Century-old time capsule found at Utah church evokes memories of fleeting Japantown
SALT LAKE CITY– A historian’s intuition about what might be hiding within the walls of a Japanese church in Salt Lake City has led worshipers to discover a century-old snapshot of a once-vibrant Japanese neighborhood now fighting for survival.
Elders at the 101-year-old Japanese Church of Christ – one of two remaining buildings in the city’s Japanese Quarter – broke through brick, concrete and rebar to extract a metal box from the building’s cornerstone. Its content tells the story of the first Japanese immigrants in a region now overtaken by urban sprawl.
Community members got their first look at the items over the weekend, taking out of the box hand-stitched flags, Bibles and local newspapers in English and Japanese, church bylaws and a glitter-lined sheet of paper with the handwritten names of his Sunday school teachers.
“You see the thoughts, hopes and faith of people in a community more than 100 years ago. What they hoped for continues to happen in the heart of Salt Lake City,” the Rev. Andrew Fleishman said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The Japanese-language Bible had been given to founding member Lois Hide Hashimoto by his mother when she left her home country of Japan for the United States in the early 1900s. More than a century later, Hashimoto’s grandchildren, Joy Douglass and Ann Pos, held her Bible for the first time.
A handwritten inscription reads: “To Lois Hide from her mother when she left for America. June 20, 1906. ‘The Lord is our strength and our refuge.'” Also in the box was an English Bible placed in the time capsule by their father, Eddie Hashimoto, then 13 years old.
Members of the Presbyterian Church knew their chapel had been dedicated in the fall of 1924, but did not know the exact date, November 2, until they opened the time capsule. It was discovered when Lorraine Crouse, a third-generation member and former University of Utah historian, pointed out that time capsules were popular around the time the church was built. A radar scan later confirmed the presence of a trapezoidal box embedded in the concrete foundation.
For Lynne Ward, an elder at the church, seeing the content evoked childhood memories of walking the streets of a bustling Japantown neighborhood filled with fish markets, hotels, dry cleaners, restaurants and other Japanese businesses. She remembers visiting a market with her mother where the shopkeeper offered her chewy citrus candies wrapped in edible rice paper that melted in her mouth.
Once 90 businesses strong, Salt Lake City’s Japantown formed in the early 1900s when a mining and railroad boom lured thousands of Japanese immigrants to northern Utah. The downtown neighborhood changed dramatically during World War II, when many community leaders were “harassed, detained and sent to internment camps,” according to the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance.
Japantown held on until the city expanded its massive Salt Palace convention center in the 1990s, wiping out most of the remaining businesses and dispersing residents to the suburbs.
Today, all that remains are a few street signs, a small Japanese garden and two religious centers – one Presbyterian, one Buddhist – surrounded by sports bars, hotels, the convention center and the arena for Utah’s professional hockey and basketball teams.
For many church members, the time capsule serves as a reminder of the history they are fighting to keep alive as urban development threatens Japantown with extinction. It also documents the resilience of a minority ethnic and religious community in a state where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church, is the largest religious group.
The single-story church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, sits in the middle of a planned sports and entertainment district that promises to bring a modern touch to a rapidly growing downtown.
Developers Smith Entertainment Group pledged to respect the needs of the church when constructing the surrounding area. But Church leaders fear the multibillion-dollar project could wipe out what remains of the Japanese community’s local history.
Ward said she left the recent time capsule unveiling feeling like she could show people that the Japanese community is not only a valuable part of the city’s past, but also its present.
“Our founding members believed that our community would still be here in 100 years to find this time capsule, and we can believe that we will be around 100 more,” she told the AP, noting that members are already thinking about what they might leave in their own time capsule.
