Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan

This book may seem to be based on an incongruous premiss, given the perceived conflict of loyalty often associated with Japanese Christians in reconciling their faith with their duty to the emperor-centred state. After the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890, for example, some allegedly hesitated to bow in reverence before the official portrait of the emperor. Half a century later, near the end of the Pacific War, a Japanese Christian settlement in Manchuria was moved away from its proposed site near the Soviet border because the Kwantung Army saw it as ‘a security risk’ (p. 232). As Emily Anderson demonstrates in this engaging study, however, an emerging trans-Pacific network of Japanese Christians was, in its own way, fully engaged in, and often complicit with, the imperial project. The main focus here is on the Congregational Church, a denomination that showed a consistent interest in this wider expansion. First Anderson highlights these Christians’ indignation at accusations of disloyalty as, imbued with the lofty values of the Civilization and Enlightenment movement a generation before, they considered themselves champions of progress as faithful servants to both God and Japan. An opportunity to demonstrate this patriotism soon arrived with the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), but, a decade later, there was ambivalence over the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). This can be seen in the writings of two influential ministers whose diverging paths form an important theme of this study. On the one hand, Ebina Danshō, minister of the Hongō church in Tokyo and future president of Dōshisha University, extolled the beauty of war and self-sacrifice. On the other, Kashiwagi Gien, a man once baptised by Ebina himself and later minister of a rural congregation in Gunma Prefecture, was already championing a socialist message, embracing pacifism, and publicising Leo Tolstoy’s condemnation of the war

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