On September 8, 1951, in San Francisco, Japan signed a treaty that would have a profound effect on the country. It was known as the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Among other things, the treaty cut off Japanese claims to Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), Hong Kong, the Kuril Islands, the Pescadores, the Spratly Islands, Antarctica, and Sakhalin Island. It specified which surrounding islands Japan would control and exercise sovereignty over, authorized the carrying out of the sentences imposed upon those convicted of war crimes, and specified the amount of compensation Japan would pay to the countries it had invaded during the war. The San Francisco Peace Treaty would go into effect on April 28, 1952. The date would also mark the end of the Allied occupation of Japan and technically bring World War II to a close. From that date on, Japan would be a free and sovereign nation once again. Jake hoped and prayed hard that the country would indeed stay free and sovereign and not succumb to the advance of communism in the region.
Also in September 1951, as Japanese diplomats were signing the San Francisco Peace Treaty, calamity struck the DeShazer family. Just before his fourth birthday, Paul became ill and developed a high fever. When he started having convulsions, Jake and Flo raced him to the U.S. Army hospital in Osaka. The doctor diagnosed his condition as encephalitis, a serious inflammation of the brain. Three doctors and several nurses worked hard to try to stabilize Paul’s condition, but to no avail. Paul continued to get sicker and eventually slipped into a coma. At that stage a doctor informed Jake and Florence that they gave Paul a less than 50 percent chance of surviving. And if Paul did survive, he might well suffer from brain damage or paralysis. Jake and Flo immediately began to pray that God would not let Paul die, and they asked the local Christians to pray with them.
Several days later Paul awoke from his coma and made a full recovery, with no lingering complications. “It’s a miracle,” one of the nurses told Jake and Florence. “Your son has the worst case of encephalitis we have ever had, yet he has made the quickest and the most full recovery.”
Jake and Florence knew that indeed it was a miracle. Their prayers and the prayers of many others had been answered, and they committed themselves to continuing their efforts to share the gospel with the Japanese people.
One of the things they threw their energy into was starting a church in Amami, a poor area in southern Osaka. A large storage room served as the church building where Jake preached each week as he won converts and built up the congregation.
As the DeShazers worked hard at establishing the church, Flo learned that she was expecting a third baby. Since she and Jake and the two boys barely fit into their current upstairs lodgings, the family decided that it was time for a move. They eventually moved into a new place near the Free Methodist Osaka Christian College. No sooner had they unpacked their things in the new home than Jake was off on a special mission: a summer evangelizing trip arranged to train seminary students from Osaka Christian College. Jake had three students assigned to him, and the team planned to travel to Shimizu and Tokyo to hold evangelistic meetings in both places.
Jake and the three students prayed together and prepared for their upcoming outreach. Then they set out for Shimizu, located 250 miles east of Osaka. They drove in Jake’s car, on top of which they had attached two loudspeaker horns. Once they reached the city, they visited the mayor and explained their intention to hold evangelistic meetings in Shimizu. The mayor heartily endorsed their effort.
For the next five evenings, Jake would drive his car to the center of town and park outside city hall, where they would hold an outdoor meeting. One of the students played the accordion, another a pipe harmonica, and the third the cornet. The students provided the music for the meeting, interspersing the musical numbers with their testimonies. Jake would step up to the microphone, his voice booming through the speakers on top of the car, and tell his story of imprisonment and how God had changed his life. As Jake spoke, one of the students would translate for him. Though Jake was making progress learning the Japanese language, he did not yet feel confident enough to preach in Japanese. By the end of the five evening meetings, about four hundred people had shown up to hear the students and Jake, and ninety-nine of them had become Christians.
For the next five days, the team traveled into the countryside around Shimizu and held meetings in villages. Before they left Shimizu, Jake and his team had baptized seven converts and organized a Free Methodist Church in the city.
The team then headed for Tokyo, where they preached in churches twenty-five times and held six outdoor meetings. By the time they left Tokyo to head back to Osaka, Jake and his team had distributed over twenty thousand tracts and handed out over five thousand Gospels of John. As they drove back to Osaka, Jake and the students prayed and thanked God for the way He had gone before them and prepared many hearts to respond to the gospel.
In September 1952, a third son, Mark, was added to the DeShazer family. Jake stayed home long enough to make sure that mother and baby were doing well. When he was satisfied that they were, he set off again, this time on a preaching tour in Korea arranged by the U.S. Air Force.
The air force sent a plane to Japan to pick up Jake and fly him to Korea. As he winged his way north toward Korea, Jake thought about how odd it was to be back in a military plane headed for a war zone. The last time he’d flown in a military plane headed for a war zone was nine and a half years before. Then he had been heading for Japan to drop bombs. Now he was headed from Japan to Korea to share the gospel with American airmen and native Koreans. What a strange turn his life had taken.
Once he arrived in Korea, Jake was kept busy. During the first week, he spoke at a number of Air Force chapel services, telling his story and challenging the men with the gospel. During the second week Jake was given special permission to travel to a number of restricted battlefront locations to talk to the soldiers.
