Deaf people can't hear, but they can see!
Why don't they just read from the Japanese Bible?
Simply put, telling a Deaf person they are not entitled to a Bible in their own language because they can just go ahead and read the Japanese one is oppressive.
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For some 300,000 Japanese Deaf people, Japanese is a foreign language.
Japanese Sign Language is a natural language in a visual-spatial modality, linguistically complex and completely self-sufficient. Imagine this. You wake up one morning, flip through your Bible, and find that more than half is just blank pages. You take that Bible to church, but the pastor tells you it's not proper, you have to use the original manuscripts to "correctly understand". Maybe you then spend years and years studying Biblical Greek and Hebrew, taking guesses at unfamiliar phrase structures, looking up difficult words in the dictionary, and being told every Sunday that if you don't get good at those languages you will never be right before God. When you have questions, you rely on somebody who is better at reading, somebody in a position of power, somebody--anybody-- to explain most of the Bible to you. After all, you always miss something when you're still learning the language. Your friends and family can't help either, because they are learning from the same people you are. There is no healthy debate, no digging deeper on your own, only being told what to believe. |
After a while, you might start to feel exhausted.
Maybe you figure that your own language isn't good enough for God. Maybe you figure you're not interested in knowing him at all, because what kind of Father doesn't know his child's language? What kind of Saviour does not speak the language of his people? How can they ask you to trust, to follow, to love somebody who feels so unreachable, somebody you need a big dictionary just to talk to? Many Deaf people have this kind of experience with Christianity, being told that only the Japanese text has legitimacy and that their signing is only rudimentary gestures, that the language they use with their community is rudimentary and somehow inferior. |
When the Bible says that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved, that includes the Deaf communities of the world. To call upon God from their own hearts, the Deaf in Japan desperately need the Word accessible to them in Japanese Sign Language.
"The teachers scolded us and said our signing looked like monkey talk." |
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