Marietta Ambler

Kindergatens Reaching Out

Part II. Even High School Boys and Girls Come Back— Parents Are Brought in Through Their Children

By Marietta Ambler, U. T. O. Kindergartner in the District of Kyoto, Japan

In the first part of this article we showed how the influence ot the Christian kindergarten prevailed after our little ones had left us and entered the government primary schools. But that is not all. There are older boys and girls of high school age—old kindergarten graduates or relatives and friends of present kindergarten children. Can we reach them? And what about the parents?

Two years ago in Koriyama we began a class for High School girls who had been twelve years or so ago among our first kindergarten children. They met in the kindergarten room in the evening once a month for English and afterwards a Bible story, but they were a bare handful—it seemed almost a waste of time. Last fall the happy thought came to us of extending an invitation to the High School at large, and they came, of course, the first afternoon—a great body, seventy or eighty—as if to the zoo, to see the antics of the foreign lady

This was a year ago. The foreign lady’s antics have become an old story, but still some thirty come, full of giggles and excitement and some real efforts after that elusive thing—the English tongue! On these afternoons the kindergarten tables are set out with games and there are a few books to read—and strange to say the book most read is a simple child’s story of The Life of Christ. It shows which way the wind is blowing—not only this, but that little class begun two years ago, which seemed so much a waste of time, has become the nucleus of a Bible class for High School girls on Sunday afternoons.

They kept coming, these kindergarten graduates of years ago, on Sunday afternoons to see the kindergarten teacher after their little evening English Class was abandoned for the larger afternoon one for High School girls in general.

One Sunday afternoon (so the kindergarten teacher told me later in great glee) the weekly Sunday visitors let it out. “Aren’t we ever going to do anything but play on Sunday afternoons ?” they said. “Aren’t we ever going to hear any more of those Bible stories we used to hear last year in the evening class? We are just forgetting all those stories we used to hear in kindergarten.” So that was the real thing. They were asking for it themselves, and the Bible class began.

This is the Japanese head kindergarten teacher’s job—her way of reaching out beyond the kindergarten children. Together we sit on the floor and make out the course. We will begin with the very beginning, God the Creator of all, and man the highest creation, and Abraham so early in history, hearing God’s voice, and leaving home and kith and kin to cross the desert, and so on.

Then there are High School boys. We must reach out to them, so once a month in the evening they come swinging in through the Koriyama Kindergarten gate for English, too. There is the earnest, studious one, always on time and very w ise; the debonair one, a little swaggering, whose face, as innocent as a May morning, still manages to make the others laugh, and the fat boy, often late, who thumps in like a young earthquake. Replicas they are of American boys, those exasperating and yet withal delightful creatures, one’s own brothers or cousins at knowing “seventeen,” most dear to memory. Watching them it is not easy to maintain an altogether stern and pedagogic eye—and how to reach them now when they are gay and young and strong— here is another problem for the kindergarten reaching out to think about.

One has a feeling against too many sermons, but if somehow they could begin to want the thing themselves! Before the summer holidays each boy was given a copy of St. Mark’s Gospel. The exciting thing about the copy was that it was written in both English and in Japanese in parallel columns, so that even the debonair one would feel obliged to look it over even for mere curiosity’s sake. At our first class this fall the boys voted on a text book for English reading. Some voted for English fairy tales, one for poetry, one for biographies of famous men, and one for St. Mark’s Gospel. We are going to be fair and take each suggestion in turn, but even so St. Mark’s Gospel is to have a hearing—and best of all it was a boy’s own vote!

Those boys are opening, no doubt, these Gospels now and then at home or in school, for the most part curiously, of course, but was it not so too with those first disciples, St. Andrew and St. John? Curiously they followed, asking where He dwelt, but the Master, knowing all, bade them to come and see, and, grow-’ ing to know Him, that first curiosity became a lifelong worship.

And last but not least are the kindergarten parents. Do any of them ever become Christians? As yet those who have received baptism are few indeed, and yet these first years of growing friendly, of mothers’ meetings, of Thanksgiving and Christmas festivals where parents were invited, \ too, and of all the other little ways of growing to be friends and of making clearer each year the Christian point of view— surely these have not been lost years.

For the first time in our history we are beginning a weekly Bible class in Koriyama for kindergarten mothers, because the time has come when there are those who definitely wish to study it. There is one mother there, too, recently baptized and very lately confirmed. She is a doctor’s wife who has had five children in kindergarten. It is a warm Church family. These are Christian young women whom Miss Ambler has trained so that they are now able to conduct Bible Classes for the boys and girls who come back and into which these new Christians enter. I like to think of that little congregation as it was a few months ago on the Sunday evening on which this kindergarten mother received baptism.

After the service was over there was, of course, the teaparty to welcome the new Christians, and as we sat around with our teacups in a kind of circle, young men and maidens, middle-aged people and old ones, what to my consternation was to become the topic of conversation but the Immigration Act! It was natural, of course. Everybody was talking about it, and yet, whatever was I to say!

