Scattered All Over the Earth

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While she leaves Denmark with Knut, a Danish linguistics student who converses with her in Panska, she comes to meet Tenzo, also known as Nanook, a native of Greenland who tries to pass off as Japanese, and his girlfriend Nora. In place of the original tree’s natural branches, the Lord grafted in branches of wild trees as a stimulant in hope that they might bear good fruit if nourished by strong roots (verses 9–12). Rejected by Israel, the gospel was given to the gentiles in Palestine and throughout the world. For a while, the wild branches did bear good fruit, but in time they began to overrun and sap the strength of the roots (verses 15–18; 29–37). The early apostolic Christian Church flourished among the gentiles but soon fell into apostasy. The natural branches scattered through four parts of the vineyard also started to bear good fruit, but in time they all turned wild (verses 19–29, 38–47). Scattered Israel also received Christ and His gospel but fell into apostasy. In the spiritual and religious realm, Christianity, which had its roots in earlier Judaic practice, has become the religion of 1.9 billion people, or 31.1 percent of the population of the world. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which derives from the spiritual labor of Abraham’s descendants, is a foundation of Western civilization, providing social and political values and the moral and ethical basis of the legal systems. That same tradition has made an emotional and psychological contribution in defining the value and purpose of life, the goodness of God, His love for all, and the Golden Rule as a guide for human conduct. In the social and cultural realm, the themes of the Bible have provided inspiration for great works of architecture, music, art, literature, and entertainment. Thus, the first group scattered (the ten tribes) will be the last group gathered as the New Jerusalem is finally established and the Savior’s millennial reign begins. And the last group scattered (the remnants of Israel, especially descendants from Ephraim, who are probably a sub-group split off from the ten tribes that settled among the gentile nations) would be the first group gathered as the early Church leaders, who come from this group, began the restoration of all things and received the keys for the gathering of Israel (see D&C 109:57–60). This distinctive pattern of scattering and gathering is illustrated in the following chart:

Hiruko’s native language has long been lost, her island devoured by water. She was a refugee in Norway and Denmark, where she finally settled and developed the language she calls Panska, which draws on the resemblances between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Panska, or Pan-Scandinavian, helps her move between countries and communicate with other immigrants. The choice between good and evil presupposes agency; the exercise of our agency activates the law of justice and its resulting blessings and punishments. Without choices, we cannot exercise agency and experience the full range of blessings and punishments (see 2 Nephi 2:5–27; Alma 12:31–32; 42:17–25). The Prophet Joseph Smith’s teachings as recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants indicate that blessings and punishments are predicated upon compliance or non-compliance with divine laws, commandments, and judgments (see D&C 82:10; 121:36–37; 130:20–21). The Lord is absolutely just in rewarding each individual according to his or her works based upon individual levels of knowledge, accountability, and motivation (see Romans 2:5–6; 2 Nephi 9:25; Mosiah 3:11; Alma 41:2–6; 3 Nephi 27:14). In essence, the law of justice might be ­illustrated as follows: When I moved to New York for college, I happened to meet a 20-year-old who was just like me: a Japanese citizen who grew up in both countries, spoke both languages, and even went to the same international high school as I did, even though we didn’t know each other due to our age difference. He had his own version of Inter-go, it turned out, influenced by Japanese internet slang where a mere “w” meant “lol.” In the Book of Mormon, Lehi speaks of all Israel in 1 Nephi 10:14: “And after the house of Israel should be scattered they should be gathered together again.” Then, three later successive passages in the Book of Mormon highlight three stages or conditions that precede the gathering and restoration of the Jews in the last days. These events open the way for all of the house of Israel to be gathered and restored to the lands of their inheritance.As seen from the chart above, the later Arab tribes included descendants of both Abraham (primarily through Ishmael’s lineage) and Lot. Note how the ancestors of the Arabs multiplied into more nations and greater numbers far more rapidly and extensively than the Israelites, who were descendants of Jacob, just one of the twenty-one known grandsons of Abraham (see 1 Chronicles 1:29–34). [1] Like Mr. Kundera, who wrote in Czech and then French, Ms. Tawada is dual-lingual novelist, alternating between Japanese and German, which she learned when she moved to Hamburg in the 1980s. “Scattered All Over the Earth”—written in Japanese and translated by Margaret Mitsutani—possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement. In its speculative setting, some unspecified disaster has caused Japan to disappear under the sea. Hiruko is one of countless refugees who have come to Europe—in her case, to Denmark, where she is hired to teach immigrant children about European culture. But rather than pine for her lost homeland or fully assimilate, Hiruko has followed an individual path of self-creation, synthesizing aspects of her different cultures into a unique whole, exemplified by a “homemade language” she has invented called Panska. What if Japan no longer exists? That’s the premise of her latest novel, Scattered All Over the Earth , which follows six individuals of various national, ethnic, and gender identities, who somehow come together to aid a Japanese woman named Hiruko find another person who can speak with her in her native language. Meanwhile, Hiruko has invented a new language called Panska (a word combining “pan” and “Scandinavia”) which can be understood by most Scandinavians, but is so distinct that she is the only one who can speak it. The novel’s narrators rotate between the six characters as they travel together throughout Europe, looking to help Hiruko but also themselves. First published in Japanese in 2018, Scattered All Over The Earth reads like the Berlin-based Tawada's homage to her native country - she was born in Tokyo in 1960, but relocated to Germany when she was 22 and now writes in Japanese and German. Throughout Scattered, different characters provide separate reasons for why the concept of a native language or a mother tongue is “rather childish.” When Hiruko realizes that the person she thought was Japanese actually was something else, she surprises herself with her own reaction: “When I found out we didn’t share a mother tongue, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. In fact, the whole idea of a mother tongue no longer seemed to matter; this meeting between two unique speaking beings was far more important.”

