1979
LDS Scene
February 1979


“LDS Scene,” Ensign, Feb. 1979, 79–80

LDS Scene

The Japan Sendai Mission has a new president. Kiyoshi Sakai of Tokyo, Japan, has been called as president, to succeed Richard D. S. Kwak. The mission is one of eight in Japan.

President Sakai, who has served as first counselor in the Yokohama Japan Stake and as a bishop in Tokyo and high councilor in the Tokyo Stake, has been employed by the Church’s distribution center in Tokyo. Serving with him in his mission assignment will be his wife, Mitsuyo Ogawa Sakai. They have three children.

For Church scholars, the invitation was a first. Jeffrey R. Holland, Church commissioner of education, participated in December in the international Jerusalem Seminar on Monotheism, Tradition, and Modernization. The invitation to participate was the first extended to the Church. He joined with education, business, and religious leaders from North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East in Jerusalem to discuss the effect of modern politics and economics on the teaching of personal values, public morals, and traditional religious beliefs.

Dale R. Curtis of Salt Lake City has been called as director of the Temple Square visitors’ centers in Salt Lake City. He succeeds Keith E. Garner, who has served in the position for four years. Brother Garner’s counselors, Gerald G. Smith and Clyde J. Summerhays, also have been released. Counselors to Brother Curtis have not been announced.

The director of Temple Square visitors’ centers oversees some 1,050 volunteer guides and hosts who assist the more than four million visitors to Temple Square annually.