A historian’s hunch about what might lie hidden within the walls of a Japanese church in Salt Lake City led congregants to uncover a century-old snapshot of a once vibrant Japantown now fighting for survival.
Elders at the 101-year-old Japanese Church of Christ — one of two remaining buildings in the city’s Japantown — drilled through brick, concrete and rebar to extract a metal box from the building’s cornerstone. Its contents tell the stories of early Japanese immigrants to an area now overtaken by urban sprawl.
Community members got their first look at the artifacts over the weekend, pulling from the box hand-sewn flags, Bibles and local newspapers in both English and Japanese, the church’s articles of incorporation and a sheet of glitter-trimmed paper with the handwritten names of its Sunday school teachers.
“You see the thoughts, the hopes and the faith of people from a community over 100 years ago. What they hoped for is still continuing to happen in the heart of Salt Lake City,” the Rev. Andrew Fleishman said in an interview with The Associated Press…