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BB: You mentioned some of your translators and interpreters. Can you say more about that process of working with translation and interpretation in your time here?

CE: Well, we had in my time four translators. First was Spring Ibaru who was a member of the church, and then we had Yoshimi Kamano for a year, and we had Shinya Maruya for two years. And that was wonderful to have one, two years, you know. When he returned to Japan, I had heard that George Uemura had retired out of the Pacific Northwest Conference, and he had been living in Seattle and had been at the church in Seattle, moved to Oregon to be closer to his family, and he was going to just be retired. And I decided I'd better go out and talk to him because he was an ordained Methodist minister. And he hesitated at first, but finally I said, "You know, I'm not going to demand too much work of you. And if you would like to do a little work on your time, your time, we'll make it worth your while," and so forth, and so he agreed. So actually, he was my translator for the last eight years then. And when we were meeting in the homes, and we would go, and he would do the sermon, and I would play the piano, and we'd all sing, and then we'd have eats, and it was just fun. We had great times together.

BB: You probably had different --

CE: I made the commitment to always give the translator my sermon one week ahead of time, and then they would have a week to translate it and get prepared to preach it. I made the decision early on that the best thing I probably could think of to do was to preach a ten-minute sermon in English and then have a ten-minute translation of it in Japanese, and that was twenty minutes. And that was long enough for anybody, and I just loved to tell this story. One day, and this is, you know, far into my ministry here, this wonderful Nisei man said to me, "Chet, do you think it would be okay if I went out to the car during the Japanese sermon and read the funny papers? I don't understand Japanese." And I said, "I think that would be perfectly acceptable. In fact, it would be okay with me if you brought the funnies into the church and read them in the pew during the Japanese sermon." I didn't, he never did that and probably because he thought that would be disrespectful. I didn't keep track of him to see if he went out to the car to read the funny papers or not.

BB: So during all the time that you were here, there was an English sermon and a Japanese sermon?

CE: Right. And I searched the hymn notes for all of the hymns that were both in the English and [inaudible] and we sang English and Japanese together all at the same time. The only thing I had to be sure if they had the same number of verses and be sure and adjust that if I needed to. But we had numbers of Issei yet singing Japanese back in those days.

BB: By the time you retired in 1990, how many Issei were still here, about?

CE: Oh, about maybe, this is just pure guess, maybe seven or nine, something like that.

BB: So that was a very significant change during your pastorant?

CE: I'll comment on that at the end because I really would like to comment on that, but we kept losing our Issei along the way. One of my, another of my favorite stories to tell is about Saya Kuroda. Saya Kuroda was a very quiet person. She didn't speak any English, but she was just a jewel of a presence. She always worked very hard at the annual bazaars and so forth, and the day came when she couldn't do that anymore. She wanted to, she just was not physical -- physically able, only barely able to get, to even walk and get around. Every fall, fall bazaar time on Sunday morning and we would begin early Sunday morning at six o'clock preparing for the bazaar and everything; she would arrive. She would get a chair. She would sit it right in the middle of the dining room where all the activity was, and that was her way of participating in the bazaar. She couldn't do anything, but she wasn't going to miss the action. And I just, and everybody had to go around her, and they didn't object at all, and I got so amused by it. And when Saya died, there was no family, and there was a pretty good koden for her service. And one day, somebody was talking about what we should do with that money that was koden for Saya. And I said, well, you know, every Sunday we have to bring up chairs from downstairs because most every Sunday, we were setting up two rows of chairs behind the pews because we kept growing and so forth, and I said that's a lot of work to bring them up and have to take them back down, and we never know until the last minute whether we're going to need them or not. And maybe it would be good to have some chairs close by in the back of the sanctuary that we can just put out in a hurry if we need them. And I thought that was a great idea. So we have the Saya Kuroda memorial chairs. [Laughs] And I just think that was a wonderful thing to do with the money because we needed chairs to sit on, and she needed a chair to sit on back in those days.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.