Part 6 (Conclusion)—Rounding the World with the Vice-President
TOKYO, JAPAN
It is after 5 p.m., local time, when the plane from Seoul lands at the Tokyo international airport, where the Japanese branch servant and his wife and the district servant await also the return of the Society’s vice-president. There is a special farewell meeting for him to serve tonight, as announced the preceding Sunday in Tokyo. So after a brief stop at the Society’s Tokyo branch, he is whisked away to the Tokyo Shibuya-Ku Kokaido, a municipal auditorium, for a talk at 7 p.m. The Tokyo and Yokohama congregations had arranged to meet here as a central point. To the delight of all an appreciative audience of 446 Kingdom publishers and persons of good will occupied the ground floor and the balcony of this auditorium and sought instruction on God’s will for them during 1957 and time to come. They received a spur to more diligent Bible study and to activity in preaching “this good news of the kingdom.” To this profitable meeting one group of special pioneer publishers near Tokyo gathered in twenty-seven recently interested persons. Also present was a professor from the Waseda University, an educational institution with an enrollment of 25,000 students, where the Society’s president addressed a large body of students and professors in the spring of 1956. The professor was encouraged to prosecute his study of the message of God’s now-established kingdom.
Came the morning of Thursday, January 31, and the visiting vice-president has the rare pleasure of enjoying the regular Bethel service at the breakfast table in the branch office building and missionary home. Except for his own comment on the day’s Bible text and his prayer before the morning meal was served, all the Bible discussion was in Japanese, not only by the Japanese members of the household but also by the missionary members from foreign lands. It was gratifying to observe how well these latter showed ability to discuss God’s Word in the language of their missionary assignment.
The further hours of the morning allowed for additional checking over the records and facilities of the Tokyo branch establishment, and part of the afternoon was taken advantage of to visit two other missionary homes in other parts of the capital city. It filled one with joy to note that the missionaries were comfortably housed and were happy in living together as fellow workers, as helpers and backers of one another in unity.
The scheduled hour of departure, 7 p.m., drew near, and some sixty of the Tokyo and Yokohama missionaries, pioneers and congregation publishers gathered at the Tokyo international airport to say farewell to Brother Franz. It was a bright and happy group, enthusiastic and confident of grander expansion of the theocratic organization in Japan in the future. As the giant PAA plane rose into the air and bore Brother Franz on his way to Hawaii, it came the time at the Tokyo branch to close out the January service report for Japan. What did the adding up of all the reports received from within the country show? The best month ever for Kingdom service in Japan, with a new maximum of 685 publishers, which spelled out a 26-percent increase already over the previous service year. The momentum gained carried them to a new height in February, 693 Kingdom announcers. In Japan Jehovah’s witnesses thanked him for all the marvelous blessings of January, 1957, which no doubt were the forerunner of even greater blessings ahead.
FLYING BACK INTO YESTERDAY AND LAST MONTH
It was during the last hours of Thursday, the last day of the month of January, when the plane bearing the Society’s vice-president left Japan, with the mid-Pacific American possession of Wake Island as its first stop. We passengers tried to sleep in our reclining seats, with our seat belts fastened to hold us down, for we were due to pass through some rough areas of atmosphere. Midnight passed and at 2:10 a.m., Friday, February 1, Tokyo time, or 5:10 a.m., Wake Island time, we landed on this tiny, V-shaped coral atoll, the top of an extinct underwater volcano, with an area of three square miles. It had been a seven-hour flight from Tokyo to here. It was still dark when we reboarded our PAA plane and got off the ground at 6:48 a.m., Wake Island time. Soon it grew light into the morning of Friday, the first day of February. We continue our flight eastward, against the sun. By now it is about 10:12 a.m., Wake Island time, and Brother Franz steps up to the pilot’s cabin and asks the logmaster when we shall reach the international date line. “We are there right now!” says the logman on checking. In fact, we see no line of any kind in the Pacific Ocean below, there being broken clouds between it and us. But it is the place to draw the line as to the time.