There was an old man opposite me with a long beard—a picture of old Japan. He looked like an old samurai and in the old days no samurai would brook an insult. “If God is really our Father and men of all nations are brothers,” I heard him say, and hearing felt as if I, too, might be in for “grave consequences” ! There was unfortunately no American senator near by to explain—but all such agitation was quite unnecessary. In ten minutes we were a family, talking as families do quite honestly and openly of the faults and problems of our different countries, trying fairly to see somehow’ from many different angles. Finally Kashimoto San summed it all up for us—nice Kashimoto San, who even burned up the family shrine when the family became Christians because he was determined it was never to be sold and become a temptation for anybody else.

“After all,” he said, “the only thing that can ever settle these difficult problems between the countries is Christianity.” And so we talked of different things until the little teaparty broke up for the evening. I have thought many times of the warmth of that small room where we of different lands—of lands, moreover, even then in the throes of misunderstanding—could meet as members of one family. Those old, old words came back to me, no longer vague, but rich with real meaning, “The Kingdom of God”—so that was it!

However it might be outside, no touch of bitterness was here. In that small room we were members one of another in the Father’s Kingdom. But to go back to the mothers. There is Mrs. Muramatsu, too, always to remember if there ever comes a day of dark discouragement, and the blessed memory of Mieko, her little girl. About three years ago Mieko began coming to our kindergarten. Her young parents Were nominal Christians of another Communion who had moved here to Otsu a year or two before, but had somehow drifted away from churchgoing. As the mother has told us since, everything of the spirit seemed vague to her—she could not seem to find God, but it was all clear to Mieko. Mieko was drinking in all she heard at a little Sunday School near by and at our kindergarten. “Why don’t you ever go to church?” she would say over and over again to her parents. A year or so went by and suddenly Mieko was taken desperately ill. In a few short hours her parents knew that there was no hope of keeping her.

Before long Mieko entered the heavenly country, brightest of all, perhaps, for little children. From that night the change which came into the mother’s life because of the faith of this child can best be given in her own words: “Through the death of this child I have learned of the existence of the spiritual world. I have learned that the spirit lives after'death. My discouragement and doubt have utterly changed into brilliant hope. I have learned that God and life everlasting are the true objects of human existence, and seeing in all that happened the Providence of God I worship in exceeding gladness before Him.” And what the mother writes is true. Over and over again one sees in her face that light “that never was on land or sea” the peace of God. Are kindergartens worth while? Gan kindergartens reach out to young and old far beyond the bounds of kindergarten proper? A thousand golden opportunities say y es! God give us eyes as little children that we may see the invisible hosts which ever fight for us, and eyes as the Master’s, that we may see the fields in Japan as white to the harvest as ever they were long ago in Judea and Galilee!

Rev. John C. Ambler7 (Rev. John Ambler6 , Thos. M.5 , John4 , Edward3 , Richard Ambler2 , Edward Jaquelin1 ), youngest son of Rev. John Ambler and Anna Mason, his wife, b. June 25, 1859; he has been a missionary in Japan for several years. Married 1ST annie Lou Johnson. I wrote to Rev. John C. Ambler; as I have had no reply, cannot give names of his children, but I will copy a letter from Southern Churchman, written by his daughter to her aunt in Boydton, Va. It will be of interest to members of the Junior Auxiliary as well as to other readers of the Southern Churchman (and of this book) :

My Dear Aunt Eannie: —We are all in Arima now, and I am so glad. We were able to leave the hot city of Osaka and come here for the summer. It has been very, very hot in Osaka lately, and it has been very hot here, too; but of course it is a great deal cooler here than it is there. Not long before we came here, Mrs. Patton, with her children, paid us a visit. One Sunday afternoon she took Sadie and me out to the Haku Ai Sha, or Widely Loving Society. The Widely Loving Society is not, I think, connected with our mission, but then our mission helps it when it is in trouble, and it is a Christian Orphanage. Not long ago there were very heavy rains, and the Haku Ai Sha buildings, being in low grounds, the water soon came up to the first floors of the house; but as part of the house had an upstairs the children were able to go up there. I heard that when Miss Hayashi, the lady who takes care of the little children, saw the flood coming, she cooked a lot of rice, so the children would have plenty to eat. Then she took the children upstairs and read to them about Noah and the ark.

Now, I must go back to the afternoon Sadie and myself, with Mrs. Patton, went out to the Haku Ai Sha. Sadie and myself decided we would choose one child and support her together. So’ we chose a little girl whose name is O Hana San, or Miss Flower. This little girl has a very sad history. About a year ago she and her mother \rere on the train. When the train arrived at the station the mother got off before the train had quite stopped. The mother was badly hurt and the little girl’s leg was cut off about half way below the knee. The mother and her child were taken to a hospital, and the next day the mother died. The little girl stayed at the hospital till her leg became better. The doctor of the hospital, who was a Presbyterian Christian, told Mrs. Winn, an earnest Presbyterian missionary, about the child, and she asked the Haku Ai Sha to take her. The little girl’s mother’s last words were: “How is Hana? How is Hana?” Hana San is now three years old, and at the orphanage all are very kind to her. The little girl’s nearest relation was a grandmother, seventy years old. I think she had a few more, but they, I expect, would have been unkind to her.

I thought, maybe, you could tell or read this to your Junior Auxiliary, and they might like to help Sadie and me to support- her, if they are not too busy with other things. Even a little tiny bit of money would help a great deal.

I hope you all are well. With lots of love to you and grandma and Uncle Sidney, I am Your loving niece, Marietta Ambler.