Following the bombing of Pear Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, the U.S. government incarcerated people of Japanese descent in internment camps, a grave violation of civil rights and a dark stain on American history.
More than 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in these camps. And some of them were Christian. SOLA Editorial Board member Tom Sugimura wrote an article for Christianity Today that contains quotes from sermons Japanese American pastors gave to their congregations as they prepared to be forcibly deported to the camps. He also gives context to what happened in the camps and following.
We believe this is a powerful article that shows the power and comfort of the Gospel even in the midst of great injustice and suffering. Read an excerpt here and find the rest on Christianity Today’s website.
We also encourage you to come back tomorrow for an interview with Tom Sugimura, in which he explains his research and his personal connection to the Japanese internment camps.
How Japanese American Pastors Prepared Their Flocks For Internment
Many Japanese American Christians first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, as they returned home from Sunday worship. Japanese students gathered with their faculty at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, to pray long into the evening. During the nightly curfew enforced for Nikkei (the term for all ethnic Japanese in the US), ministers telephoned frightened church members who huddled together in their homes.
Ten weeks later, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, forcing nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast to relocate to internment camps. Throughout the spring of 1942, public notices started appearing on telephone poles in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles announcing the dates when “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and nonalien” would be evacuated and where they would be picked up.
Each family could only bring whatever luggage they could carry, leaving behind homes, businesses, farms, churches, communities, and even pets. Authorities then bused them to makeshift assembly camps where they would reside for several months before being transferred to one of 10 relocation centers in the country’s interior.
My grandparents and their two young children, my aunt and uncle, were detained at Manzanar Relocation Center near Death Valley, California. The older generation rarely talked about the camps, so in college I began to study the internment to learn about my family’s story. Now, as a pastor, I’ve expanded my research to how the Japanese American church practiced soul care during that difficult time in our nation’s history.
By the outset of World War II, Nikkei churches numbered about 100, mostly led by Issei, or immigrants from Japan, but also including Nisei, ethnic Japanese born in the US. These believers endured their grief and shame by caring for one another, as exemplified by the actions of Nikkei pastors and the sermons they preached in the days before evacuation.
In my research, I discovered an unpublished manuscript entitled The Sunday Before: Sermons by Pacific Coast Pastors of the Japanese Race on the Sunday before Evacuation to Assembly Centers in the Late Spring of 1942. Like John the Baptist, Nikkei ministers raised their voices in the wilderness to proclaim a message of hope in Jesus Christ. Yet they also actively lived out their faith by suffering with their flocks and leading worship services behind the barbed wire of the internment camps. Their witness in the face of unjust suffering models how we can care for souls today. (Unless otherwise noted, most of the sermons quoted below are from The Sunday Before).
Read the rest of the article at Christianity Today’s website.” There is no waiting process for an excerpt.
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