Rev. Yasushi Phillip Sakai

Yasushi Philip Sakai was born in 1948 in a hamlet in Miyama village, Wakayama Prefecture, on the mountainous Pacific coast of central Japan. He came of age in a country still reassembling itself after the war, and entered college near his hometown just as a tide of communist ideology was sweeping across Japan and much of the world. Recognising the danger in that current, he began to search for an answer adequate to it — a search that, in 1969, brought him into the Unification movement.

Three years later, in 1972, he crossed the Pacific as a missionary, sent to support the success of a series of speaking tours by Rev. Sun Myung Moon in the United States. He never returned home to stay. Like many of the early Japanese missionaries, he chose the elder son nation over the country of his birth, and threw his life into the work of building the providence in America.

The last thirty years of that life were spent in Hawaii. There he gave himself almost entirely to witnessing and to the education of members and young people, with a particular tenderness for second-generation members who had drifted from the church. He sought them out personally; when they came to service he handed them notes, and tried to revive in them the conviction he had carried since his own youth.

At the centre of his teaching stood Jesus Christ. Sakai believed that without understanding Jesus' heart and the Bible, one could not properly understand the Second Coming or True Parents, and he made it his lifework to build that bridge — first for fellow Japanese members with little Christian background, and then for the children of the movement. He returned constantly to two scriptures: 'Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,' and 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' In them he heard the whole of Jesus' loneliness and his victory.

He researched Jesus, the Bible, and the spirit world with unusual rigour, urging his students to study the introduction to restoration in the Japanese Divine Principle. With his son Michinari he went out every morning, rain or shine, Bible in one hand and straw mat in the other, sitting on Chinatown street corners to read scripture among the homeless.

In his final years he joined the Maryland community after his long Hawaiian chapter. He is survived by his wife Kyoko, his son and daughter-in-law Michinari and Chiharu, and his granddaughters Karyana and Liberty.