It’s hard to spot the small, red brick Japanese Church of Christ in downtown Salt Lake City. But in the shadow of the massive Delta Center, tucked behind the vacant Struve Building and all but surrounded by a parking garage, the century-old chapel stands as a testament to a mostly forgotten community.
Meeting in the adjacent fellowship hall because the church is undergoing renovation, about 30 people on a recent Sunday morning worshiped in word and song. A large, open Bible, a cross and two lit candles sat on a wooden table lugged over from the church. Strands of origami cranes hung in the windows, while longtime member Ron Nishijima’s colorful paintings adorned the wall. Lantern-shaped light fixtures dangled overhead.
Guest pastor Rev. Mike Clang delivered a sermon he titled “Do What?” on God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The congregation then stood for the doxology: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,“ first in Japanese, then in English. Next came “prayers of the people.” Those in need of help from above were listed on the program. The Rev. Clang read each name individually.
“PNC,” he said, referring to the Pastor Nominating Committee, which is searching for a new permanent minister.
“Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer,” the reverend and the congregation said.
“Japantown,” he said.
“Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer,” they recited again.
For the people who worship here, Japantown — what’s left of it — needs divine intervention.
An ambitious new project threatens the future of the Japanese Church of Christ and the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple down the street, the sole remnants of what once was a thriving Japanese American community. The two buildings sit in the path of a plan to remake downtown Salt Lake City.
Smith Entertainment Group, which owns the Utah Jazz and the new Utah Hockey Club, intends to put $3 billion into a sports, entertainment, culture and convention district covering a three-block area east of the Delta Center. The proposal includes reconfiguring the arena entrance to face east, pedestrian plazas, taking 300 West underground between 100 South and South Temple, and building one or more residential towers and a hotel. The project, which aims to better connect the east and west sides of downtown, could impact the Salt Palace Convention Center, Abravanel Hall, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and Japantown Street.
The Japantown of yore is long gone. It’s uncertain what the new development will bring.
“It really was a nice, warm community. The people were friendly. It was a gathering place,” said 90-year-old Nishijima after church services. “Everybody was so kind to each other. I hope we can regain some semblance of what we had. But I don’t know if that’s possible.”
SEG has worked closely with the city and members of the Japanese American community who want to ensure Japantown isn’t swallowed in the project and to recognize its cultural and historical significance. The company has vowed to be sensitive to the “unique challenges” the churches face. Rolen Yoshinaga, a Salt Lake Buddhist Temple board member, said if done right, the project could be an asset not only for Salt Lake City but the two churches. An enlivened Japantown Street, he said, would bring diversity to the district. He said Japanese Americans are cautiously optimistic that can happen.
When Japantown bustled
First-generation Japanese immigrants — Issei — started arriving in Utah in the late 1800s, mostly as railroad, mine and agricultural workers. By 1907, residences and businesses started to emerge from South Temple to 300 South and State Street to 700 West, the heart of the bustling community centered on 100 South between West Temple and 300 West. Noodle houses, hotels, rooming and boarding houses, bath houses, variety stores and barber shops lined the street. The Intermountain Buddhist Church was established in 1912, and the Japanese Church of Christ in 1918 to meet religious, cultural and social needs.
Most Japanese lived in the area and, for some, living quarters were in the back rooms of businesses or above them. Children grew up with the sidewalk and alleys as their playground. They played kick-the-can and hide-and-seek on the dirt streets in the middle of the blocks. Empty lots became softball fields and the grassy islands in the wide city streets were ideal for football. The Buddhist Temple showed Japanese movies with English subtitles and Kabuki productions in the basement.
The community tripled in size during World War II with the voluntary evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The migration alarmed state and local government leaders. The Utah Legislature hurriedly passed a law that barred Japanese from buying land in the state from 1943 to 1947. Organizations and groups petitioned the city commission to stop issuing them business licenses. In spite of the opposition and discrimination, the number and kinds of businesses increased as they settled in Utah. Law offices, beauty salons, apartments, gas stations, produce companies, florists and nurseries, appliance and jewelry stores all opened their doors.
From its inception, Japantown, also known as Nihonmachi, meaning Japanese Town, was the gathering place for Issei, Nisei (second generation), and Sansei (third generation) in Salt Lake City. On any given day, they met at Aloha Fountain and the Pagoda restaurant, or ran into each other at California Market, Family Market, New Sunrise Fish Market and Sage Farm Market. They mingled as their cars were gassed up and serviced at Tats Masuda’s Uptown Service Station or Pee Wee’s Conoco Service. In its heyday, an estimated 2,000 to 8,000 people lived in Japantown. It even had three newspapers at one point.