So here we crossed the international date line. Did that make any difference? Yes! What, then, had happened? I did not feel a day younger, but we had here crossed over from Friday back into Thursday of the same week, and from February 1, 1957, back into January 31. All the hours that the vice-president had lost by flying eastward from New York city some fifteen thousand miles back due west he was now about to recapture. We now measure time by what it is in Honolulu, our destination, according to which we have gained a day in our life. So it is that on Thursday, January 31, at 5:35 p.m., after a fine aerial view of the famous Diamond Head promontory, we landed at the Honolulu airport, with the sun still shining brightly in the west. It had been an overwater flight of eight hours and fifty-one minutes from Wake Island. All together, seventeen and a half hours had been consumed since leaving Tokyo, Japan. By the calendar we had landed in Honolulu an hour and a half before we left Tokyo.
HONOLULU, HAWAII
It had been a pleasant surprise for Jehovah’s witnesses in Hawaii to learn early in October that they were to have a visit by the vice-president of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society the first weekend of February. At once preliminary plans were begun to hold a district assembly in that connection. It was hoped to be able to hold this assembly in Hilo, to advance the work on the Big Isle of Hawaii, over 150 miles to the southeast. But a place large enough to accommodate such a gathering was not yet available. Hence the American Chinese Club Pavilion in Honolulu, here on Oahu Island, the same Pavilion where the Society’s president and his secretary had spoken in March of 1956, was selected.
Work was started on printing 50,000 special invitations for persons of good will, 40,000 regular handbills and 572 window cards. Later, plans were made to have the public lecture radiocast on one of the prominent stations, and so an additional 30,000 handbills were distributed on the outer islands of the Territory of Hawaii just the weekend before the district assembly. This would enable interested persons who could not attend the assembly personally to hear the message by radio. Other means of advertising used were radio spot announcements, items in seven newspapers, and three spots on television, two in English and one in Japanese. No stone was left unturned in advertising this important event.
Finally the evening arrived when Brother Franz was to reach Honolulu via Pan American Airways on the last leg of his eleven-week service tour around the globe. So Thursday evening, January 31, found about 250 of Jehovah’s witnesses at the airport to give the traveler a characteristic Hawaiian welcome. After some delay in getting through customs he was finally in touch with them, and these members of the global New World society began to pile him high with the traditional fresh-flower leis, fifty-four of them, some of these being given Hawaiian-style! Overwhelmed, Brother Franz did not want to part company so soon with these newly met friends. To their delight he announced that he would give an account of his trip for them all at the Central Unit Kingdom Hall at 7:30 that evening. This Kingdom Hall adjoins the Watch Tower Society’s Honolulu branch building, where an assembly place of Jehovah’s witnesses was first named Kingdom Hall over twenty years ago, after Judge Rutherford’s visit in April, 1935. Almost all of the welcoming crowd made their way over to the designated place, and at 7:45 p.m. the meeting to hear the travelogue began, with 173 crowded into the hall. The time available was convenient, for, owing to another engagement at the American Chinese Club Pavilion, the district assembly workers were unable to get into this place of assembly until 11 p.m. to make final preparations for the opening day. So, right after the travelogue, many quickly changed into work clothes and swung into action at the Pavilion and about 2:30 Friday morning all was ready there for the opening session.
Those arriving for the initial gathering at 9 a.m. saw the theme “Pure Worship Expansion” in bold letters on both sides of the Pavilion’s stage proscenium. To the left they saw displayed a replica of the globe with a pictorial projection of the Hawaiian Island chain. This side depicted the progress of the work by 1937, showing all the islands colored brown except Oahu, which was in yellow, indicating that then there was only one congregation in all Hawaii and work was being done on only one island. The other side showed the progress of the witness work by 1957. Here the Island chain was all in yellow, having been bathed in the “golden light of Kingdom truth” by the expansion of pure worship and showing now a total of seventeen congregations. To show further the theme of fruitfulness, a large tray of literal Hawaiian fruits decorated the center of the Pavilion stage and large Hawaiian pineapples were spaced between colorful caladium plants along the front of the stage. Other native Hawaiian plants completed the scene.
At this time 275 turned out for the field contact here, and after a half hour of instruction they proceeded to the field. This time the advertising of the public lecture on the streets was promoted in a different way. Instead of walkers marching as usual with placards fore and aft, the conventioners held up signs mounted on sticks, so that they were displayed above the people’s heads. These were also equipped with colored arrows to attract more attention.
