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JG: Let's go back briefly and then we're gonna get you out of seminary 'cause eventually you have to graduate, but you had talked a little bit about these conversations you were having with Nisei pastors. You were interning at a Japanese American church, working with Grant Hagiya, and I'm just curious, this kind of, these conversations, it sounds as if this was kind of the culmination of moving into the ministry, and I'm just wondering if you could talk about that leading up to your ordination?

MN: Sure. Over the course of my seminary years, and even after seminary when I started to really pursue the ordained ministry, I was fortunate, and I really have to say I was fortunate to have at that time, and not just me, but the other Sansei seminarians and clergy, we were fortunate to still have in our midst, and to a certain extent still have in our midst today, Nisei, and I think there were a few Issei pastors still around, who had been through the wars and who had struggled to pastor churches before the war. And even before the war, we're talkin' about guys, pastors who led our churches or who established our churches during the Depression and then ministered to people in the camps and then after the end of the camps and the return to the West Coast and resettlement and all that were the ones who really had to build the churches back up. It's just, hearing those stories about the struggles that they went through really had a profound effect on me and really, again, made me question what was important to me and what I wanted to do. Some of those pastors were pastors that I had had growing up here at Centenary, yet when I was a kid growing up, or even during my teenage years growing up, didn't know anything about them other than that they were the pastor. But as I started to hear these stories it really made me question what was important to me and, and even the deeper question to me was, you know, these pastors sacrificed and struggled for myself and others, so then, okay, so Mark, what are you gonna do with your life? Now, I think anybody in any line of work, any vocation, needs to ask that question as well, and I know there are Sansei lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, others who I have spoken with who really take that question seriously and give back to the community in their own ways, but I think being in the church and knowing also through these stories and other things I have read about what these ministers have gone through really had a profound impact and influence on me.

One story in particular that really gripped me at the time I heard it had to do with one of our retired Nisei pastors, actually a couple of Nisei pastors who are now retired, Bishop Roy Sano who was Reverend Roy Sano here at Centenary over a generation ago, and Bishop Sano always told the story about his experience during the internment camps, but how he was able to leave camp and attend a church summer camp somewhere, I believe back in Pennsylvania, and it was there that he made the decision to deepen his faith and enter the ministry. Another story that comes to my mind is that of the Reverend Lloyd Wake who, whose family is from central California and during the -- and whose family, like a lot of other Niseis in the Central Valley was a farming family -- but how during the farm worker movement in the '60s and '70s, how Reverend Wake sided with the farm workers while the rest of his family, being farmers, or as we call them now, growers, were on that side of the issue, and how it caused a lot of struggle within the Wake family. And yet Lloyd, Reverend Wake, Lloyd Wake, knowing that this was gonna cause division within his family, stuck to his faith and his ministry and continued on. And it was also Lloyd who later on went on to pastor, to be on staff at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco, and during that infamous shoot out in the mid '70s, I believe it was 1978, with the Symbionese Liberation Army and the FBI, Patty Hearst, one of the untold stories of that episode -- I mean, everybody heard about Patty Hearst and knows what happened with her, but there was a Sansei girl who was a part of that group, Wendy Yoshimura, and the story that is told is that Wendy Yoshimura ran down the street after getting out of the bank building where the shootout was held, ran to Glide Memorial United Methodist Church where Reverend Wake took her in and gave her sanctuary there and stayed by her side throughout that whole ordeal, not just that day, but long afterwards. And it's stories like that that really influenced me, and I have to say, compelled me to really ask some deep, hard questions about what I wanted to do with my life.

JG: So in this process of kind of asking these hard questions, you finally made a decision to move forward with this. Was it any one thing or was it, I mean, when did you finally realize this is what you wanted to do?

MN: You know, that's a hard question for me to answer, simply because, Jim, again, there really was no one earth-shattering event, but somewhere along the line I just made the decision to do it, and I guess it had to do with, again, my seminary studies, a chance for me to, number one, deepen my faith, but in the process of deepening my own Christian faith, clarifying my own understanding of, of God and Jesus Christ and the church and along with that my own identity. Perhaps one of the stories that, biblical stories, that is, that has shaped my calling in the ministry is the well-known story of Moses and the burning bush, where Moses, where God calls Moses to go out and be the leader of the Hebrew people and Moses says, "Well, you know, God, I don't know how to speak," and God says, "Don't worry about that. I will lead you and tell you what to say, put the words in your mouth." And then the famous question and answer, Moses says to Yahweh, "When people ask me, 'Who appointed you leader?' what shall I say?" And God's response, "Tell them, 'I am who I am,'" which also is translated in the Hebrew, "I will be who I will be." And that story, as well as other biblical stories, in a lot of ways helped me clarify my decision to go into ministry, but more than that to really understand that my calling was to the Japanese American church. And not that it was ever gonna be anything else. I mean, I never consciously thought I would just go into ministry and not serve in a Japanese American church. If anything, I figure yeah, that's what I'll do, but that, that one story in particular really did it, does it for me and continues to this day.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.