Building A Community
At the outset of war between the United States and Japan in December 1941, approximately 127,000 people of Japanese descent lived in the US, primarily in California, Washington, and other western states. Some were first generation migrants (Issei), but a significant majority were US-born citizens of the second (Nisei) or even third (Sansei) generations, whose families had remained in the US despite significant discrimination.
A majority of Japanese Americans were Buddhist, but Japanese Christian converts were among some of the earliest migrants to the US, and US denominations began missionary outreach to Japanese migrants as early as the 1880s. At first this missionary activity was closely related to foreign mission work in Japan, but as Japanese Americans became a settled part of the US population, they began to establish permanent domestic congregations with pastors largely drawn from the Japanese community.
Among the major Protestant denominations, the Northern Baptists (later to become the American Baptists) had Japanese American missions and churches in two major locations: the Seattle area, where the first Japanese American Baptist church was founded in 1899, and the Los Angeles area, which by 1940 had the largest number of Japanese churches. These growth of these congregations was influenced by the ongoing work of both Baptist missionaries and Japanese Americans themselves, but also by the changing laws around migration, which shaped the livelihoods and experiences of the whole Japanese American community.
In the timeline below, you can see signifcant dates in Japanese American Baptist history, as well as the major changes in migration law that occurred between 1882 and 1941: