Body of Kobe Quake Victim Secured : Tragedy: The family of Voni Wong pays $12,000 for return costs. ‘We feel she deserves a Christian burial,’ father says.

VAN NUYS — The family of a 24-year-old American woman killed in the Japanese earthquake was able to secure her body on Thursday and arrange for its return--after they obtained a $12,000 cashier’s check to pay for expenses involved.

The $12,000 is what the U.S. State Department estimated it would cost to prepare Voni Wong’s body for intercontinental shipping and return it to the United States, said her father, Henry K. Wong, at his Van Nuys home.

“It’s going to be a real burden,” said Wong, a retired aerospace engineer, “but we have to do it for the sake of our daughter.”

The Wongs, devout Baptists, had feared their daughter’s body would be cremated, as is traditional in Japan.

Wong, who graduated from UCLA in 1993, was working as a language teacher in Japan when she was crushed to death in the collapse of her house in Ashiya, near Kobe, during the earthquake Monday.

Working with friends in Japan and the State Department, the Wongs were able to find a funeral home near Osaka willing to pick up the body. But when mortuary workers went to the reclamation area to retrieve Wong’s body Wednesday, they were rebuffed by a Japanese official, who said that as a foreign citizen, Wong’s body could not be moved without her passport, her father said.

Henry Wong faxed documents to a friend in Japan authorizing him to take possession of the body, and early Thursday the woman’s remains were taken to the funeral home.

Wong said he hopes his daughter’s body will be returned to the United States by Monday or Tuesday.

Wong, 64, said he retired two years ago and his wife has been ill with anemia, so in order to raise the money he had to use their savings and turn to relatives and friends, including members of his church, Shepherd of the Hills in Porter Ranch.

“I am glad we do have the means to be able to meet this unexpected expenditure,” he said. “We feel she deserves a Christian burial.”

People ranging from members of the Shepherd of the Hills choir to celebrity disc jockey Rick Dees--a former church member--said Thursday they wanted to help the Wongs.

“It’s an insurmountable amount of money,” said Paula Cracium, a spokeswoman at Shepherd of the Hills. “It’s like adding insult to injury.”

The church has started a fund for the family and collected nearly $1,000 from the choir alone Wednesday night, Cracium said. And Dees mentioned the Wongs on his radio show Thursday morning, offering to help. Voni Wong’s brother Anderson formerly worked at KIIS-FM, Dees’ station.

Wong said airlines were calling him offering to fly his daughter’s remains back at no charge, and an Alhambra funeral home that caters largely to the Chinese community offered to take charge of the body on arrival at no cost.

A State Department official said many governments have regulations for shipping dead bodies overseas, and meeting those requirements can be expensive.

“Sometimes it is quite costly, and sometimes families opt to have a local burial,” the official said.

But that would be out of the question for the Wongs. Christian burials are very uncommon in Japan, and the family had been haunted by fears that the body of their only daughter would be cremated, depriving them of the chance to bury her according to their religious beliefs.