By Laura Foushee, CBF field personnel
When our family returned to Kanazawa after nearly six years in Tokyo to serve alongside Kanazawa Baptist Church again, one of the things that excited us was for our daughter, Ada, to attend Kanazawa Megumi Kindergarten. The preschool has been a ministry of Kanazawa Baptist Church for 70 years, and it was one of the first communities we served when we moved to Japan in 2013. In addition to teaching English to the preschoolers several times a month, we also taught English conversation classes for mothers. When we returned to Kanazawa, we were delighted to find out some of Ada’s classmates were the younger siblings and children of parents we had befriended over eight years earlier. I sat between two of those mothers at the school’s Christmas pageant this past year and told them, “I never imagined 10 years ago that I would be sitting with the two of you as we watch our children play Mary, Joseph and one of the wise men in the pageant together.”
As we prepared this winter for Ada’s graduation in March, I recalled attending previous graduations as a teacher and crying as the younger students sang songs to say goodbye to their older “brothers and sisters,” dressed like little grown-ups in frilly dresses and suits with shorts, who were preparing to move on to elementary school. This year, I attended as a parent as my own concluded her sweet preschool years and was anxiously awaited the big transition to primary school. And yes, I cried. A lot.
To be honest, I was not sure that Ada would graduate from Megumi Kindergarten. Since our first three years in Kanazawa, Megumi’s student population is half of what it was then. A national declining birth rate and an increase in dual income families in the heart of city has meant fewer families find that traditional half-day preschool models meet their family’s childcare needs. As the school has watched other preschools like them shut their doors in recent years, it has continued to adjust to survive, knowing that difficult decisions might have to be made in the coming years.
Now that Ada has graduated and our younger child will begin there this spring, we have experienced firsthand the Christian witness of this preschool. Though many of the teachers and most of the students are not Christian, the children learn how to pray, recite scripture and sing hymns daily. But even more than that, the school has created an environment that exercises openness, patience and grace for each student that walks into the school.
For us, the school embraced Ada as a three-and-a-half-year-old who did not speak Japanese (and the teachers did not speak English!) and love her through all the communication gaps. And then they celebrated with us over a year later as Ada finally started outputting the Japanese she had been hearing and connecting with her classmates on a different level.
I do not know what the future of Megumi Kindergarten will be, but I give thanks to God that in a full-circle moment that has come through our long-term presence, I have been a part of the ministry of this school as both a teacher and a parent. I give thanks to God for 70 years of showing the love of Christ to the thousands of students and families it has served, praying that the seeds planted even years ago will take root in the hearts of those whom it has loved.