanese believers as they made
a stand for the Lord.
‘Because of the
earthquake and the other disasters that have happened, they are beginning
to lose their faith in material things. Pray that God will fill that void
in their hearts.’
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