Christianity in Japan

The Japanese last week sold to U.S. Protestantism the idea that their new united Japan Christian Church is much better than it has been painted by journalists and missionaries recalled or soon-to-be-recalled from Nippon.

The selling was done by nine top-ranking Japanese Christians who foregathered unofficially with 16 influential representatives of U.S. churches at Riverside, Calif. After six days, the Americans seemed satisfied that there was nothing to get excited about in the recent restrictions on missionary activity in Japan. Briefly, the story told by Bishop Yoshimune Abe and his comrades was this:

For the first time in history, last summer war became an active possibility between the U.S. and a nation this country had evangelized. Japan reacted by banning foreign-mission executives and funds, more or less as the U.S. might ban German cultural agents from executive posts in American churches. Thereupon Japanese Christians did the logical thing: they took full control of their churches with un-oriental speed before their Government got still tougher. In so doing they merged 42 denominations into one, leaving out only the Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Episcopalians (who refused to recognize the validity of the ministerial orders of the other denominations) and the Seventh-Day Adventists (who held out for a Saturday Sabbath).

These sudden moves startled American churchmen. They suspected that the new church was united more by Government pressure than by spiritual guidance, feared that Japanese Christians, regulated and dominated by a totalitarian State, might apostasize. But, said Bishop Abe: "The Government has not interfered and has no intention of interfering with the doctrine of the church." Only State control is administrative enforcement of the 1940 Religious Bodies Law (which recognizes Christianity as an official Japanese religion along with Shintoism and Buddhism). All church executives must be Japanese subjects, and no native church worker can be supported by foreigners; but American mission boards can still pay the salaries of U.S. citizens working in Japan, can aid the Japanese churches financially provided they tie no string to their gifts.

Bishop Abe reported that before Japanese Christians agreed to the Government's insistence that they take part in Shrine Shinto ceremonies, the Government gave written assurance that the observance is purely patriotic (like uncovering at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) and in no way religious. On the same grounds,

Japanese Roman Catholics have been doing likewise. "The god we speak of here has a different meaning from the absolute God," the bishop quoted from a Ministry of Education pronouncement on the Shinto divinity Amaterasu Omikami. Furthermore, to make the distinction clearer, the new church is changing the name of God from Kami (the word for the Shinto divinities which early Christian missionaries adopted) to the honorific Kamisama, Ainokami (God of Love) and Shu (Lord).

Since last summer's mission crisis (TiME Sept. 9), more than half of the 900-odd U.S. missionaries who were in Japan in January 1940 have left, and many more will soon go home--partly because of the Japanese Government's action, partly because the U.S. State Department is trying to get Americans out of Japan. The Presbyterians have stood firm and made no substantial withdrawals. The Episcopalians, whose non-Japanese bishops were the first target of the Japanese rules, have summoned home all but 16 of their foreign workers. The Methodists have recalled all theirs. But Japanese Christians are anxious to have U.S. churchmen return to Japan whenever they can, have offered to help support those who are now staying.

Japanese Protestants insist that their church is far from being on the defensive. Their best-known leader and one of their spokesmen at Riverside, trachoma-cured Toyohiko Kagawa, last year headed an aggressive Nation-wide Evangelistic Movement which statistically did much better than its American counterpart, the National Christian Mission (TIME, April 14). In 247 meetings it. drew 86,485 people (one person for every three Japanese Protestants, compared to the Mission's one for every 18 in the U.S. Protestant constituency) and made 1,868 converts (adding nearly 1% to Japan's Protestant church rolls, compared to the Mission's one-eighth of 1%). Kagawa is reaching the great non-Christian mass of the Japanese people by picking out certain specific groups--lepers, bank clerks, fishermen, nurses, lawyers, tuberculosis patients--and tackling them one at a time.

U.S. churchmen left Riverside with a real feeling that the Nippon Kirisuto Kyodan (Japan Christian Church), being as indigenous as Fujiyama, might make Japan more Christian than foreign missions ever succeeded in doing. Japanese delegates had made the point that Christianity flourished in 16th-Century Japan after the evangelism of St. Francis Xavier, when the authorities suspected that it might be preparing the way for the conquest of Japan by European countries as the Philippine Islands had been conquered. For more than two centuries, Christians were forbidden to enter Japan on pain of death. With Japanese at the helm of the church, the political threat to Christianity is minimized.

A translation of the New Testament into "Basic English," using a vocabulary strictly limited to 1,000 words, was published in England this week by the Cambridge University Press.

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