{"id":342740,"date":"2014-01-31T04:10:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T03:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/loving-serving-in-japan\/"},"modified":"2024-06-06T12:11:39","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:11:39","slug":"loving-serving-in-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/loving-serving-in-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"Loving & Serving in Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cI work as a civil servant in the area of fisheries and marine resources<\/strong>. During my 22 years of marriage I\u2019ve moved 5 times to different regions of Japan<\/a> because of my job,\u201d recounts Nagatani Hiroshi. He is a married focolarino<\/a> with three grown children. He was born into a Buddhist family but later followed his wife in being baptized a Catholic. \u201cI thought that by doing so I would be providing my children a single religious reference in a social context that is quite diverse spiritually.\u201d In 1993 Nagatani and his wife met the spirituality of unity<\/a> and felt urged to live the Gospel by placing themselves at the service of others, especially by contributing to the spiritual formation of the laity in their parish. Family life was still filled with moves and \u201cthis brought an element of adventure. One time we went to live on the island of Tsushima where there is no Catholic church. At first we felt totally lost, but then we became friends with an Anglican priest on the island, and would attend the Anglican liturgy on Sundays. Thanks to this friendship, when a Catholic priest began coming to the island to visit us, the Anglican priest was quite willing to place the church at the disposal of the Catholics for Mass. Thus all the Catholics on the island began to unite and we were able to contribute to their spiritual growth.\u201d Recently Nagatani and his wife were invited to join the Diocesan staff that runs marriage preparation courses for young couples. They were entrusted with the lessons on procreation and life. \u201cMy wife is a midwife, so she dealt with the technical side. I dealt more with the family relationship side, that is, the variety of issues that are involved and how they could be dealt with as a couple. In carrying out this service I find myself conveying to the young people an idea of Igino Giordani, which was particularly helpful to me. Igino Giordani <\/a>would say that all the time a couple does not live out mutual love is wasted time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mutual love in a family becomes the driving force behind constructive relations of service with an ecumenical dimension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}