Akichika, Mabel

• Mrs. Mabel Akichika was the visionary mother of CAJ.
• Her story has been kept alive in various forms, including the booklet Christian Academy in Japan: 1950-1994 by June Habbestad (long-time librarian at CAJ) and in annual "appearances" by former teacher Michele Postema (teacher, - 2008 pictured at right) with new staff and second grade classes giving the following speech:
  • My, how this place has changed…got lost coming from the eki. Looks very different from when I first set eyes on it in 1948.
  • Don’t recognize me? I’m Mabel Akichika…the MA of CAJ. I’m the missionary lady who had a dream…might call this school the School of Dreams…if we built it, they would come! You look confused?
  • Let me start at the beginning:
    • My husband Yutaka and I landed in Yokohama on Oct. 23, 1947. Actually being able to come to Japan as American missionaries, since we were ethnically Japanese, was a miracle. (Aside: General Douglas MacArthur helped get our visas approved.)
    • But before we had left our home in the USA, we were at a prayer meeting and God gave me a vision. I know that sounds strange, but I saw a land with a field of wheat, with ferns growing there, black and white cows, and empty houses.
    • When we arrived in Japan, the American GIs gave us a nice house, but I didn’t unpack—oh, no—because I was looking for that place with the empty houses. Another missionary, another Mabel, Mabel Francis, told me that no such place existed.
    • But I persisted, until one day, while I was riding on the Seibu train line (gesture to the train), I looked out of the window, and what should I see? Many empty buildings! So I got off the train and asked what kind of place this was…”It used to be a dairy… the Morinaga Dairy, which had been chosen to supply milk for the Imperial Household!”
    • “What color cows did this dairy have?” I asked. And the local residents looked at me sort of strangely and replied, “Black and white.”
      • “Thank you, Lord,” I said. “This is the place.” And I picked a little plant, a fern, to take home to show my husband.
  • Well, the rest of the story gets a little complicated, but almost every day I traveled to Higashi Kurume, a little inaka place back in those days, let me tell you. A Korean man owned this property, and I asked his caretaker if I could use the house for children’s meetings. One day the owner came and watched a meeting and afterwards he came up to me and said, ”You are doing a good work. I will give you this place.”
  • But there were some complications, which are a little hard for me to recall. I knew that I had the Korean man’s promise, but I didn’t have a legal document for the property. So I prayed… but I also did something that I learned about from the Bible: I walked around this property—once a day for 6 days, and 7 times on the 7th day, claiming it for the Lord.
  • And, you know, my mission, the Far East Gospel Crusade—you call it SEND today—got the deed to the property. (To show our appreciation to the Korean man, my husband gave him an expensive 16mm movie projector and the head of our mission, Mr. Sweet, gave him his brand-new Plymouth car!)
  • A few years later my mission sold this Higashi Kurume property to the Japan Evangelical School Association, which later became CAJ—and here you are today!
  • Of course, there still was that little matter of the mura-roads…but I think that a guy named Rick Seely took care of that in 2000-something.
  • (Take book out of purse). Well, I’m off to take a walk around this School of Dreams. (I’m glad a lady named June Habbestad recorded this story in her little book about CAJ, or these young ‘uns wouldn’t know about it.)