Does God care about Japan?

I was looking out the window of a train the other day, speeding ever-so-smoothly across the green countryside of northern Japan.  The fields were perfectly manicured.  Houses and factories were all neat and in good repair.  All of the Japan I could see, for hundreds of miles,  was prosperous and immaculate.

We passed through large cities, some with millions of people.  More than 99% of them are non-Christian.  And almost all of them, according to missionaries, are resistant to the gospel.  Christianity is a religion for foreigners, they think.  And if they have religious needs,  they turn to Shinto and Buddhism.

The Japanese I met there, outside of Christian circles, were gentle and exceedingly respectful.  Their lives seem full of work and family, and all the other quotidian details of a modern, successful society.

But they are noticeably absent of the gospel.  My wife and I did not see one church in our time there.  Of course there are some, but the fact that we spent time in both Kyoto and Tokyo, and saw not one church, is evidence of the exceedingly-thin penetration of the gospel in Japan.

Zipping by these fields and houses and people I wondered.  Does God care about these millions who know him so little, if at all?  Has God given up on them?

Jonah came to mind.  He had been compelled to preach to Nineveh, the capital of what was the Nazi Germany of the ancient near east.  Jonah was hoping the Ninevites would not repent, so that they would be destroyed by God.  To his chagrin, Nineveh repented at his preaching.

This threw Jonah into a near-suicidal tailspin.  He became depressed. God interrupted him in his self-pity.

“Shouldn’t I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left?”

God pities Japan, in which millions don’t know their right hand from their left.  Of course, we might say the same about our own country.

If God cares about Japan, so should I.