After dinner at the cafeteria, which was installed alongside the Pavilion auditorium, with long tables under canopy, a program followed with talks on spiritual prosperity and accurate knowledge and on announcing Jehovah’s kingdom with magazines, this being pointed up with practical demonstrations. The names of those on this and succeeding parts of the assembly program, such as Fajardo, Ito, Samson, Akiyoshi, Yoshikawa, Chum, Chong, Kong, Lu Shigemi, Kawasaki Ah You, Uchimura, Liu, Palusky, Kealoha, Nako, Krautheim, Higa and Tyson, showed up the polyglot, multiracial constitution of the inhabitants of Hawaii and that the New World society is made up of “all kinds of men,” whom God is saving by Jesus Christ.
During the course of the afternoon, at the studios of TV station WGBM, Brother Franz was televised on “Guest Time” for two and a half minutes. Also, following the afternoon assembly sessions, twenty-five missionaries and special pioneers from a number of the islands of Hawaii gathered for an unscheduled meeting at the Kingdom Hall alongside the branch and had a special hour and a half meeting with Brother Franz. During this time interesting service and Bible questions were treated. Brother Franz especially reminded these full-time publishers of their favored position in Hawaii and admonished them to keep on setting a fine example in zealous service.
Friday evening the 940 in attendance benefited by talks on spiritual need and unity in the New World society delivered by the circuit servant for Hawaii and the Society’s branch servant, Keith W. Stebbins. In sequence to them Brother Franz made his first official address on the assembly platform, to climax a blessed day. This night’s attendance of 940 stood out favorably in bold relief against the 918 witnesses who had reported field service during the preceding month of January, which figure was eight more than the goal of a 10-percent increase in the number of active publishers for Hawaii. Thereby further increase was certainly shown to be immediately possible in Hawaii.
At the Pavilion 650 gathered Saturday morning to hear the discourse on dedication and baptism. The baptism of the candidates took place in the blue Pacific Ocean alongside the public baths at Waikiki beach. After all the others had been immersed, one candidate from the island of Molokai arrived late at the beach, but on being found to have informed himself on the issue of baptism and upon individually answering in the affirmative the decisive questions put to him by the speaker, the branch servant, this eager candidate was immersed by himself, to bring the total of baptized ones to fifty-two, there being nineteen brothers and thirty-three sisters. The afternoon feature, “Witnessing with a Purpose,” was presented in first a discourse and then a four-part demonstration arranged by the circuit servant. A three-part symposium followed this up, entitled “A Career with the New World Society,” and in this the pioneer service was made prominent. Attendance at this session was 755.
The evening’s talks were designed to benefit Kingdom ministers of all ages, children, adults, aged men and women, and newly interested associates. For the closing event of the day the branch servant kindly offered to have the vice-president speak instead of him on the programed talk “Proper Administration of Overseer Duties.” Those gathered for this occasion were thrilled to hear announced that 1,005 were then seated around Jehovah’s spiritual table at the Pavilion, the biggest gathering of ministers yet. Before closing, congratulatory telegrams were read from Chicago, Illinois, and the Philippine Islands, and Canton Island, where one lone Oriental sister formerly in Hawaii is now carrying on the witness work under the Hawaiian branch.
Sunday, February 3, the final assembly day, came with overcast skies and there was some rain. How favorable would the weather be to the afternoon public meeting at the Pavilion? Last night the assembly attendance had overflowed out onto the beautiful grounds fronting on the Pavilion. Confidently the morning program of the assembly went forward, with 860 in attendance. The young ministers were specially admonished to flee from desires incidental to youth, and all those present were wisely counseled on guarding our association amidst this world and never to compromise Christian principles. The session concluded with timely advice on fleeing from materialism and on meeting the need to expand pure worship.
