Featured In Memory of "Uncle Miya"

If you've been here for awhile, you may remember my Japanese Bible translation partner for the Lifeline Japanese NT. His family name was Miyakawa, and we all called him "Uncle Miya" (pron. me-yah). Uncle Miya passed on to his reward in Heaven on Jan. 18. I haven't seen him since we left Japan in 2014 to come here to teach, but I miss him. However, I am happy for him to be in Heaven with Jesus. He can look down now and see how God is using the translation he worked so hard on. (More about that later.)

In his last days he was in the hospital with various illnesses. His final stay was after a stroke. He became unresponsive for awhile, then went to Heaven. (More on that later.)

On this thread I'll share a few memories of his personal testimony and of translating with him. It was a hoot! He was quite a character, and a wonderful linguist and translator.

 

Uncle Miya was a high school English teacher, and that's where he honed his linguistic ability. He knew both English and Japanese extremely well, though he did not speak English that well. He retired early from teaching because of the lack of respect among modern Japanese teenagers.

He went for many years to a well-known liberal church in our town of Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan. There he rubbed shoulders with a Christian author, one of the most famous novelists in Japan. Her name is Ayako Miura (三浦綾子 (1922–1999), and there is even a museum in her honor in the city, which I have visited.

Miura's most famous work was arguably Shiokari Tōge (1968). It was published in English in 1974 as Shiokari Pass. I highly recommend this book if you are interested at all in Japan. It is the novelization of a famous historical incident when a Christian train conductor sacrificed his own life to save the passengers on a runaway train car careening down a mountain. You can stop at the small train station at the top of the mountain where there is a memorial to the man.

Uncle MIya was chosen as the final editor and proof reader for this famous novel. That shows his great linguistic ability as well as the trust Japanese folk had in his skills.

 

Uncle Miya did not get saved in the liberal church. No wonder! My wife and I once lead a woman to Christ from that denomination. She had been told by her pastor to be baptized 20 years before, even though she did not know what that meant or what salvation was. "You'll learn that later," the pastor told her.

We were telling her about Heaven when suddenly a light came on for her. "Oh," she said, "You are talking about the Bible Heaven, but I was thinking about the Buddhist Paradise!"

It took a family crisis to finally bring Uncle Miya to truly believe in Christ. More on that tomorrow.

 

Uncle Miya’s son was studying to be a dentist, and needed money for school bills. Unknown to Uncle Miya, his wife took out a loan from a loan shark—plenty of those in Japan. He only found out about it when his wife could no longer handle the payments by herself. She attempted to take out a mortgage on their modest home, which had been completely paid for, but there was problem: in Japan, real estate is not jointly owned, so it was in his name and she could do nothing about it. Not only that, after graduating the ungrateful son refused to pay any of the loan.

Uncle Miya was devastated, so he went to his friend Missionary Frank (our coworker) for comfort and counseling. Frank counseled him that what he needed most was the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior. Seeing his spiritual need, Uncle Miya trusted Christ as Savior that very day. Frank then suggested the Japanese family court, and that worked out well. The judge required the son to pay the loan. From then on, to Uncle Miya, Frank could do no wrong, and Uncle Miya began attending the church Frank was planting, and was baptized there.

 

I'd be happy to!

We are at the church a little early today, since my wife had a task to perform here, so I can write a little. I'm trying to remember when Uncle Miya and I started collaborating by looking back at my correspondence. I began our translation in 2002, though I had worked a little with Matthew and John already.

Uncle Miya was brilliant, no doubt about that. He only had a B.A., but could have done well in a graduate program. But he could be crotchety. Japan is what is called an honor-shame society. You must never show disrespect in public there, or the relationship is over.

A new missionary came over to Japan who already knew somewhat of the language, and did a furlough replacement term in our town. He was very educated, had an M.Div., and had even studied Japanese at a graduate school, but he did not have the practical knowledge that interaction with Japanese people in Japan gives you. I sent him to Uncle Miya to round out his Japanese proficiency, but that effort failed.

One day he got angry at Uncle Miya, probably about some minor detail of Japanese grammar. According to Uncle Miya who was seated at the time, "He stood over me and yelled at me." Big mistake. From that time on, Uncle Miya refused to have anything to do with him, and the new missionary missed a wonderful chance to improve his language! It's hard to blame my friend. As it became obvious with this incident, Uncle Miya's forte was not in teaching Japanese to foreigners, but in Bible translation, where he became an irreplaceable part of the effort.

