Japanese missionary in South America

No verification

Here is a heart-warming missionary story. A missionary of Japanese ancestry really wants to go to Japan on a mission since he can speak the language. Instead, he gets called to Colombia and will speak Spanish. He serves his entire mission disappointed, but faithfully. At the end of the mission, he meets a Japanese family living in Colombia and teaches them in their native language. He also finds out that the original Book of Mormon that this family had came to them from the missionaries father (just a nice little added touch).

This is a nice story, but there is no documentation to verify its validity. It is similar to experiences of Masakazu Watabe, a missionary of Japanese heritage who served a mission in Brazil. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Liahona (August, 1987):

When Brother Watabe learned that each member of the Church should be a missionary, he committed himself to go tracting every day. He began by tracting in the train on the way to work, giving pamphlets to those who were interested. While serving a mission in Brazil, his third son, Masakazu, had the unusual experience of baptizing a man who had first heard of the gospel from Masao Watabe on a train in Japan fifteen years earlier.

So there may be a little truth to this one.