June 06, 2008

Tokyo South is dead

Long live Tokyo South!

I haven't been keeping up on church reorganizations in Japan, so this news comes to me rather late. But an email from a recent Tokyo South RM confirms that the mission is no more. A bit of research turned up this note in the Church News, February 10, 2007:

Portions of the Japan Tokyo North Mission and Japan Tokyo South Mission are being consolidated and will be known as the Japan Tokyo Mission. The newly aligned Japan Tokyo Mission will be concentrated around the greater Tokyo metropolitan area and its 10 stakes.

Essentially, the Tokyo mission structure has returned to the state it was in when I stepped onto Japanese soil thirty years ago, a few months after the creation of the Tokyo South mission out of the Nagoya and Tokyo missions. My first senior companions were from the Nagoya mission.

My correspondent describes the final days of Tokyo South as a mirror image of its opening days (a good thing, by the way). In another strange turn of events, Kobe mission was reopened. I'd kept the Kobe mission alive in The Path of Dreams for purposes of plot. Now it's alive for real.

Sociologically, this is a curious move. It's like closing the Los Angeles mission and opening one up in Bakersfield. An effort, perhaps, to save the church from the missionaries.

Related posts

How it began
The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

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