The Korean War had been going on for over two years now. It had basically ground down to a stalemate along the 38th Parallel, the original agreed-upon border between North and South Korea. That did not mean, however, that all was quiet along the battlefront. Twice during his visit to the front, Jake had to scurry for cover in sandbag bunkers because of incoming enemy fire. When he wasn’t avoiding enemy fire and conducting chapel services, Jake spent most of his time talking with or counseling airmen.
One of the highlights of Jake’s trip to Korea occurred when he spoke at the Young Nak Presbyterian Church. The church had been built by North Koreans who had been forced to leave their old church and homes at the start of the war and had fled south. Inside the church a thousand people gathered to hear Jake speak through an interpreter. As he spoke, a chorus of amens would arise from the mostly Korean audience. Jake marveled at how different the Koreans were from the Japanese. The Koreans were much more demonstrative during church services than the normally reserved and polite Japanese. Jake found himself excited by the enthusiastic feedback from the congregation.
As he flew back to Osaka, Jake thought over his trip to Korea. It had been a long time since he’d been among a crowd of Americans. He was surprised that they still recognized him and wanted him to recount his story of being part of the Doolittle Raid and his subsequent capture by the Japanese. This experience convinced Jake that he should accept the invitation to attend the next annual Doolittle Raiders reunion, to be held in San Diego in April 1953. He had not attended any of the previous reunions.
Jake traveled alone to the United States for the reunion. Florence was expecting another baby and could not make the trip. Besides, the whole DeShazer family was planning to return to the United States for furlough in the not-too-distant future.
At the reunion in San Diego, Jake thoroughly enjoyed himself. He had a great time catching up with many of his old Army Air Corps comrades, although a number of the surviving Raiders had stayed on in the military and were fighting in Korea. Jimmy Doolittle was there, larger than life. About halfway through the banquet, he whispered to Jake that a parcel had arrived for him in the lobby. Jake was puzzled for a moment, and then he nodded. Several weeks before, he had ordered five hundred Bible tracts to be delivered to him at the hotel where the reunion was being held. Now, in the middle of a banquet of five hundred people, the tracts had shown up. Five hundred people at the banquet and five hundred tracts—was it a coincidence? Jake didn’t think so. He excused himself, retrieved the tracts, and began handing them out.
A waiter approached. “What are you doing, Sir?” he asked.
“Passing these out to everyone,” Jake replied.
“But you can’t do that!” the waiter exclaimed. “You are supposed to be one of the honored guests.”
Jake shrugged his shoulders. “I want every single person in this room to get the message of salvation—they need to read this.”
“I know that you can’t give them out,” the waiter said. “Here, give them to me. I will do it myself. You go back to your table.”
Jake smiled to himself at the sight of the waiter offering everyone a tract as if it were a glass of wine. One way or another the gospel had gotten out!
In addition to attending the reunion, Jake was able to visit several churches while in the United States. In typical style he spoke at a large gathering at Greenville College, Illinois, and then enjoyed lunch with a Sunday school class who had saved their pennies all year to send money for shoes for the DeShazer children.
Jake returned to Japan ready to get back to his work preaching and teaching. He also threw his energy into supporting a Christian radio station. When funding for the station ran low, Jake and Flo agreed to use the last of his army back pay to keep it on the air.
Not long after Jake returned to Japan from the United States, the Korean War came to an end when an armistice between North and South Korea was signed on July 27, 1953. The armistice divided the Korean peninsula between North and South at the 38th Parallel, right where it had been divided before the war. Jake hoped that the armistice marked the end of the expansion of communism in East Asia.
Two and a half months later, on October 10, 1953, Florence gave birth to another child, this time a daughter, whom Flo and Jake named Carol Aiko (which means love in Japanese).
In April 1955, after six hectic years of living in Japan, it was time for the DeShazer family to return to the United States for furlough. Before leaving for home, Jake had one last task he felt compelled to complete. It was now ten years since World War II had ended, and many convicted Japanese war criminals were still imprisoned on death row awaiting execution. Jake’s heart broke when he thought of their wasted lives, and he wrote to the American military authorities on their behalf. In the letter he pointed out how his own life had been spared: “I owe the emperor of Japan an eternal debt of gratitude. I would have spent eternity in hell if I had been executed at that time, for I was not a Christian.” Then he added, “Our country was the first to drop the atomic bomb. Now let us be the first to show mercy.”
Chapter 18
A New Strategy
In September 1955, Jake found himself once more behind a desk. This time he was attending Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, studying for his master’s degree in divinity. The Free Methodist Church had agreed to continue Jake’s salary and pay his expenses while he attended seminary. In exchange, Jake spent most weekends on the road speaking, sometimes with his family but mostly alone. His fame as a Doolittle Raider still drew large crowds of Christians and non-Christians alike. He loved to tell about his experiences as a missionary to Japan and about the openness of the Japanese people to the gospel.