In 1966, development of the Salt Palace wiped out the two major blocks at the core of the community. The city seized property through eminent domain. Some shops closed, others relocated, only to later go out of business. Only one, now called Japan Sage Market, exists today, though under different ownership. The churches, a few apartments and businesses on the surrounding blocks remained, but the heart of the Japanese American community stopped beating. Expansion of the Salt Palace Convention Center in the 2000s further encroached on the last holdouts — the Japanese Church of Christ and the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple. A small Japanese garden next to the church was installed with the convention center expansion.
Was it ‘cultural genocide?’
Yoshinaga grew up in Ogden, which had a small Japantown of its own. But he and his family piled into the car and drove to Salt Lake City’s Japantown once a month to stock up on Japanese goods. They shopped up one side of the street and down the other. And then it disappeared.
“All of a sudden, we weren’t coming here for groceries anymore. It was gone. Everywhere we went was gone,” he said.
Paul Iwasaki, who grew up in the middle of Japantown, calls the destruction “cultural genocide.”
“To me, that’s exactly what happened. You had this community of Japanese Americans that was probably the only one at least of that size and kind in the whole state. That was the place where everyone of Japanese heritage went at some point in time. Whenever they had the opportunity, they would go to J-Town,” he said.
“It was an important place to the Japanese community. But once the government makes up its mind they want to displace people, they’re going to take the path of least resistance. And what was that? J-Town, and (they) wiped it out and to me that was as much an act of cultural genocide as anything.”
Carmella Javellana Hirano, an assistant minister at the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple, said the prospects of a new project impinging on what’s left of Japantown revives old trauma, especially for the older generation that endured discrimination during World War II and lost their homes and businesses to the Salt Palace development.
“I don’t know that that pain has healed,” she said.
The Japanese American community back then offered some resistance but not enough to derail the Salt Palace construction. Yoshinaga said he believes there was a sense among the people that it couldn’t be helped, they had to do it for progress, roll with the punches, which he called a typical Japanese response.
But, he said, “there’s also an undertone of they wouldn’t do it to anybody else around here.”
Growing up in J-Town
While progress erased the shops, restaurants and hotels, it didn’t sap them from Iwasaki’s memory. He can vividly recall in great detail not only the name and location of nearly every business on 100 South but the names of the proprietors.
“This was my playground,” he said as he walked through the courtyard behind the Christian church on a July afternoon. The fellowship hall wasn’t there in the 1950s and early 1960s when Iwasaki and his friends rode bikes around the blacktop, played baseball and banged tennis balls against the adjacent building. He showed me how they occasionally climbed up on the church roof.
He described his childhood in J-Town as idyllic. He lived at 60 Whitmore Court, Apartment 8. He was Opie Taylor. This was Mayberry. He ran around in a coonskin cap. He donned a kid-sized replica Army uniform his uncle sent him. He collected cardboard boxes from the Gold Strike Stamp Redemption Center and turned them into playhouses.
“I was surrounded by family, friends and a loving, caring community of friends, shopkeepers and others,” said Iwasaki, who became the Salt Lake City Police Department’s first Asian officer and later a prosecutor and juvenile court judge. “Each of the shopkeepers, restaurant owners and other community members felt like family to me.”
His parents owned the Pagoda in the basement of the Colonial Hotel. Playing on the sacks of rice was one of his favorite things to do. He straddled the bags and pretended he was Davy Crockett riding a horse. One of the workers would be his sidekick, George. Once a week, Iwasaki hauled a sack of his parents’ dirty work uniforms to Eagle Laundry in his little red wagon and returned home with clean, laundered uniforms. A big tank next to the boiler building behind the laundry would occasionally release a huge cloud of steam. To him, the sound and the steam was a rocket blasting off. He played leapfrog over a fire hydrant that’s still there today and sat atop it to watch the annual Obon festival.
Wally and Mary Doi owned the Aloha Fountain, later the Aloha Cafe. All the J-Town regulars hung out there to socialize and catch up on what was happening in the community. Iwasaki and the Dois’ son, Robin, sometimes peeled potatoes and ran them through the slicer to make french fries. Wally Doi, who lost a leg in World War II as a member of the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up mostly of Japanese Americans, was like a second father to Iwasaki. He taught him everything he knew about baseball and took him fishing.
