January 2003

To our Friends and Supporters:

The New Year is now upon us, and we have new challenges to face. Related to our work here in Tsukuba, there are two significant challenges (and opportunities) we are facing that we need to your prayer support behind. One has to do with the land that our facilities stand on. Ever since we arrived in 1986, the lot next door has stood undeveloped and even undifferentiated from the Christian Center lot. In fact, it borders us on two sides, as our lot is long and narrow at the street and then widens out at the back, where the Center building and our house are located. For years, we have had an unwritten agreement with the owner to allow us to park on the lot in exchange for taking care of the weeds, etc. We have just found out that he is putting it on the market. Even though land prices here in Japan have declined considerably since the "bubble" burst, it is still going to take a lot of cash for the church/center to purchase it—somewhere on the order of $350-400 thousand! We are starting negotiations this month, and we ask for your prayers as this process unfolds. Not only would it be a considerable hindrance to our overall ministry if that land were walled off and developed for some other purpose, but from the positive side, if we are able to get that land, it would really open up new possibilities for expanding the total Christian ministry here. Working with the Ibaraki YMCA and the Tsukuba Gakuen Church next door, we envision being able to put up a multi-use building to serve both as an education complex for the church but also as a center for expanded ministry to young children and their families. There is clearly a growing demand for such services here in this area, and being located directly across a lightly traveled street from a very nice public park, it means we would be able to put together a very effective program without the large outlay of land for play area. Likewise, with the new train to central Tokyo from Tsukuba scheduled to open in two years (and being only about three blocks from the station), a great deal of future development close by is practically a sure thing.

The other challenge I (Tim) am working on is technological in nature. Several Japanese supporters have been working with me to translate a number of articles on faith and science with the intent of setting up a good web site in Japanese. Already, a small site is up and running, but the logistics of getting the pages set up and running is rather daunting to say the least. At least the present lack of skills makes it seem that way! At any rate, a considerable effort is being expended to get it up and running. Presently, one of the local pastors has set up a small web site with a few things on it, but it will need to be greatly expanded and improved. You can look at it at but unless your computer has the software to display Japanese, it will all be a jumble of gibberish. As each byte of encoded information on a computer has only 256 possible combinations (kind of like Braille, except there are 8 bits that are either on or off, as opposed to only 6 dots or no dots per Braille letter), it takes 2 bytes to encode each of the Japanese characters. 256 is plenty to handle our 26 letters and a variety of punctuation symbols, etc. But for Japanese, you need a system with several thousand possible combinations, which takes 2 bytes per symbol to accomplish. Thus, Japanese read on an English-only computer results in as long series of nonsense symbols. To most of you, real Japanese might look pretty much the same, i.e. a "long series of nonsense symbols," but they are pretty easy to tell apart! In the past, even in this newsletter, my apostrophes have gotten translated into gibberish due to the interface problem between my Japanese computer and the English environment of most of your computers. I think I know how to avoid that now, but we'll see.

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

In Christ,

Tim and Juji Boyle

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 178