Final preparations were now made for the grand climax of any New World society assembly, the public lecture. Favorably, the Hawaiian winter skies held back from pouring down further rain and the temperature was mild. The subject, “New World Peace in Our Time—Why?” had been extensively advertised by the many available means. The public responded. As the speaker, the Society’s vice-president, addressed this visible audience, his speech was being recorded on tape. At the termination of a half hour that part of the speech was immediately carried to the studios of station KPOA not far away and broadcasting of it began at 3:45 p.m. The next half hour of the uninterrupted public address at the Pavilion was likewise tape-recorded and the tape was hurried over to KPOA and its radiocast of the address continued without a break. The concluding fifteen minutes of the speech, with its appeal to the listeners to pursue further the goal of New World peace and expressing the loving hope for their eternal enjoyment of it, was also recorded and the radiocasting of it over KPOA ended at 5 p.m. The distant station, KILA, on the Big Isle of Hawaii, was tied in with KPOA and it rebroadcast the entire speech by this relay to the island’s 80,000 inhabitants, mainly at Hilo. After the public address the branch servant exclaimed: “This is the last meeting we shall have here in this place.” How was that? “It is now too small!” Yes, the attendance had reached the proportions of the largest turnout at any public meeting of Jehovah’s witnesses in Hawaii, a new record peak attendance of 1,472 visibly present, not counting the indeterminate audience invisibly present by radio.
A short intermission, and the assembly reconvened to hear a summary of the weekly Watchtower magazine study and the branch servant’s exhortation on “Keeping Within the Confines of the New World Society.” Assuredly many of the public were staying for this finale of the assembly, for when the vice-president came on again to give an official conclusion to this spiritual feast the largest attendance yet outside of the public meeting was present to hear, an attentive 1,128. After once more expressing his appreciation for the opportunity to visit these fair islands and to make the acquaintance of all his listeners interested in God’s Word, new friends, he drew the assembly to its close with fervent prayer to Jehovah God for spiritual prosperity through his King Jesus Christ. Long after the dissolution of the assembly down came the rains, toward midnight.
Another night was at our disposal for meeting with these spiritually seeking Hawaiian friends. So at the assembly’s close it was announced that the vice-president would speak again at the Central Unit Kingdom Hall Monday night to all in position to come. In spite of the rain 303 filled the beautiful Kingdom Hall to overflowing and received further encouragement to sing to Jehovah the “new song.” The meeting the succeeding night, Tuesday, February 5, was different. It was one of farewell at the Honolulu airport. Many Hawaiian friends, together with the missionaries, thronged the waiting room and bestowed lovely leis of flowers and of candy and other mementos upon the departing vice-president. They followed him to the gate onto the airfield. After a last wave of Aloha! to them all Brother Franz entered the door of the waiting airplane. Shortly after 10 p.m. the PAA superconstellation pulls away from before the airport building and gets onto the distant runway and is soon lost to view in the blackness of the night sky, up above dripping clouds and under starlit Hawaiian heavens.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Arrival of the plane on the American continent was next day, after 7 a.m., at the San Francisco international airport. Thirteen brothers, all servants and representatives from the numerous congregations in the San Francisco-Oakland area of California, were there. Brother Franz adorned each of them with a lei fresh from Hawaii. The public relations servant of the circuit was alert to his assigned task and so, before the evening meeting, a recording was made at the studios of Station KLX of a seven-minute interview with Brother Franz and then another interview at the Watch Tower Society’s former radio station, KROW. Invitations to the evening meeting at the Municipal Auditorium over in Oakland, California, were restricted so as not to draw too big a crowd. Yet, at 8 p.m., after a fine musical program of a half hour, the big auditorium had a capacity crowd of 8,091 to hear the round-the-world traveler give his first report in the United States of America. Listeners came from far points, even from Los Angeles to the south. All returned to their abodes much refreshed by the two-hour travelogue with which they were served.
The following morning, Thursday, February 7, the vice-president emplaned for the Brooklyn headquarters of the Watch Tower Society. There was a cross-country nonstop flight of over eight hours eastward to land safely, after some circling aloft owing to airport traffic jam, at the Idlewild International airport on Long Island, outside of New York city. On hand to greet Brother Franz were both the Society’s president and the secretary-treasurer, besides a goodly number of other members of the Brooklyn Bethel family. It was a joyous reunion, and there were still Hawaiian leis to grace those of this reception committee with. By 10:30 p.m. we were back at the Brooklyn Bethel home, grateful to Jehovah for his power and goodness that had preserved us all. The vice-president’s round-the-world service tour had taken seventy-seven days, including the day gained by crossing the international date line in the Pacific, or eleven full weeks. Seventeen different lands outside the American mainland had been visited with meetings with the members of the globe-embracing New World society of Jehovah’s witnesses. Everywhere there were members of this New World society that expressed their wishes and hopes of attending the already announced international assembly of Jehovah’s witnesses in the big New York city stadium in the summer of 1958.