Sister Teresa Teshima, RSCJ, president of St. Francis Xavier Mission for Japanese Catholics in San Francisco, was recently featured in an article by Catholic News Service. Sister Teshima, 81, has a 76-year history with the mission, which served as an oasis for her parents after they emigrated from Japan to the United States.

The Catholic News Service article was based on a feature about Sister Teshima in Catholic San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO (CNS) – St. Francis Xavier Mission for Japanese Catholics in San Francisco always has been "a church by the wayside, for people in pilgrimage," said Sister Teresa Teshima.

Sister Teresa, a Religious Sister of the Sacred Heart, is president of the mission's Japanese Catholic Society. Now 81, she arrived at St. Francis Xavier with her parents when she was just 5 years old.

The mission was founded in 1910; in 1993 it was merged with St. Benedict Parish, where the San Francisco archdiocesan ministry to the deaf is based.

Japanese Catholics may be small in number -- there are about 50 core members -- but they say their congregation has a big heart.

They are bound together by their personal experiences of pilgrimage and their memories of segregation and oppression, including the years Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were forced to spend in U.S. internment camps during World War II.

They also are tied together by a religion that centuries ago would have made them targets of persecution in Japan.

For the immigrant parents of Sister Teresa, the mission was a welcome wayside stop.

"My mother was looking for a kindergarten that had bus service. We weren't Catholic. We weren't anything in fact," Sister Teresa recalled in an interview with Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocesan newspaper.

Once enrolled in the kindergarten, young Yasuko, as she was known then, began to learn about her new neighborhood and started to go to Mass with her friends. At age 10 she became a Catholic.

When World War II began, she was finished with school and was working for a Japanese accounting firm in Los Angeles. It was dissolved when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued his order sending Yasuko Teshima's people to internment camps. She returned to San Francisco to be with her parents and together they were sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah.

She was able to leave to go to a Catholic college in Omaha, Neb., that was run by the Religious Sisters of the Sacred Heart. She entered the community after graduation.

But her parents had to cope with life at the camp as did her childhood friend, Sumi Honnami, and her family.

After the war Honnami's family returned to San Francisco, but not everyone did.

Sister Teresa eventually returned, too, after serving in the Philippines, Japan and all over the United States for her order from 1946 to 1985.

"Our parish was dispersed," said Honnami, who added that she is still "devoted to this little church (the mission) on Octavia Street."

"Now," she added, "we are a handful holding the fort."

Sister Teresa, Honnami and Hiroko Sakamati, a member of the mission since 1963, as well as other longtime members, are there to welcome newcomers who have been transferred to the Bay area from Japan for jobs.

Today the mission's Japanese Catholics number about 50, though the congregation swells to nearly 150 on major religious holidays. Members commute from San Mateo, San Jose and Santa Rosa each third Sunday of the month to attend a Mass celebrated by a Japanese-speaking priest, and then enjoy a home-cooked meal.

For the last year, members have been pooling airline frequent-flyer miles and cash to bring Jesuit Father Yoshio Futo from St. Louis to San Francisco to celebrate Mass in Japanese each month. They hope to have a Japanese Catholic priest serve them permanently in the future.

The small number of Japanese Catholics in the Bay area reflects the portrait of Catholicism in Japan, where Catholics make up less than 1 percent of the population, according to Holy Names Sister Deborah Church, associate professor of history at Holy Names College in Oakland.

"Christianity is strong," she said, adding that most of the country practices Buddhism and Shinto, two ancient religions.

The Catholic faith first came to Japan in 1549 with Portuguese Jesuit St. Francis Xavier. Less than 40 years later, Catholics numbered 300,000, worrying Japanese leaders. Eventually, an edict was issued banning Christianity and expelling the Jesuits. For the next forty years, thousands of Christians were martyred, and many more were tortured, forcing the church underground.

Catholics practiced in secret, for 250 years, until an expedition made in the 1850s by Commodore Matthew Perry on behalf of the U.S. government opened Japan to the rest of the world.

During the hidden years, Japanese Catholics had to publicly declare annually they had nothing to do with Christianity.

Japanese people first began arriving in California in about 1869, and today the Japanese community is the third largest Asian group in the San Francisco Bay area.

The demographic is something the leaders of St. Francis Xavier Mission hope to tap into, and there are signs that has started. In the past three years, 20 Japanese people have signified interest in becoming catechumens.

"This is a very large number considering how loyal Japanese people are to their ancient traditions and religious beliefs," said Sister Antonio Heaphy, a Sister of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and director of the San Francisco archdiocesan Office of Evangelization.