Densho Digital Archive - Phil Shigekuni Interview (denshovh-sphil-01-0012)

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SY: And during all those years you were extracurricular, you were active in the church?

PS: Oh, yeah.

SY: Was that --

PS: Right, I stayed active I was teaching Sunday school at the Holiness church for many years and in fact one of my students was Bill Watanabe of --

SY: Little Tokyo Center, how nice. Can you sort of describe what the Holiness church, the methodology, the theory?

PS: It's an evangelical church. It places a great deal of emphasis on the literal interpretation of the Bible and it focuses on the portions of the scripture that have to do with certain things that you need to do to be a Christian. You need to accept Christ, you need to confess your sins and in order to be a Christian you had to do these things and if you did these things then you were a Christian, you were saved. And then once you're in the loop with other Christians, then it was your obligation to go out and convert other people because if you didn't the consequences were dire, of course. So I was in that mold for many years.

SY: And when you say it was all... your church then was all Japanese American, right?

PS: Yes, that was first the L.A. church and then the Holiness church in the valley.

SY: And when did the Holiness church start here?

PS: Oh, gosh it got started many, many years, well before the war.

SY: So way before the war.

PS: Yeah, in the '20s sometime, some real pioneering people.

SY: So it had no relationship to Japanese Americans trying to stay together as a group or it was purely Christian origin?

PS: Yeah, right, started in Japan.

SY: And still very, very big here.

PS: Oh, yeah, and still very big and still very conservative.

SY: How many Holiness churches are there in the area do you know?

PS: Gee, there's one in San Jose, mainly in southern California. I would guess maybe six or eight, something like that. There's one in San Diego, in West Covina, so I feel very good that Paul, largely through Paul, we became Methodists. And as I mentioned it's a much more open church.

SY: And that was something that Paul Tsuneishi was looking for that?

PS: He initiated it right. He got together with the pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church who was at that time was George Nishikawa and George told us what to do and we eventually did it.

SY: And it was with the express purpose of becoming less restrictive.

PS: To become Methodist, United Methodist.

SY: To become Methodist knowing that the Methodist church is more liberal or less --

PS: Well, I don't think that was necessarily our intent but one of the things that happened when Reverend Kimura, who died a few years ago, he wanted to start another church because he felt that he wanted a church in the western part of the valley. But the people who came could have gone to the Holiness church but they chose not to so they weren't about to become Holiness so these people were Presbyterians or Methodists, they were other denominations, so they felt more comfortable fitting into to the Methodist framework and so that's because the Methodists had a more liberal outlook. One of the examples of the persons that joined with us was somebody who was kind of on the fringes at the Holiness church that I knew and I asked him why he wasn't more active at the Holiness church before he became active at our church, the Methodist church. And to this day he's one of the pillars of our church. And he told me very out, he said, "I couldn't come to grips with the fact that my mother who was Buddhist was doomed. If I didn't reach her and convert her it was too bad," and he couldn't accept that. So that's the good news of the more liberal churches, not only the Methodist churches but some of the more liberal wings of the Presbyterians and so forth.

SY: Did the Holiness church though stay very racially... all Japanese American?

PS: Mainly.

SY: And then when you turned Methodist did that open it up to other...

PS: No, the Methodist churches are largely ethnic, the ones that I know of. Centenary is, you know, it's right in J-town, it's starting to get a few non-Japanese but it's basically still a Japanese church.

SY: Japanese church.

PS: And West L.A. is basically Japanese church. It's probably the largest ones in the area but I feel a lot more comfortable with the Methodist people. They don't have a lot of the trappings of traditional Christianity, but I'm comfortable, I think.