Paul Yorishige Watanabe served at several Southern California Japanese American churches in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Los Angeles Japanese Baptist Church (now Evergreen Baptist Church) and the Fundamental Baptist Mission to the Japanese. This is a collection of notes for 66 different sermons used by Watanabe.

Paul Y. Watanabe was born in 1886 in Gifu, Japan. After being orphaned when his parents were killed in an earthquake, he was reared in a Christian orphanage. In 1907, he was encouraged by missionaries to go to the United States to study. He initially lived in San Francisco, where he stayed for two years. He indicates that due to the large number of Japanese-speakers in the city, he was unable to effectively learn English. Consequently, he deliberately left the West Coast for the Midwest and then later the south. He eventually graduated from both high school and college in Texas, and he completed one year of graduate study at Yale University. After preaching throughout Asia for a year in 1920, he returned to California and was ordained in Gardena.

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