A small act of peacemaking is being remembered this summer in Oregon.

In the days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor a Japanese man donated a "hand-hewn Shinto symbol called a torii gate" to Waverly Heights Congregational United Church of Christ, according to The Portland Tribune.  Eric Bartels writes:

The gate will be rededicated Sunday at Camp Adams, a sylvan Clackamas County retreat that remains part of the summers and the memories of parishioners at Southeast Portland's Waverly Heights Congregational United Church of Christ.

Glen Pullen, a computer specialist at Portland State University who grew up in the neighborhood, remembers the gate from his youth.

"I grew up in this church," he says. "That torii was always part of the environment. Just part of the landscape."

Pullen says Lee Lynne was pastor of the church for six years beginning in 1936. His decision to install the distinctive gate on a shady stream bank generated controversy. Church members reportedly objected to the presence of a symbol of Japanese culture so soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 of its day.

Church lore holds that the gate was once dumped into the stream below it. Pullen wonders if the acrimony led to the pastor's departure from Waverly Heights Church in early 1943.

"He might have been fired. I really don't know," he says....

(Nancy) Tice, a Southeast Portland publicist and lifelong member of the church, took it upon herself to identify the donor of the gate, whose name did not appear anywhere in church records.

Aided by the downtown Japanese Methodist Church, the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center and longtime Portland residents of Japanese extraction, Tice finally located a Portland man with a yearbook from the Minidoka Relocation Center in south central Idaho. There, the yearbook's owner was interned alongside a shopkeeper named Hongero Kato.

Tice believes Kato, whose family relocated to Chicago after the war, was the former owner of the gate, although "we cannot absolutely, positively prove it."

While the United Church of Christ has always had a progressive, all-inclusive profile, Tice says, Lynne's willingness to install the gate remains praiseworthy.

"He was able to look past the current conflict to think about it being a symbol of friendship between nations even though they were at war," she says. "They weren't going to be at war forever.

"It was a way of reminding people that we need to remember the significance of friendship and find other ways to solve problems."

Current pastor David Zaworski says that while Lynne would have been following church principles to act on his conscience, "it may have caused him some heat even within the congregation. The minister does not tell people what to believe in our church."

Zaworski says Lynne's gesture would have been in keeping with tradition at the United Church of Christ and its antecedents, which have opposed slavery, ordained women, and accepted lesbians and gays into their leadership ranks.

"Justice issues have long been an important part of our church's tradition," Zaworski says. "I suspect that was on his mind."

Click here to real the full story and to see a picture of this beautiful gift to Portland.

Kato, who donated the gate, was taken from Oregon as part of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  This article in The Portland Tribune reports that he never returned to the state.