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Last year I posted a link to a research piece on Dr. Bernard J. Bettelheim, the crazed European missionary and troublemaker extraordinaire who spent several years living in Naha, Okinawa. In that piece, I mentioned that Bettelheim spent considerable time translating the canonical Gospels into katakana and phonetic script of the local Hogen dialect.

Although Bettelheim records his success in translating the Gospels into katakana and the native Hogen, we can only speculate upon what he was actually able to get across in these attempts.

While looking online for more of Bettelheim’s diary, I came across copies of his translation of the Gospels of Luke and St. John, digitally archived at the University of Hawaii’s Japan Collection:

Treasures of Okinawa, Frank Hawley Collection

Some time after the Doctor’s departure from Okinawa (something that the Ryukyuan government tried to arrange from the moment he set foot on the island), a monument was erected in his memory by a group of foreign and Japanese Protestants. Like many, many other historically significant artifacts, this monument was destroyed in the bombardment of Okinawa during World War II. While looking at the link above I came across a digitally archived rubbing of the original monument, hosted by the university of Hawaii’s Okinawa Collection:

Sakamaki Hawley collection, Hakutokurei Kinento Takuhon (Rubbing of Monument to Bettelheim). It’s the 4th item down.