Emily Anderson. Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan

Emily Anderson’s new book examines the profound transformation undergone by members of the Japanese Congregational Church (Kumiai kyōkai) as they adapted their theology and ideology to the new realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book joins a large body of scholarship, both on the intersection of empire and religion, and on the trials faced by Japanese Christians during the Meiji reign (1868–1912). Much of that previous work focused on the clash of worlds: either the moment of mission encounter or the conflict between mission Christianity and existing religious and political interests. In contrast, Anderson presents the Japanese Christians not as converts but as missionaries in their own right. The moment of encounter was internal to the Christians themselves, as they came to embrace ideas of social reform, modernization, and national destiny alongside those of religious conviction. The content chapters follow a fairly well-established chronological arc, proceeding from the reformation of domestic social institutions in the mid-nineteenth century, through Japan’s reimagining of its relationship to both Asia and the West, and finally through the stages of continental expansion and experimentation that culminated in the 1932 formation of the Japanese client state in Manchuria. The first two content chapters examine how Christians faced the question of political loyalty during the late Meiji period. The first of these tests was the crisis created by the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), a ritualized document that blurred boundaries between the political and religious, and prompted Christians such as Kashiwagi Gien to refute old criticisms of Japanese Christians as a domestic fifth column. When such concerns resurfaced during the war against Christian (albeit Orthodox) Russia (1904–1905), prominent voices such as Pastor Ebina Danjō responded by dispelling any hint of divided loyalties: the war represented Japan’s sacred duty to bring civilization to the benighted East, and the duty of Christians was to their nation. Three subsequent chapters look to a different sort of expansion: the sacred mission to bring Christ to the Japanese diaspora in California and Korea, to use Christianity first to civilize and absorb the residents of Korea, and later to neutralize the Korean resistance to Japanese rule that had coalesced in Korea’s 1919 independence movement. The book’s final two chapters echo the question of how Christianity informed and inflected the choices of the 1920s and 1930s, examining two separate movements: one for Tolstoyan agrarianism, and another to create Christian settler villages in Manchuria—two reactions to the reality of military adventurism that, while opposed, nevertheless shared a conviction that Christianity would play a crucial role in shaping Japan’s larger destiny.

Ancient history · Christianity · Empire · Ideology · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies