Stories: Reflections on the Yamagata Branch in the 1960’s by Conan
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| Reflections on the Yamagata Branch in the 1960’s.
by Conan Grames January 23, 2009
"I arrived as a missionary in the Yamagata Branch on February 16, 1968. The first thing I noticed was that there were about three feet of snow on the ground! I next noticed that it was almost as cold inside our apartment as it was outside. The apartment was a Japanese style home attached to an old hospital which was then owned by the Church. Only one end of the hospital was used for meetings. The rest of the building was in an abandoned state and still had the remnants of hospital equipment scattered about. I remember taking a “tour” of the place with my companion, Elder Ridge, and going into what appeared to be operating rooms and seeing operating tables and other types of hospital equipment still lying about. On one occasion following a meeting of our MIA, we had a bat fly from the old hospital downstairs up through our meeting room! No wonder the building was referred to as “o-bake yashiki” (the ghost mansion).
There was a shower in our apartment. At one point the pipes froze and no water came out. We went outside, scooped up snow in a kitchen pan and melted it on the stove. When it was good and hot we poured it over the shower pipes. It did the job. The water started to flow in the shower and steamed up the shower room like a steam bath. This was not surprising since the temperature inside the shower room was still around freezing. At night we would hang our wet furo towels on a line over the futons in our bedroom and turn off the little sekiyu (kerosene) stoves in the room. In the morning the towels were frozen solid.
Although the building was cold, the spirit of the branch was warm. There were four elders. Elder Yanagida served as the branch president while I served as the district leader. The fourth elder was Elder Doug Matsumori who continues to be a good friend to this day. The strongest brother in the branch at the time was Makoto (?) Oki who spoke wonderful English even then, and later became a translator and interpreter at the Church offices in Tokyo. He led the committee which did the revised translation of the Book of Mormon in the mid-1990’s. When I see him occasionally, we always hug each other. While I don’t remember the names of other members since I was there such a short time, I remember a spirit of unity and faithfulness among those wonderful members. Even then, though the branch was small in numbers and the building left much to be desired, it felt like Zion and seemed destined to be a center of strength for the Church in Japan." |
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