Alumnus: Japanese TCK Tak

 

Takashi (Tak) Funatogawa (japan) came to Singapore through the encouragement of Rev Edmund Chan to serve as an intern in Covenant EFC, and, a year later, to study in EAST. While studying, he and his wife, Suzuko, worked with a team of locals and Japanese to reach out to 32,000 Japanese expatriates and their families, through outreach and informal home meetings.

The former EAST Student Council President (2015) spent most of his formative years in the UK, and the USA. “As a third-culture-kid,” he says, “I know what it feels like to be an outsider.”

When his family returned to Japan, Tak, by then a young adult, felt the loneliness of the youth he met at church. “Many do not fit into the traditional Japanese society,” says the former English-Language teacher. “God put into my heart then a desire to reach out to them.”

Tak feels that being among so many cultures at EAST has been God’s training tool for his future ministry. “For example, within the Student Council alone, we have six nationalities and six different definitions of punctuality,” he says. “So when I called for a meeting at 11.00am, I had to learn not to be upset – which I did at first – when others came later and didn’t even know they had offended my Japanese-clockwork expectations,”

This training to see from another person’s viewpoint, Tak feels, is one of the things God brought him here to learn to reach Japan’s “lost generation”. “God showed me that our Japanese youth are ‘another culture’,”he says.”They are lost not because they can’t be reached, but because we have not been trained to reach them.”

Tak graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Christian Ministry. He is now pastoring at Sapporo Minami Evangelical Christ Church with his wife Su and they have a young daughter Seira who is almost two years old.

Read more alumni stories at www.east.edu.sg/tag/alumni/

#EASTAlumni #EASTLifestyle #TCK #Japanese