SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — Given all the newly completed renovations done to the century-old church, Alan Shino said he had doubts about finding a time capsule behind the cornerstone of the Japanese Church of Christ.
Everything from the walls, moldings, floor, electrical, and roof was upgraded.
As the Facility and Grounds Manager, Shino didn’t want to mess up anything after so much time and money had gone into renovating the church.
“My friend came in from Vegas to visit, and he said, ‘Hey, let’s go on an Easter Egg hunt’ ,” said Shino.
That playfully made comment sparked a mission to find something bigger than Easter Eggs.
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“When we sat down, we were thinking we were going to get this concrete vault, you know, real simple. That wasn’t anything like I encountered,” Shino said.
It took more work, special tools, and time to break through brick wall strongholds.
“When I started, it was more a situation of the unknown, not knowing what I had to do. We spent eight hours just locating where it was,” he said.
In time, the revelation behind why the process took so long started to make sense. It also gave a better understanding of the church’s history.
Shino said the founders, when building the church foundation wall, used a method that required filling up spaces with cement. There wasn’t a clear-cut designated space for the time capsule; it was dropped into the cement.
The founders hoped that future generations would eventually find the capsule.
Nearly 100 years later, Shino found himself working to break through that cement.
Shino said the whole drilling process was challenging because he was expecting to eventually hit an airspace within the wall, where the time capsule would likely be.
“We would drilland run thescopethe camera down into the hole and see if we could find something. And finally, I struckalmost the corner of the time capsule.”
What was inside the capsule?
That answer will be revealed in a future story.
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AloJapan.com