Ehoba

Once upon a time, I was living with a family in a suburb of a major city in Japan. Japanese suburbs are fairly rural- the Japanese tend to build vertically when they build due to lack of space, so there were small farms and rural temples about mixed in with the fairly nice modern houses.

When one does laundry in Japan, it is generally hung outside to dry rather than being run through a dryer. Since I was in school most of the time, my choices for doing laundry were fairly limited to the weekend. One Sunday, I was starting to take my wash out to hang when my host mother stopped me.

{Don't dry your laundry out there today!}* she said. {The neighbors always have barbeques on Sunday. All your clothing will smell like food for the week.}

I thanked her for telling me, going to set up the indoor drying rack in my room instead. When I came back, I asked her why the neighbors did that. As far as I had seen, they were a fairly normal Japanese family, doing their best to ignore the fact that their neighbors were hosting a gaijin and going about their business.

{They're... what do you call them...} She thought for a moment. "Ehoba."

"Ehoba?"

{Yes... they're not quite Christians... they come to the door sometimes and ask if we've accepted Jesus, and I tell them 'No thanks, I'm Buddhist!'}

{You can't mean Jehovah's Witnesses?}

{That sounds right.}

{I didn't think they HAD Jehovah's Witnesses in Japan!}

{Maybe not; let's look it up.}

So we pulled out the battered old Japanese-English dictionary she kept by the kitchen table, and there it was... Ehoba- Jehovah's Witness. You could have knocked me over with a poke, I was so surprised to find out that my Japanese next door neighbors were Jehovah's Witnesses.

Come to think of it, I'm still kind of shocked!

*{} = Translated from Japanese