salt lake city — A historian’s hunch about what might be hidden within the walls of a Japanese church in Salt Lake City has led worshipers to uncover a century-old snapshot of a once-vibrant Japantown now struggling to survive.
Elders of the 101-year-old Japanese Church of Christ — one of two remaining buildings in the city’s Japan Quarter — dug through brick, concrete and rebar to extract a metal box from the building’s cornerstone. Its contents tell the stories of early Japanese immigrants to an area now overtaken by urban sprawl.
Community members got their first look at the artifacts over the weekend, removing from the box hand-stitched flags, Bibles, local newspapers in English and Japanese, the church’s articles of incorporation, and a sheet of glossy paper bearing the handwritten names of Sunday school teachers.
“You’re seeing the thoughts, hopes and faith of people from a community more than 100 years ago. What they hoped for is still happening in the heart of Salt Lake City,” Pastor Andrew Fleischman said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Her mother gave the Japanese-language Bible to founding member Louis Hyde Hashimoto when she left her native Japan for the United States in the early 1900s. More than a century later, Hashimoto’s grandchildren, Joy Douglas and Anne Bos, held her Bible for the first time.
There is a handwritten inscription that reads: “To Lois Hyde from her mother when she started in America. June 20, 1906. ‘The Lord is our strength and our refuge.'” Also in the box was an English Bible that their father, 13-year-old Eddie Hashimoto, had placed in the time capsule.
Presbyterian members knew their chapel had been dedicated in the fall of 1924, but they didn’t know the exact date, November 2, until they opened the time capsule. It was discovered when Loren Cross, a third-generation member and former historian at the University of Utah, pointed out that time capsules were common at the time the church was built. Radar scanning later confirmed the presence of a trapezoidal box covered by the concrete foundation.
For Len Ward, an elder at the church, seeing the contents brought back childhood memories of walking the streets of the bustling Japanese neighborhood filled with fish markets, hotels, dry cleaners, restaurants and other Japanese-owned businesses. She recalled visiting the market with her mother where the merchant would give her chewy citrus candies wrapped in edible rice paper that would melt in her mouth.
Once home to 90 businesses strong, Salt Lake City’s Japantown was formed in the early 1900s when a mining and railroad boom attracted thousands of Japanese immigrants to northern Utah. The downtown neighborhood changed dramatically during World War II, when many community leaders were “harassed, detained, and sent to concentration camps,” according to the Downtown Salt Lake City Alliance.
The Japantown continued to hold out until the city expanded the massive Salt Palace Convention Center in the 1990s, eliminating most of the remaining businesses and dispersing residents to the suburbs.
Today, all that remains are a few street signs, a small Japanese garden, and two religious centers — one Presbyterian, one Buddhist — surrounded by sports bars, hotels, a convention center and the home arena for Utah’s professional hockey and basketball teams.
For many church members, the time capsule is a reminder of the history they are fighting to keep alive as urban development threatens the Japanese neighborhood with extinction. It also documents the resilience of an ethnic and religious minority in a state where The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church, is the largest religious group.
The one-story church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, sits amid a planned sports and entertainment district that promises to bring a modern touch to the fast-growing downtown.
The developers at Smith Entertainment Group pledged to respect the needs of the church while building the surrounding area. But church leaders worry that the multibillion-dollar project could erase what remains of the Japanese community’s local history.
Ward said she left the unveiling of the final time capsule feeling empowered to show people that the Japanese community is not only a valuable piece of the city’s past, but its present as well.
“Our founding members thought our community would still be around in 100 years to find that time capsule, and we can think we’ll be around a hundred more,” she told the AP, noting that members are already brainstorming what they might leave in their own time capsule.