It was on September 1, 1980, that the “Daily Word” telephone service was begun from my home in Nagoya, Japan. The purpose of the 90-second daily message was to give Japanese students of English an opportunity to listen to an interesting, informative, meaningful message spoken by a native speaker of English at anytime of day or night. From this inauspicious beginning, the service developed in a very surprising way following reports that appeared both in newspapers and on television. Eventually taken over by NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone), over the next 18 years, it averaged about 120 calls per day for a total of almost 900,000 calls.
After being introduced into the NIFTY-Serve computer network in Japan and onto the Internet worldwide, there were more readers than listeners. Two textbooks for English students were published and messages were made available in Braille accompanied by cassette tapes at a library for the blind in the city of Kobe. Meetings of listeners/readers were held periodically in Nagoya where we spoke with one another in English.
The service was discontinued at the end of February 1999, a couple of weeks before my wife and I left Japan after 47 years of missionary service there. In response to the expressed desire of “Daily Word” fans in Japan, I have reactivated the service on a web page [i.e., “Timely Words”] from our home in the Penney Retirement Community in Penney Farms, Florida,
[Rev. Clark Offner passed away on January 23, 2014. His final message is The Time Has Come (10/12/27) .
We editors of his messages express our heartfelt thanks for his devotion to this service for 30 long years, and wish many readers will make good use of them.]
1/1/79 "Daily Word"s predecessor,
Kyo no Messeji, (0566-52-2732) in Japanese began from Takahama Church using
"answer phone" machine (book of these daily messages, Kokoro no Sanpo-michi,
published December 1994 by Kirisuto Shinbunsha)
9/1/80 "Daily Word" (052-794-6422) began from Nagoya residence using
same method
4/26/81 First meeting of listeners
10/3/81 Began sending out printed copies of messages
8/29/82 First issue of "Daily Word" Echoes
9/21/83 Second telephone "answer phone" installed to handle more calls
2/1/86 Telephones purchased by NTT; "Daily Word" became NTT service;
taped/ transmitted on NTT equipment
1/88 "Daily Word" messages introduced into NTT's CAPTAIN system
1/89 Daily Word, textbook for university students, published (Hokuseido)
12/90 "Daily Word" messages introduced into the English Forum of NIFTY-Serve computer network
1/91 Ofuna-Hakase no Deiri-Wado, high school text, published (Biseisha)
10/30/92 Messages began to be recorded on chip instead of on tape; must
be called in daily
10/93 Japanese translations of messages from NIFTY-Serve made available for general listeners/readers
3/96 On Internet (NAMOS home-page)
1/19/1997 = message #5596; Weekly copy #780; "Daily Word" Echoes #55; Listeners Meeting #65; Total number of calls (9/80-12/96)=782,729; Average per day: 131; Record number of calls in one day: 5224 (1/14/88)