Century-old time capsule found at a Utah church evokes memories of a now fleeting Japantown

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A historian’s hunch about what might lie hidden within the walls of a Japanese church in Salt Lake City led congregants to uncover a century-old snapshot of a once vibrant Japantown now fighting for survival.

Elders at the 101-year-old Japanese Church of Christ — one of two remaining buildings in the city’s Japantown — drilled through brick, concrete and rebar to extract a metal box from the building’s cornerstone. Its contents tell the stories of early Japanese immigrants to an area now overtaken by urban sprawl.

Community members got their first look at the artifacts over the weekend, pulling from the box hand-sewn flags, Bibles and local newspapers in both English and Japanese, the church’s articles of incorporation and a sheet of glitter-trimmed paper with the h