the extension of the teaching work in the
Northern Island (Hokkaido) of Japan. If no settlers are in the Northern
Island, then they should undertake to send some in as quickly as possible.

Will you please actively consider the settlement now of the Northern
Island; also pass on to the new N.S.A. the three tasks the Guardian feels
they should undertake promptly.

(December 27, 1956)

To the National Spiritual Assembly of Australia

[Letter of July 19, 1957]

...The emergence of a new Regional Spiritual Assembly in the North Pacific
Area(34), with its seat fixed in the capital city of a country which by
reason of its innate capacity and the spiritual receptivity it has
acquired, in consequence of the severe and prolonged ordeal its entire
population has providentially experienced, is destined to have a
preponderating share in awakening the peoples and races inhabiting the
entire Pacific area, to the Message of Baha'u'llah, and to act as the
Vanguard of His hosts in their future spiritual conquest of the main body
of the yellow race on the Chinese mainland--the emergence of such an
assembly may be said to have, at long last established a spiritual axis,
extending from the Antipodes to the northern islands of the Pacific
Ocean--an axis whose northern and southern poles will act as powerful
magnets, endowed with exceptional spiritual potency, and towards which
younger and less experienced communities will tend for some time to
gravitate.

A responsibility, at once weighty and inescapable, must rest on the
communities which occupy so privileged a position in so vast and turbulent
an area of the globe. However great the distance that separates them;
however much they differ in race, language, custom, and religion; however
active the political forces which tend to keep them apart and foster
racial and political antagonisms, the close and continued association of
these communities in their common, their peculiar and paramount task of
raising up and of consolidating the embryonic World Order of Baha'u'llah
in those regions of the globe, is a matter of vital and urgent importance,
which should receive on the part of the elected representatives of their
communities, a most earnest and prayerful consideration...

May this community(35) which, with its sister community in the North, has
had the inestimable privilege of being called into being in the lifetime
of, and through the operation of the dynamic forces rel