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SF: Now your family was basically in Los Angeles, right? In Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights? And I guess they were in Venice for a little bit, too, is that right?

PN: Right -- exactly. Uh-huh.

SF: So can you describe a little bit for us the Japanese Christian community in those areas? What did people do in terms of their social activities? Were there sort of like business ties between fellow Christians or fellow Baptists or Methodists or, or anything like that? How was the community organized?

PN: Yeah. The church played a very important part in bringing the ethnic Japanese people together. The Buddhist church as well as the Christian church. And it was really for self-support and the sense of feeling comfortable with your own and for socializing. It was just a natural tendency for them to come together. And the church was the ideal institution where they could come together and feel comfortable. So it was a wonderful opportunity to develop these churches. That was the main reason, I think. And then the development of the -- what they call it, Japanese Towns, or Little Tokyo in Los Angeles area. You know, they were just finding their support group by coming to that. In the vernacular, they started the newspaper to keep the community working together. So this is a way groups begin to form. But primarily, the church played a very important part because they felt very secure, and they had the support of other Japanese Americans.

SF: What was the role of the larger, say, Methodist church, the larger Baptist church, and so forth, in terms of supporting or setting up working with the Japanese churches? Were they actively involved in the sort of, you know, getting these organizations started among the Japanese, or did they just kind of give a little bit of a help -- little bit of help at the beginning and then the community took over and sort of ran it, ran the church independently?

PN: Yeah. Well, I think these denominations were always involved. It started out with individuals -- maybe missionaries to Japan who have come back. And these were, they were members of the established churches. They took an interest in the immigrants from Japan. Whether they taught the Bible or wanted to meet some of their domestic needs, well, they developed and formed these little groups. And then as soon as enough leadership was developed within the indigenous Japanese group, well, then they begin to form their own churches as such. But because of the initial inspiration and help given by the major denominations: Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, whatever that denomination happened to be, they became a Presbyterian church or a Baptist church or a Methodist church or a Congregational church. That's how it got started. And we just celebrated -- about 120 years ago, that we got started as immigrant churches among the Japanese.

BF: Once these little churches started taking off, was there much interaction between those small Japanese churches and the larger, like JBC, Japanese Baptist and First Baptist? Was there -- did the congregations ever come together back then?

PN: Well, I think the larger church, the established, like First Baptist, they were like a mother church, kind of overseeing, giving them security and direction. But on the whole, the initiative was with the ethnic group themselves. And in terms of the Japanese Baptist Church here in Seattle, they took the initiative to start little missions wherever there was a little colony of Japanese. So according to the history of the church, they started groups as far as Vancouver, Canada, and all the way down the state of Washington, all the way down south -- here and there, Tacoma, wherever else -- Bellevue, they start these little missions. So that's the way it began to expand.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.