Pee Wee Kobayashi’s gas station was also a local hangout. It was the place where Iwasaki went to put air in his bike tires.
Iwasaki and his friends also climbed to the roof of a building behind the Buddhist temple that used to be across from the church before it moved down the street in 1962. It wasn’t until he was an adult that he learned that building was called the nokotsudo. It housed the remains of cremated Buddhist church members.
Looking back, Iwasaki said he didn’t realize at the time that the community he loved would all be gone. It leaves him frustrated, angry and sad. He misses it. He wishes he still had his coonskin cap and Army uniform.
“I didn’t think about what would happen to all those shops once they’re gone, what would happen to all those people and their futures,” he said. “Now, I feel guilty that I didn’t give it more consideration. But I think I was just young and naive.”
Preserving Japantown’s past
Lorraine Crouse worked in special collections at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library for 30 years. On a recent morning that stretched into an afternoon, she spread dozens of mostly black-and-white photos of Japantown and its people across a large conference table.
Snapshot: Mary Murakami and Kiyoko Nishida outside the New Kimpa Cafe.
Snapshot: People doing a traditional dance in front of the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple for the Obon festival.
Snapshot: Mary and Wally Doi working the kitchen at their Aloha Fountain.
Snapshot: Mr. and Mrs. K. Wada in front of the California Market, the Sunday before the store moved to make way for the Salt Palace.
Snapshot: George Murakami lounging on the hood of a car in a white shirt, dark jacket and jeans.
That photo is especially meaningful for Crouse.
Her parents, George and Betty Murakami, met in Japantown. Born and raised there, Betty lived in the Tokiwaya Hotel on West Temple where Nordstrom sits today. George was born in Berkeley, California, but his family was relocated to the Topaz Japanese American Internment Camp near Delta, Utah, in 1942. He brought four denim jackets, four jeans and four white T-shirts because “he had to be cool,” Crouse said. The day after graduating from Topaz High School, he was put on a train to Michigan to work.
At the war’s end, George’s parents, Kanekichi and Kogiku Murakami, were given $25 and a one-way bus ticket to Salt Lake City, where Kanekichi secured a job as a cook in Japantown. All of the family were and are loyal members of the Japanese Church of Christ.
Crouse doesn’t want the stories behind the photographs to be lost. She has a need to document the history of Japantown. Few people living now experienced it.
“This is my passion here. This was a community. This was where people lived and played and grew up and even died, all in this area,” she said.
Crouse quotes a Japanese phrase, “okage sama de” — “Whatever I am today, it is because of you.” These people who came before fought to build their church, fought to start their business, fought for their rights, she said.
“I felt like I had to make sure that it was preserved.”
Dancing in the street
Though their downtown community no longer exists, Japanese Americans continue to keep their heritage alive as best they can.
Japanese culture, more specifically Japanese Buddhist culture, was on full display on a scorching Saturday evening in July outside the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple. Thousands of people lined 100 South for the 88th annual Obon, a festival that honors and remembers deceased ancestors. Hand fans were a hot item at Lumbini’s Garden, the temple’s gift shop. Lanterns were strung between power poles. Taiko drummers clad in red and black pounded out booming rhythms. Women in colorful yukatas and men in happi coats performed traditional bon odori dances under the direction of Paul Iwasaki’s wife, Sandy, the lead dance instructor, a position she inherited from her mother, who filled the role for decades and was one of the Obon festival’s originators.
The next day, the Rev. Jerry Hirano and his wife, Carmela Javallena Hirano, conducted Obon/Hatsubon services at the Buddhist temple, marking the first Obon service for those who died in the past year. Burning incense, symbolic of cleansing or opening of the mind and preparing oneself to listen to the teachings or dharma, wafted through the small main hall or hondo where about 30 people, some holding “thought” beads known as onjen in their left hand. Three golden altars — a large one with Adima Buddha in the center under a peaked roof flanked by two smaller ones — sat at the head of the room. The seated Rev. Hirano repeatedly struck a large inverted bell known as a daikin while chanting.
Hirano, whose temple practices Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, rose to the podium to deliver the dharma. His message was that most people don’t have the perseverance and patience to gain enlightenment in this life, “so we have to take refuge in something greater than ourselves.” He also said a small change in one’s perspective can help remove some of the hate and divisiveness in the world and that we should see each other as human beings.
