Person

Morikawa, Jitsuo

• Reverend Jitsuo Morikawa

1912-1987

Reverend Jitsuo Morikawa was born in Port Hammond, British Columbia in 1912. He was the youngest son of Yasutarō and Tora Morikawa. His mother died shortly after he was born and his father remarried in 1919.

He graduated from the University of California-Los Angeles and of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1940. He went to work after that as a pastor for three different Japanese-American congregations before being forced with his wife, Hazel Takii (1915-2005), to move to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona where they lived for 18 months. During his time there he served as a pastor in the camp.

After being release, he moved to Chicago in 1943 where he became the associate pastor and later pastor of First Baptist Church of Chicago until 1956. Jitsuo then moved to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania where he served as director of evangelism (1956-1966) and office of planning (1966-1972) as well as the associate executive secretary of the American Baptist National Ministries until 1976. He was the interm pastor of Riverside Church in New York from 1976-1977 and later settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he was the minister of the First Baptist Church until he retirement in 1982.

He was the vice president of American Baptist Churches USA from 1984-1986. He was well-known and well regarded in the evangelistic community. He died in 1987. His wife wrote his biography after his death, "Footprints: One Man's Pilgrimage, a Biography of Jitsuo Morikawa" and it was published 1990.