 

Uncle Miya joined the translation team in August of 2003. There were three of us at that time: Uncle Miya, Frank, and me. I provided the initial Japanese text by translating into Japanese from Scrivener's Textus Receptus. I would then give the file to Uncle Miya and Frank, and wait for their comments.

More about Uncle Miya later, but let me share about Frank.

During the Vietnam War, Frank was in the U. S. Air Force. He was sent to Pennsylvania for a crash course in Russian. They were not allowed to speak anything but Russian for that time--total immersion! Frank then joined Air Force intelligence, and had some fascinating experiences.

He would fly as an Russian analyst listening for fighter pilots' chatter. Landing in Vietnam, they often found bullet holes from AK47s in their plane.

One day they were flying along the Turkish border with Russia when Frank heard a Russian fighter pilot say, "I have lock-on. Do I have permission to fire?" Fortunately for Japan, where Frank and his wife served God as missionaries for many years, permission was denied!

Needless to say, Frank was a tremendous linguist, excellent in Japanese though sometimes rusty in Greek. He was a huge addition to the team, though he could not come all of the time.

 

During the course of our translation, I talked (phone, in person, email) to many who wanted to join the effort. This is an area where a missionary translator must be very careful. There are some bad eggs out there!

One would be translator I knew had participated in a former effort which failed. He was one reason it failed! He was pugnacious and believed he was always right, but he did not know the Greek and had faults in his English too. One day he approached me with his version of John 3:16, and though I tried to be nice, I could see that his rendering was unusable.

Once I got a call from an American man in the Yokosuka area, where a large joint American and Japanese naval base is. This man was a businessman, providing a service to the American sailors on the base, and overall a good man. So anyway, he wanted to join the translation effort.

"Do you know Greek?" I asked. Nope, no luck there. "Can you speak Japanese?" I queried. Nope, can't do that either. But hey, he wanted to contribute financially, and that's good, right? So I instructed him on how to send an offering to us through our mission board. Nope, he did not believe in mission boards. Regretfully (NOT!) I turned down his offer of personal help.

Then he found a Japanese man who he thought could be a translator. In such a case I would give an assignment to the would be translator to see how capable he was. According to the American businessman, this man had done a couple of chapters in John, so I asked to see them. Never did. Apparently the would-be translator had gotten a bad case of stage fright, or maybe he was just being coerced and didn't like that.

I tell this story to say that Uncle Miya was not like that. He was not only very capable, and fearless in his corrections of my work, he was extremely faithful. Every Friday was translation day, and in the morning I would work on the base text in Japanese from Greek. After lunch I would pick him up, take him to the church, and then translate with him for several hours. (We found that 3 hours was pretty much the limit before our brains froze. Japanese is intense.) In all of the years we translated together, he never missed a session unless he was sick or we were in the States on furlough.

Folks, that is what it takes to be a Bible translator: faithfulness. This afternoon I will teach "Bible Translation Theory and Practice" to three future translators in our MA on Bible translation, two wonderful young people, and a 40 year old who wants to translate into a Middle Eastern language. (You would be amazed!) To these young people I will emphasize just that: be faithful. It takes years and incredible amounts of time to translate the Bible. But God is always faithful, and the Holy Spirit is the Helper.

 

It's a complicated subject, but OnlyaSinner has helped. In addition to the three styles that his son mentioned (often called levels of politeness), there is how children talk to each other, and how you would talk to the Emperor, so five levels in all--at least!

Concerning showing respect, consider how you greet a Japanese with a bow. It is actually more complicated than you might think. Japanese will tell you that they have a vertical society, while saying Americans have a horizontal society in which all are equal. The person who is lower in society in Japan will bow lower, and if the higher person bows once, the lower person will bow twice. So, you can gather who is higher in Japanese society by how they bow to each other.

Concerning the disrespectful young people, this is a recent development (20-30 years). It's a huge problem in the education system of modern Japan (which is not nearly as good overall as you have heard). When they get to college, as OnlyaSinner said, some amount of respect kicks in as they mature. However, when the college grad joins a company, he is hit like a ton of bricks and forced into that company's particular type of respect and shame. There is a lot more to it, but these examples may help you.