It’s possible to interpret the novel as a cozy, upbeat response to global crisis. The young characters celebrate their differences while at the same time eliminating all barriers to communication, setting off on adventures together that are designed to heal in some small way the wounds of planetary dysfunction. Tawada suggests as much herself: “In this novel, I wanted to focus on a small group of people making their way through that world, to write about the bond of friendship that holds them together.” Still, it’s hard not to prefer Yoshiro’s deep-rooted, loving steadfastness in The Emissary to the rather machinelike chumminess of Hiruko and her friends. A second great world religion, that of Islam, arose among the Arab descendants of Abraham in the seventh century and has become the second largest world religion, with 1.2 billion followers, or 19.7 percent of the world’s population. The contributions of Islam in the areas of science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, architecture, and technology have been considerable. Islam has served as the moral and ethical basis of many nations, and its leavening influence has been felt in several empires, including those of the Turks, Persians, and Mughals. Allegory of the olive tree. A symbolic portrayal of these events is found in Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree. Zenos provides a profound prophetic overview of essential elements about the scattering and gathering of Israel. Although the scattering and gathering are literal, historical, physical events, they also reflect a more important dimension of a spiritual scattering, and in the latter days their gathering as seen in the mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The mission of the Church is to bring us unto Christ through missionary work, perfecting the Saints, and temple work. The inseparable relationship between the concept of gathering and the spiritual mission of spreading the gospel, nurturing members in the Church, and maintaining family ties is beautifully illustrated in the allegory of the vineyard recorded and commented upon in Jacob 5–6 in the Book of Mormon. Jacob records this allegory from the writings of an otherwise unknown prophet Zenos of the Old Testament period. The allegory is summarized in the following paragraphs, with a historical interpretation written in italics. Multiple prophetic viewpoints of a latter-day return of the house of Israel are provided in the Bible and other scriptures. [5] Major scriptural passages concern not just the gathering to their lands of inheritance but, more importantly, the restoration of the covenant house of Israel to their promised lands in the latter days. The return of the house of Israel in the last days seems to be in two phases: a gathering phase and a restoration phase . Gathering refers to their being brought together from their scattered places, whereas restoration refers to God’s renewal of covenants with them unto their lands of inheritance. This return of the house of Israel will reveal God’s great power and promises. As Jeremiah prophesied:To adapt to his postapocalyptic reality and to care properly for Mumei, Yoshiro has had to transform himself, but he is in control of his remaking, painful though it is. If his old self isn’t suited to his new reality, he muses, The Meiji period in Japan was the main stage for the country’s overall modernization. Starting in 1868, with the crowning of fourteen-year-old Emperor Meiji, the island started to reshape itself from being an isolated, feudal society under Chinese influence and entered an increasingly interconnected, Westernized world. Nineteenth-century Japan, Mizumura explains, wanted to move away from the Sinosphere toward creating international networks, particularly with the American and British Empires. During this period, linguistic debates ensued as to how to create a new version of Japanese—one statesman, Mori Arinori, going so far as to claim that Japan should “yield to the domination of the English tongue.” Other members of the intelligentsia wanted to replace Japanese characters with Romanized ones, making it a horizontal language, read from left to right. And although these proposals were never executed, the Meiji Restoration decided to cut a considerable number of Chinese characters and incorporate, instead, more vernacular syllabary ideograms. Nowadays, the Japanese language looks like a combination of easy-to-memorize syllabaries ( katakana for foreign loan words and hiragana for Japanese words) and harder-to-memorize kanjis (simplified versions of the Chinese ideogram system). Modern Japanese, Mizumura explains, was a modern invention, a fiction that accompanied the assimilation of Japan into the early stages of Western forms of capitalism. Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'.