Catholic Mass for Agnostics and Anglicans in Japan

    My daughter recently was granted acceptance into a catholic school in a nearby city and as newcoming parents we were sent an invitation to the school's Christmas "Missa" which, not actually being catholic myself, I had to look up online to find that it is the Latin word for mass in the religious sense, not the scientific. By the time it had occurred to me to have any misgivings about going to a church service when we aren't exactly church folk, my husband had already RSVPed and I was getting excited about hearing Christmas songs.

    We got to the building and waited in line to enter the little cathedral and it was actually nice in sense to be in a Christian religious space that was not just a wedding backdrop as so many things that look like cathedrals or churches seem to be in this country.

    First came the Christmas concert, which started with a group of children singing various holiday songs, some in Latin and others in Japanese. All of the children sang well and at least one seemed to be of equally mixed race to my daughter. My eyes teared up, watching the girl and seeing how at ease she was with her peers-- how included. That was something I wasn't sure I could give my daughter in this country, a factor I've been more aware of since a boy on my daughter's bus yelled "HAFU" at her last week. My daughter, the school's bus attendant, and apparently everyone but me ignored the boy completely, but it bothered me. I've never had anyone treat my daughter that way and I haven't heard the kid so much as mutter since then, but I am paying more attention now.

    After the choir came an orchestra that included a horn section-- something Texas high school orchestras almost never have as those instruments usually belong to the football team's musical escort: the marching band. Every orchestra I played in for the decade that I studied the cello was just strings, sometimes not even with proper orchestra music. This gathering by comparison seemed much more elegant.

    Among the songs the orchestra played was Sleigh Ride, a song I had not heard in almost 20 years and not since the last time I played it during the Christmas concert with my high school orchestra. I was overcome by nostalgia instantly and still remembered around half of the notes I had memorized back in my freshman year when no one knew I needed glasses and I didn't know everyone else could read the sheet music without leaning so close to it.

    The wave of nostalgia faded into amusement with the next holiday medley and eventually the music stopped. Half of the crowd left then, content with the ninety minute musical performance. A few others came in for what would be the third Catholic mass I had ever attended.

I was not prepared for this much kanji.

    Because my husband's only experiences with Christianity came by means of British boarding school, he wasn't used to any of the procedures in Japanese and was as surprised as I was to find that what in English is usually simplified to, "And also with you." somehow becomes a formal, kanji-laden expression in Japanese.

I also came to realize that my glasses need some fine tuning as I frequently misread the hiragana on the music provided in the program.

    It was still fun but significantly less nostalgic than I had expected overall. In a way, it was still getting my family into something similar to a culture I was a part of for some of my youth, even as it was a different church and in a different language.