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Japan and Hawaii 1924-1945

The Interim

Holding on Through "The Absolute Dark Ages"

With the mission closed, President Grant often brooded over the isolated Japanese Saints and looked for the time when the gospel could again be taught to those people. In the interim a faithful Latter-day Saint, Nara Fujiya, who later described the era as "the absolute dark ages," helped keep members unified by maintaining the Mutual Improvement Association (the only Church meeting they were authorized to hold) and publishing a newsletter called Shuro (The Palm), which appeared from 1925 through the fall of 1929. There were about two dozen Japanese members who wished to maintain activity in the Church, but they were spread from Sapporo in the north, to Tokyo and Kofu in the middle, and to Osaka in the west. From 1924 to 1927, the little flocks tried valiantly to sustain one another. Parties, especially at Christmastime, brought some warmth and fellowship. Some of these members eventually fell away, but most survived through their dedication to the Church.

In 1927 the First Presidency appointed twenty-eight-year-old Brother Nara to be the presiding elder in Japan and permitted the Saints to act more fully in priesthood functions. The First Presidency asked former mission president Alma O. Taylor to correspond with some of the members. But from 1927 until 1934 the picture is not clear. When Brother Nara's railway job took him to Manchuria in 1933, Church leaders found his replacement in BYU-educated Fujiwara Takeo.1

In 1926 BYU president Franklin S. Harris had visited Japan in a professional capacity, but he also represented the Brethren in visiting the Japanese members and helping with organizational matters. While in Sapporo, he met Fujiwara and invited him to attend BYU. Brother Fujiwara became the first Japanese to graduate from BYU. In 1934, shortly after his graduation, he accepted the call to serve as presiding elder and as a special missionary in Japan. He shepherded the Japanese Saints faithfully, even performing two baptisms of member children and trying diligently to activate members and remain in touch until his early death from pleurisy in 1936.2 The decade from 1936 to 1945 was a period of little or no communication between the Church and the members in Japan. In fact, the focus shifted to Hawaii.

Harvesting the Japanese Field in Hawaii

Recognizing that years might pass before missionaries could again preach in Japan, Heber J. Grant, the man who had established the Japanese Mission in 1901 and closed it in 1924, decided to continue work among the only significant population of Japanese who were available to the missionaries, the Japanese in Hawaii.3

When President Grant arrived in Hawaii to organize the Oahu Stake in 1935, he was introduced to nine Japanese of Hawaii, generally called Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJA), who had been baptized members of the Church the day before.4