Sharing sukiyaki

Old men with salt-and-pepper hair will soon take over the kitchen of a historic South Hill church. On Saturday, they’ll hover over hot woks as they take charge of the main dish: tender strips of sirloin beef, stir-fried with fresh asparagus and other vegetables, then infused with a tangy mix of soy sauce, sugar and sherry.

While certainly a feast for the senses, the annual sukiyaki dinner is more than just a meal for members of Highland Park United Methodist Church. For this largely Japanese-American congregation, the food they serve is both a bridge to the past and a celebration of culture.

“It’s our heritage,” said Gary Saiki, who has been part of this close-knit congregation since he was born 50 years ago. “This is what our grandparents and our parents have shared with us.”

Every year, for nearly six decades, people from all over Spokane and beyond have flocked to this church to eat with chopsticks and get a taste of traditional Japanese food.

Long before the proliferation of Asian restaurants, the annual sukiyaki dinner was one of the few opportunities in town to eat sushi, try out sweet rice crackers called senbei and savor the beef-vegetable-rice dish made famous by the isseis – the first-generation Japanese who ruled the kitchen for decades.

“At that time, no one in Spokane even knew what sushi was,” recalled Kaz Yamamoto, 79, a longtime member of the church.

The elaborate banquet – which for many years also featured a kimono fashion show and tea ceremony – became one of the ways for the area’s Japanese American population to share its culture.

The congregation now known as Highland Park United Methodist Church began in 1902 with a group of young men from Japan who moved to Spokane to work in the sugar beet industry near the town of Fairfield. They started worshipping at Central United Methodist Church downtown but then began meeting in a Chinese laundry for Bible study and English class, according to old newspaper articles. In 1912, the Japanese Mission Board was formed by the Methodist churches in Spokane. Twenty-five years later, the Japanese immigrants were able to purchase a church from a Swedish Methodist congregation and established what became known as the Grant Street Church.

It was at that old building, which was located at Fifth and Grant on the lower South Hill, where the sukiyaki dinner was born.

The congregation – which built a new church on Garfield Street in 1958 and renamed itself “Highland Park” – soon became known for its annual Japanese feast.

“We wanted to keep our culture alive,” said Yamamoto, who was born on a farm in Wapato, Wash., but moved to Spokane after being sent to an internment camp in Wyoming during World War II.

During its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, the annual sukiyaki dinner was a two-day extravaganza that drew more than 3,000 people. A story about the feast even made the cover of Sunset Magazine in April 1980.

Along with the kosher dinner at Temple Beth Shalom and the Greek dinner at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, the sukiyaki meal at Highland Park became one of the city’s premiere food events, a chance for people of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds to gather and eat.

Over the years, however, the annual dinner became more of a challenge for Highland Park’s congregation, especially with the deaths of the isseis and as the nisseis or the second-generation grew older. The elder Japanese Americans not only had to pass down the tradition to the sansei, or third-generation, and their children, but also teach the church’s growing hakujin or non-Japanese population.

Many in this congregation of 150 families remain respectful of the church’s Asian roots, especially the people who aren’t of Japanese descent, said the Rev. John Coleman Campbell, Highland Park’s pastor. In fact, some of the church’s newest members were drawn to the place because of their affinity for Japanese food, culture and values, which emphasize hard work and hospitality, he said.

A month before the sukiyaki dinner, the entire church goes into planning and preparation mode. Yamamoto and others spend hours in the kitchen, baking senbei and other treats. Saiki puts together a grocery list that includes 250 pounds of beef, 200 pounds of rice, 150 pounds of tofu and 50 packages of bean-thread noodles known as saifun.

On the day of the feast, the nisseis hunker down in the kitchen, stirring the sizzling beef and paying tribute to the generation before them – the people who not only gave them careful instructions on how to cook sukiyaki but also showed them how to live.

“This is our heritage. This church is like home,” said 80-year-old Aiko Minata. “Being part of this meal gives us a sense of pride.”