Just for fun, here is a cartoon about how you apologize when you are a high muckymuck who has blown it. Godzilla is apologizing for what the podium says is "destructive behavior."

 

To continue, every Friday was translation day. On the way to the church I would stop at a convenience store and pick up some "Venezuela Bitter" dark chocolate, the best chocolate I've ever had. It came in a little box with individually wrapped pieces--typical Japanese over-packaging. I might also add some other candy of some kind. That particular convenience store also had a great latte. While we translated we savored these delicious Japanese treats. (They sure know how to make sweet things!)

All morning I would work at the church on the base translation from the Greek. We had a nice Japanese desktop PC there with both Japanese and English Bible software, and other software also useful for translation, such as a Japanese English dictionary. I also had other helps available, such as various lexicons, including a couple of small Greek-Japanese lexicons.

I would have a nice lunch at the church prepared by my sweetheart, then pick up Uncle Miya at about 1:00. He was always ready and waiting--a man of great character! On the way to the church, we would discuss English idioms--a passion of my friend. He would name an idiom from a certain item, and then I would. Sometimes he would know one that I didn't, and sometimes I would think of one he didn't know. (Note that an idiom is a word or phrase the meaning of which is quite different from the literal meaning.)

For example, one day we did cat idioms:

It's raining cats and dogs.
Cat got your tongue?
The cat's meow. (He really liked that one.)
The cat's out of the bag.

Can you add to this list?

 

It was slightly sweet, but bitter in a good way!

It's bittersweet that I can't buy it in America.

 

I've got to head home--not feeling well and my wife is here to get me. But let me just tell you a little about Uncle Miya's translating face. On Monday I can write more about his corrections on John 1, where we started.

He was opinionated, pushy, easily offended, not afraid to rebuke or disagree with me. And I loved him! And he did a wonderful job with a couple of peculiarities: he loved the classical Japanese and this affected his translations, and he liked rare words.

 

Our first day of translating together was on Aug. 1, 2003. I had been translating by myself for about a year, so it was a huge blessing that God lead a Japanese partner to the work so early, and one so capable.

The first thing I learned was that we were going to innovate--a lot! Looking at John 1:1, Uncle Miya immediately objected to the typical Japanese word for "word," which is kotoba, which is made up of the two Chinese characters for "word" and "leaf" (言葉), though all the other versions used this word. . In classical Japanese, only the first character meant "words," since it was originally a pictograph of a mouth (the square) with lines, or words coming out of it. However, in modern colloquial Japanese the leaf has been added for some strange reason. That's etymology for you!

Since the Japanese word for "word" has a narrower meaning than the Greek logos, Uncle Miya suggested the transliteration logosu (ロゴス). This is actually the name of a large Japanese company, so it is not unknown to the Japanese. Using the loan word, then, allowed us to footnote the word, giving an expanded definition. The Japanese love scholarship and foreign languages (though they are lousy at these), so for us it was a win/win rendering.

In other verses, Uncle Miya began schooling me on Japanese honorifics. This was humbling for me, since I was a graduate of the Tokyo School of the Japanese Language, which did very well at teaching honorifics. One verse he corrected was John 1:5, where I had used an honorific verb for "light shineth." Uncle Miya questioned that, saying in the notes, "Is there anything to imply something to respect the light? Ask Frank." We eventually kept the honorific, but made it more clear that we were talking about Christ, a person. You do not use that particular honorific verb on inanimate objects.

We finished seven whole verses that first day! It would take a while before we learned to work closely together, so in those early days we would get confused, misunderstand, and sometimes butt heads more often than necessary.

I also began to broaden my Japanese vocabulary through Uncle Miya. In v. 15 I had, "...yelled," (叫んだ。) but Uncle Miya suggested "spoke with a loud voice" (大声で言った。), a more adult way of saying it. At a later point in our work, he once rebuked me with, "Pastor, that's what a middle school student would say." Boy, was that humbling!

Occasionally he would be unsatisfied with a verse we had spent a long time on. After our corrected v. 19 he wrote, "Revamp this verse again." And so it went. Folks, in case you have not gathered it, Bible translation is difficult, taxing, tiring, and sometimes intense. But we loved doing it together!

More about John 1 later.

 

Thank you for your concern. I am still recovering from surgery, and get tired easily, but doing well. My wife takes excellent care of me (and the Lord does)!