Usually Dan comes up with the ideas, and Karen completes the implementation.  It's a simple pattern, you see: Dan the Starter, Karen the Finisher.  But somewhere along the way, Dan decided that he was loading Karen down with too much work, or maybe he thought she was having too much fun with the web stuff... Either way, he decided to implement his own idea of producing a web site in Japanese, designed for pre-evangelism (i.e. to get people interested in becoming interested in Christianity).  But he always does things differently than Karen would - while she continued to maintain proverbs2525.org by applying TLC to each individual line of HTML code, Dan headed out to the computer store and bought... (imagine dramatic but cheesy musical intro here) Home Page Ninja 2002!  (See photo on right)  You know, one of those hand-holding, beginner-friendly, "answer a few questions and poof, you have a web site" sort of tools.  (Can you tell which one of us is writing this?)

Seriously, though, he's right - I don't really have time for another web project.  Plus, I can't rib him too much about his software, since I was once caught buying the book shown on the left (blush!).  And I must admit, his site is cute, which in Japan seems to be the most important quality of any product, be it a web site or construction machinery (have you ever seen a purple and pink backhoe before?).  The truly amazing thing about Thinkword is that until a computer change bogged him down and then he got too busy, he was updating it every day!  There are two sections of the site that he updated daily for several months (and intends to resume when he can): his diary and the Word-of-the-day.  On-line diaries are all the rage in Japan right now - similar to blogs but more personal.  And when he was keeping it going he apparently had followers - we heard from several people that they were checking his page regularly for his daily scripture and/or diary entry, and no doubt there were others who we don't know personally but who found it on a search engine or something.  After all, that's the idea of a web site - to reach people you don't know.

Why the name "thinkword.com", you ask?  Well, even though the site content is mostly Japanese, people like little bits of English as long as it's easy vocabulary, and "think word" can have many nuances - thinking about words (like playing with language), think about the Word, etc.  It's not too overtly Christian, but it can have Christian layers of meaning.

Here's a peek at his front page.  If you have Japanese fonts enabled on your computer, feel free to browse the real thing at http://thinkword.com (even if you can't read it, you can enjoy the MIDI music he selected for each page).  But notice the catch phrase that is in both languages: "A place to think about words that mean something."  Not too strong, but just enough to get people thinking (no pun intended!).  The purple link is Today's Word (with the honorific form of "word", which generally means Bible passage, which is exactly what it is).  The green one is Today's Diary, the gold one is Testimony Collection, and the dark blue one is Story Collection.  The rest of the site includes a personal section (profile about Dan, FAQ, and a photo gallery), favorite links, church links, and monthly archives of the scriptures and diary entries.  Every now and then he got the notion to add a new section or do something cute.  During December 2002 he even changed all the text colors to Christmas colors and all the music to Christmas carols!  It's okay for mission work to be fun, isn't it?