Rev. Brooks Andrews recently retired as pastor of Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, the same church his father, Emery Andrews (born in 1894), was serving when WWII began. Brooks was only a small child then, but remembers that the members of the congregation were forced into internment camps along with 100,000 other Japanese Americans. Emery Andrews and his family followed his congregation to Minidoka, the camp in Idaho, where he continued to minister to them. Rev. Andrews worked for justice for the Japanese Americans who were stripped of their property and dignity.
Following the war, Emery Andrews became involved in the ‘House for Hiroshima’ project that built homes, day care centers and other structures in Hiroshima. He made trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1949 and 1951. During that time he kept a dairy, made a scrapbook and took many photographs.
This week, Brooks Andrews brought these remembrances of his father’s activities during the post war period to ABHS. He has donated them to the ABHS archives so that they can be made available to researchers.
