When you thought this had to be the place where they would not come after you…

Guess who just knocked at the door in the middle of my midday porn-browsing session, to ask me if I had accepted Jesus in my heart yet?

Yes, indeed: the two middle-aged women (actually probably in their mid-twenties, but dressing as a neurotic librarian from the bible-belt always tend to make you look older) patiently though relentlessly knocking on my door where Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Of course, being Japanese before being JW, they were reasonably easy to get rid of with a polite “sorry I’m busy”, though not before one had started digging in her religious phrase-book for ways to greet me in my own language…

Which takes us to this amazingly funny statistics page apparently kept by the JW church itself, and giving a good insight on the amount of work involved in mass soul-saving ventures. With pearls such as this graph comment:

5. How many preaching hours does it take to convert a person to a Jehovah’s Witness?

Top and bottom 20 countries of the ratio of one baptism to hours. The higher the ratio, the longer hours are needed to convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses. For example in Japan, it takes about 18,000 hours (!) of preaching to gain one baptism, whereas in Nepal it takes only 2000 hours.

So let’s not be too hard on those poor Japanese Witnesses: they got a much tougher gig than their counterparts in, say, Nepal, Congo or Tajikistan.

Another bit of some interest is that, according to these stats (let’s not forget they are provided by the JW’s church itself, therefore of more than dubious objective value, but anyway), Japan is the country where the church has incurred its highest number of defections last year, by a wide margin…

I guess the Freaky Religious Cult thing is not as popular as it used to be here…