A month after he died Thackeray got a letter from Elder Michaels. "Hey, civilian," Michaels wrote, "guess who they made me companions with? Danbury! I suppose Prez. Atkinson wanted to prove you could get ten in a month in Hakuraku. As long as I don't have to stick around and clean up the mess I'll bask in the glory. Oh, and as long as Yoshida Shimai doesn't murder him before one of them gets transferred. Oh, by the way, Atkinson got his one-thousand baptisms. Was there ever any doubt?"

No, there hadn't been.

Michaels died before the mission changed presidents. The new president was Japanese, Inoue Dendou-bucho. "He's a good man," Yoshida wrote Thackeray, "but he won't keep the charade going. Atkinson's old apes try to tell him how to run the mission. But he's going to listen to the local leaders, because he knows where they're coming from, because he's not a hotshot gaijin from Salt Lake City who can intimidate people because who he's related to and all the baptisms he gets."

Thackeray was back to BYU majoring in English lit. The center will not hold, he wrote her, having just digested a good deal of Yeats.

The center was having a tough time of it. Then the North Asia Area Presidency was reorganized. And things fell apart. The new GA took one look at the Tokyo South mission and did not like what he saw. He eliminated the small groups, recombined half of the two-man districts. He banned streeting and expanded pre-baptism church attendance and lesson-plan requirements for all investigators.

Baptisms dropped ninety percent.

Thackeray decided to get his minor in Japanese. As in all of his classes, most of the students in his 300-level grammar class were returned missionaries. In study group, the subject of missions inevitably came up.

"Tokyo South," he said, simply, to the equally simple question.

"Tokyo South! Jeez, you're one of those thousand-baptisms-per-month weasels, huh? Flip, we were lucky to get one-twenty, max. You know how many times we got our noses rubbed in it? Like every zone conference. Like we're not as holy as you guys 'cause we're not drowning everything that doesn't naturally sink. How many boku baptisms did you have to do to do those numbers, anyway?"

Spoken in jest, yet Thackeray could taste the animosity. He wanted to defend his mission, point out that not every baptism was a boku baptism, that there were some missionaries--Chadwick, Matthews, Kempner, Yoshida, to name a few--who maybe weren't dunking ten a month, but were doing the work well, and doing it above board. He wanted to ask the questions he'd never resolved with Michaels, about at what point the numbers you got baptizing for the numbers weren't just numbers.

Then there was the time an RM came up to him after class and identified himself as a Tokyo South alumnus. Apparently he knew Thackeray from the old lost-in-Tokyo story. Thackeray had no idea who he was.

"Yeah," he said, "I listen to them bad-mouth Tokyo South and President Atkinson. Fact is, they didn't have the spirit like we did. They could have done it if they wanted it. You just gotta want it."

Thackeray walked away. No wonder they hate us. And it wouldn't heal until the Atkinson-jidai missionaries had all died and reality had settled in and those halcyon days had become myth.

So he didn't talk much about his mission, except with RMs who hadn't been to Japan, and then only in the abstract. But the next summer, Yoshida Shimai died. She came to Utah to see him, and they talked about everything for a very long time.