Things you don't expect to happen in Japan . . .

. . . such as the Jehovah's Witnesses knocking at your door. Or in our case, peeking in through the open door while we were putting away the groceries on a Tuesday night.

In a country that is not only overwhelmingly Buddhist and Shinto, but in which a syncretic approach to religious observance predominates, the experience of having the JWs tap on your door as they would in Australia is a tad disorienting, to be frank. Had this been Australia, I would have relished the opportunity to engage these people--I am not as reluctant nowadays to debate the Saturday morning religious callers as I once might have been, for reasons which you'll have to ask me in private. On this occasion, given that our visitors were Japanese, I settled for as polite a "No thankyou, I'm not interested" as I could manage. I hope I didn't seem too rude.

There are apparently more than 200, 000 JWs in Japan. Suppressed by Imperial Japan in the interwar period, proselytism by American missionaries in the 60s led to a rapid growth in Japanese converts over the last three decades of the 20th century. (Growth has fallen off significantly since then.) The country was visited by the founder of the sect, Charles Taze Russell, in 1911, on a world tour to convert the "heathens." He described the prevailing Japanese attitude towards religion as "toward infidelity, doubt and atheism." My kind of place. :)