Akita

This is September 9th.

Japan's Mitsubishi materials to expand tungsten recycling capacity at Akita.

That is Reuters via mining.com.

So as I've long said here, you know, recycling is not the most glamorous subject.

Mary mystically weeps because many priests and bishops betray the Church just as Judas betrayed our dearest Lord.

Sister Agnes Sasagawa says, was a middle-aged Japanese woman who converted from Buddhism to Catholicism and eventually became a consecrated religious sister at a convent in Akita, Japan.

When Sister Agnes entered the convent in the early 1970s, she was totally and incurably deaf.

But despite her physical handicap, Sister Agnes was blessed with extraordinary spiritual experiences.

When the sisters of the convent assembled for morning prayer, they found blood on the hand of the statue of Mary.

The wound exactly matched the wound on the hand of Sister Agnes.

A second message of Our Lady of Akita came in August of 1973.

It was a first Friday when the heavenly voice from the statue warned the following, quote, "...many men in the world afflict the Lord.

And then, so, so, and, and, and this does lead into what came next.

So there was a lot of difficulty planning out the rest of our day, uh, before we ended up in the evening in, in, uh, Akita City.

And, and, and the reason is because...

So, so we should say that we were in Jōmonji, and we wanted to get to another place called Tempo in Yuzawa City.

You know, he didn't know if we were traveling up there on vacation or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's like, "Oh, you know, yeah, we want you guys to come." And I'm like, "Oh, you know, actually we're literally on our way to Akita City, like, [laughs] after this, but, but that's really great." You know, so they, they, th- yeah, definitely the, the, the jazz, I think, like, the, the, the, the, uh, like you said, the, the coffee and the lunch...

I mean, lunch seemed to be a big thing.

Yeah.

But I think like in Akita-

Yeah

... um, up the northeast like of Japan, like they've set up like a, oh, what would you say, like liaison offices or something like for foreigners-

That's

what a bad loan is, right? So trying to explain what that problem was, what it looked like, and doing it through people, right? Not an abstraction, but some guy in a small company in Akita who no longer can pay back his loans because he can't sell as many t-shirts.

So that was what I did.

I went and tried to tell more complex stories in a way that was understandable.

When you as a journalist kind of get onto this and you go to Akita, you interview the one of the shop that cannot pay back his loan and you've got his story kind of captured.

That's just like one slice of the whole thing that's unfolding.

Earlier you kind of made a comparison with, it's not a PhD thesis, it's just like a piece of the whole picture.

But do you feel like sometimes you want to write about the whole picture to get people to kind of really see how that story of the man in Akita not being able to pay the loan kind of has an impact on the bank, which at the time is maybe one of the largest in the world, which has an impact on this and the butterfly effect of how this is kind of all interconnected.

So we're talking above a diocesan level approbation.

Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, Akita, and Kibeo.

Now at Kibeo, where Our Lady warned that fire could fall from heaven if we don't change, the statue of Our Lady was weeping, was shedding tears.

And in many ways, it's a statue of Mary co-redemptrix.

So I traveled extensively through Japan.

And that was not just the Nagoya, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Sapporo, and Tokyo, but rather the smaller places like Akita and Aomori.

and in Kobe and so on, that you really get a better feel for the essence of Japanese people and Japanese culture.

And I think that was something that not only served me well back then from Tokyo, but also carried on as I moved slowly around the globe and based myself in different locations.

It took probably about an hour to get there.

I believe there was some... a wee bit of highway tomfoolery with wrong exits and... going on and off ramps a couple times, but we did make it there in about an hour, and it's interesting, because it's still in Aomori Prefecture, but it's the southeast part of the prefecture, and it's in the area called Hachinoe, and I was reading a little bit about it, so Hachinoe's got quite different weather patterns, so that's why, if you go right across to the other side of the island where you're in Akita and Niigata, that's rice-growing country, but because of the weather here, they don't grow rice, but what they do grow is buckwheat, and buckwheat is, of course, what you make soba noodles out of, so And apparently the local soba is very, very well regarded.

And this place, Tomon, I mean, Philip, do you remember when we, I think when we got out of the car, I almost kind of gasped.

It's a massive, massive, like wooden, old Japanese wooden structure.

I'm really sorry.

Can you come tomorrow? And I was like, uh, you know, actually we're, nope.

First train tomorrow down to Akita.

So we'll have to save it for next time.