101-year-old time capsule discovered at Utah Church unearths remnants of once vibrant Japantown

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — 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.The Japanese-language Bible had been given to founding member Lois Hide Hashimoto by her mother when she left her home country of Japan for the U.S.

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 started to America.

20th June, 1906.‘The Lord is our strength and refuge.’” Also in the box was an English-language Bible placed in the time capsule by their father, a then-13-year-old Eddie Hashimoto.Members of the Presbyterian church knew their chapel had been dedicated in the fall of 1924 but did not know the exact date, Nov.

2, until they opened the time capsule.It was discovered when Lorraine Crouse, a third-generation member and former historian at the University of Utah, pointed out that time capsules were pop...