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"We had just come out of church after the first service, and people were going in for the second [on] Sunday morning, 7 December 1941. A man rushed into the patio and told us the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. We were stunned. We couldn't believe it. We didn't know what to do."1 The Rev. John H. M. Yamazaki, recalling that moment fifty years later, was a newly ordained deacon at the time, assisting his father, the Rev. John Yamazaki, who in 1907 had been the founding pastor of this Episcopal Mission to Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles. On that date St. Mary's parish register listed four services: 7:30 A.M. Holy Communion, 9:30 A.M. Sunday School, 10:00 A.M. Morning Prayer in English, and 11:00 A.M. Holy Eucharist in Japanese. Someone had later added in bold script, Emergency: News that Japan unwarrantedly attacked America came after the morning service.
By 1941, St. Mary's, having begun as a house church on Flower Street, was a church building on Mariposa Street with a bustling congregation averaging a hundred families per Sunday. Located in one of a half dozen defacto segregated sections of the city, hand-lettered signs had warned 'Japs Keep Moving: This is a White Man's Neighborhood," during the Depression. The teen-age Yamazaki boys, John Jr. and his next younger brother James, recollected "dawn patrols" around the church to remove the posters claiming property values would plummet if St. Mary's was allowed to build a new multi-use parish hall. A half-century after the trauma of Pearl Harbor, John Jr. recalled: "My father went into the...second service and...had to tell the congregation what they had not yet heard [because of] being on the way to church. I went into the rectory and began receiving the calls that kept coming throughout the day"-a reference to St. Mary's function as an information source for the wider Japanese community.2
After high school young John (1914-1998), eldest of four Yamazaki children, graduated from UCLA in 1938; nearly a third of his Japanese-American companions similarly went on to college despite being officially barred from the professions. His gregariousness and enthusiasm served him well in gymnastics and clubs as well as in academics. Seminary experience at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific provided...