From Expo '70 to the Seventy: A High School Student's Referral Card at the Osaka Mormon Pavilion and the Rise of Elder Kazuhiko Yamashita (1970)

In 1970, as a symbol of Japan's recovery from World War II, the first World's Fair ever held in Asia opened in Osaka. With the theme "Progress and Harmony for Mankind," the seven-month exposition welcomed representatives of 77 countries and over 64 million visitors. Among the national and corporate pavilions stood a large Mormon Pavilion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nearly seven million people passed through it, where they briefly heard the message of the restored gospel and watched the film "Man's Search for Happiness." Approximately 780,000 Japanese visitors were so moved that they left their contact information and asked for missionaries to visit them at home.

One of those visitors was Kazuhiko Yamashita, a high school student. Impressed by the young missionaries' attitudes and the film, he wrote down his name and number and turned in a self-referral card. Six months later, the missionaries called on him.

"Those missionaries were great," he later remembered. "They were a good example to me. I was interested in their life and service. They were young and polite and I wanted to hear their message." Still, Kazuhiko was a busy high school student and canceled many of the appointments the patient missionaries arranged.

The turning point came when he was filled with a "very sad feeling" and wanted to express gratitude to the missionaries who had kept teaching him — and to apologize for his half-hearted effort. One of them told Kazuhiko he would soon complete his mission and return to the United States. Moved by the news, Kazuhiko committed to immediately learning about the gospel.

"Then the discussions started," he recalled. "I didn't understand their message well, but I knew they loved me. Their lives and example were the message of God. Then I was baptized."

Of the roughly 780,000 referrals gathered at the pavilion, this one teenager's card — out of seven million visitors — became a General Authority's conversion story. Kazuhiko Yamashita went on to serve as a bishop, counselor in the Fukuoka Japan Mission presidency, stake president, and Area Seventy. He married Tazuko Tashiro, a convert who had found the missionaries in her teens and gained her own testimony after the death of her brother humbled her to pray; the couple was sealed in the Tokyo Japan Temple shortly after its dedication in 1980, raised six children, and in 1984-85 he served as a visiting professor at BYU. On April 2, 2011 — more than forty years after filling out the referral card at a world's fair — he was sustained as a General Authority Seventy of the Church, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.

More than four decades later Elder Yamashita looked back with gratitude on those patient, tenacious missionaries who changed his life. He came to see the fruit of the pavilion in his own family and in the international Church: "We know that our Heavenly Father knows everything in our family. He knows our weakness, our challenges, our suffering, our patience. Everything... Patience means waiting with hope." After years of prayer for a son who had left Church activity for six years — a former bishop placing the boy's name on the temple prayer roll and praying daily — the son offered a sincere prayer of his own, received a strong testimony that God lived and loved him, and returned. "I had my miracle," Sister Yamashita said.

The account stands as a striking improbability of the gathering of Israel: one self-referral card among hundreds of thousands, one busy teenager among millions of fairgoers, one team of patient missionaries — and from that slender thread, a Seventy of the restored Church of Jesus Christ.