The street outside the church is quiet on this Sunday. That’s not always the case. The Salt Palace loading dock is directly across the street, separated by a beige wall capped with an Asian-style bar tile — an attempt to shield the temple from noisy cargo bays. On some days, including Sundays during worship service, dozens of trucks four across queue up to deliver their loads.
“That is one of the things that’s a real thorn in our side,” Yoshinaga said.
The trucks sometimes keep templegoers from being able to get out of their parking spots, leaving them stuck. It’s a nuisance, he said, that gets under people’s skin. They’re rightfully mad because they’re not supposed to have to fight that on a Sunday.
“We always say you wouldn’t do that to the other church in this state,” Yoshinaga said.
Looming development
The Smith Entertainment Group’s downtown revitalization project has moved quickly since Ryan and Ashley Smith acquired the NHL team in April, maybe too fast for some in the Japanese American community. But Mike Maughan, SEG executive and project principal, and City Council members have had multiple discussions with them over the past few months.
Maughan told the council in May that after meeting with Japantown representatives and hearing concerns about loading docks on the north side of the street, the group has “every intention to replace those loading docks with street-facing spaces to enliven the area.”
On the Re:Imagine SLC website, SEG promises to be “excellent neighbors and are sensitive to the many unique, ongoing challenges faced by the Japanese Christian Church and Japanese Buddhist Temple. We believe this proposed development would only stand to improve the existing situation.”
Several years ago, Salt Lake City and the Japanese American community engaged in a 15-month process to consider how to preserve future economic development and tourism opportunities, allow area churches to grow and thrive, and create something for future generations on Japantown Street. In April 2021, they unveiled a proposed streetscape project that includes narrow street entries with sculptures to define Japantown, landscaping with Japanese cherry trees, festival space and more. Estimated price tag: $6 million to $7.4 million. The city planned to pay for it as funds become available.
But the streetscape plan is now on hold as the Smith Entertainment Group proposal makes its way through city and state government. The Salt Lake City Council in July endorsed a participation agreement, including an accompanying sales tax increase, with SEG, which now awaits approval from the Utah Legislature’s five-member Revitalization Zone Committee.
The agreement requires SEG to “use commercially reasonable efforts to coordinate the district redevelopment project with the city’s efforts to facilitate the recognition, revitalization and/or redevelopment of the Japantown community located at 100 South and 300 West.”
City Council members negotiated some considerations for Japantown in the agreement, including at least $5 million for a streetscape project, historical markers and twice yearly meetings. It’s not everything the council or the Japanese American community wanted, but it’s something.
Council Chair Victoria Petro said the city would create a “restorative, there’s no way to create a completely reparative” paradigm for what happened to the Japanese American community. The city and SEG, she said, want to bring “dignity, culture, history” back to the area.
Still, members of the Japanese Church of Christ and the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple worry towering apartment buildings and hotels will put them further in the shadows, literally and figuratively. They don’t want the light through their beautiful stained glass windows to be obscured. They don’t want to be marginalized again.
Kristine Aramaki, a member of SLC NextGen, a group of young people who want to be part of the Japantown conversation, is concerned the new development could make daily church operations difficult.
“I kind of see it like the ‘Up’ house,” she said, referring to the Disney movie about a tiny house wedged between tall buildings.
The churches also fear access to parking will be lost and that establishments that serve alcohol could go up nearby.
Cautious optimism
Yoshinaga, who represented the Buddhist temple on the streetscape planning, described the mood of the Japanese American community as cautiously optimistic about the SEG project. If done properly, it can be an asset for the city, not just for the churches, he said. A vibrant Japantown as part of an entertainment district would reflect a diverse cultural element in Salt Lake City, he said.
He said he believes the city’s heart is in wanting to preserve the churches. But he said that developers that want to maximize profits and churches that want to function for another century have different interests. Yoshinaga appreciates the plaza space that SEG has said would be available for public events but said people want to celebrate Obon in front of the temple as they have done for decades.
“We, on the other hand, are less interested in short-term profits. We’re here to be here, for a long time,” he said. “Our economies aren’t the same as the developers’ so we always have to stand up for our principles of what it takes to run a church.”
Constructed next to a building bearing a sign reading, perhaps fittingly, Intermountain Casket Company, with loans from the Presbytery, United Church of Christ and the faith of its members, Japanese Church of Christ has stood since 1924. In September, the congregation will throw a party to commemorate the 100th anniversary of their now-renovated chapel, and usher in what they hope will be another century in a once again recognized Japantown.
