The Ongoing Challenge of Christian Mission in Japan

Concluding Suggestions from a Former Missionary to Japan

Based on the evidence to date, we are led to conclude that Christianity in Japan has likely had, in general, too little of what Walls calls the “indigenous principle.” ⁴ The fraught political realities that accompanied Japan’s first and second encounters with Christianity in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries and in the mid-nineteenth century, not to mention the horrific war with Western nations who had formerly dispatched hundreds of missionaries, combined with the Japanese church’s enduring dependence on the conceptual Weltanschauung of Western (mostly German) theology, still leaves many Japanese Christians feeling “dressed up in ill-fitting western clothes,” to borrow a well-worn image from the late Roman Catholic novelist Endō Shūsaku. It is no surprise that many still feel, like Kitamori, that the churches are “populated by un-Japanese Japanese people.” It is not difficult to imagine how easy it is to fall back into what Ishihara calls “the old environment” of Monday through Saturday, in spite of spending every Sunday with other believers.

This sense that Christianity is still an alien faith has seriously affected evangelism and pastoral work. In the late 1990s, the late Matsunaga Kikuo, New Testament scholar and then president of Tokyo Union Theological Seminary, offered the following harrowing assessment of the situation for Christians in Japan:

According to a recent statistic, the average Christian life of a Japanese Christian is only 2.8 years! This means that quite a number of Japanese are baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, but after less than three years they lose their Christian commitment and perhaps their faith in Jesus Christ. ⁵

Of course, there are undoubtedly a range of sociocultural factors at work here, such as the high time demands for service often placed on newly baptized members. However, at face value, this startling statistic implies that the gospel is still seeking to find adequate expression. This means the demanding task before the churches is still translating Christ into the thought forms and life forms of Japanese identity.

However, when considered from the wide-angle lens of history, Japan’s difficult missional situation should not justify derision or despair. From Christianity’s initial movement out of first-century Palestine into and beyond the cultures of the Greco-Roman world, indigenization, enculturation, and contextualization have mostly been glacial, painstaking processes that have proceeded more by fits and starts than by sudden and dramatic revolutions or revivals. ⁶ These processes have been going on in Japan since the Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived in Kagoshima in 1549. After I was officially appointed as a mission co-worker to Japan in 1988, a Japanese pastor who had spent decades ministering in a rural district offered me some sage advice. Looking me in the eye, he said with a wry smile, “Hastings-kun, welcome to Rome in A.D. 130.” I never forgot his words, but it took me many years to grasp the depth of this insight.

I will conclude this three-part series by offering a few friendly suggestions on how the churches in Japan might continue to promote the process of translating Christ into the thought forms and life forms of Japanese identity.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Thomas J. Hastings in Nishinomiya, Japan, with his Seiwa College students in 1993. Thirty years later, Hastings (right) discusses his latest book, Worshiping, Witnessing, and Wondering: Christian Wisdom for Participation in the Mission of God, at OMSC@PTS in November 2023.

Why propose such a massive research agenda? In the Socratic tradition, self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and in the context of early nineteenth-century Christendom, Kierkegaard revived this ancient truth in his famous theological maxim, “subjectivity is truth.” I would only add that genuine self-knowledge is always accompanied by knowledge of the other, and the above-mentioned compendium of primary and secondary sources would help accomplish this sense of communal understanding. Especially in a society where ancestors are revered and celebrated, it always seemed odd to me that Japanese theologians, pastors, and laypeople know far more about Luther, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, and Pannenberg than about Hosokawa Gracia, Takayama Ukon, Tsuda Umeko, Uemura Masahisa, Uchimura Kanzō, Kawai Michi, and Kagawa Toyohiko and Haru. Without denying the importance of continuing to engage the work of Western theologians, an Ad Fontes effort would contribute to positive curricular changes in Japanese seminaries and divinity schools. This movement should be characterized by honest, critical scholarship, not by hagiographies of local Christian heroes and heroines. I believe that a serious Ad Fontes movement would strengthen, deepen, and broaden the resources for Japanese Christian identity and begin to free future theologians and pastors from their captivity to the West while also opening up avenues of mutual understanding and theological dialogue with Christians in neighboring China, Korea, and Taiwan.

While Toyohiko was an ordained pastor in the Church of Christ in Japan (a Presbyterian and Reformed body), in 1921 the Kagawas inaugurated the “Friends of Jesus” movement to support the spiritual lives and social activism of young Japanese Christians. Economist and lay Christian leader Sumiya Mikio says, “This new religious movement was a reform movement in opposition to the churches that had restricted faith to the spiritual world and enshrined the gospel in the church alone.” ⁷ The Kagawas were critical of the “Western” individualism, intellectualism, and isolationism of the established churches. However, rather than abandoning the churches, like Mukyōkai founder Uchimura Kanzō, they chose the harder path of challenging the churches from within.

Here is how an English brochure from 1928 describes the group:

The Friends of Jesus Society, described recently by Mr. Kagawa as a ‘Francisco-Jesuit-Protestant Order,’ revives the loving service of the poor of St. Francis of Assisi, the loyalty to the Church of the Jesuits, and embodies these ideals and others in a practical program of Christian living designed to fit the needs of modern life in Japan. It does not take young people out of the world; it carries the spirit of the monastery into home and office, and makes every common duty an act of worship . . . The little group has grown to a thousand and three hundred, about half of whom are women. No special propaganda has been carried on for expansion, and the Society is rather slow to admit new members, requiring a three-year period of novitiate. The first year one is a Friend, the second a Brother, and the third and highest class is that of the Servants. Certain reading is required, including the Old and New Testaments, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, etc. ⁸

While the “Friends of Jesus” never became a mass movement, I think the missional impulse at work here is sound and still relevant for consideration today. In the context of Japan’s rapid industrialization and militarization, the Friends of Jesus was an indigenous attempt to practically translate Christ into the thought forms and life forms of Japanese identity. This becomes more obvious when we examine the movement’s Five Principles:

Especially in light of the subsequent history of the rigid, enduring divisions in Japan’s Protestant churches between the so-called “church or gospel faction” and the “social faction,” the Friends of Jesus was a prescient attempt to harmonize a vibrant personal faith with a strong commitment to local public action and social reform, and thereby, contribute to the ideal of world peace. In Walls’s terms, these principles embody both the “indigenous principle” and the “pilgrim principle.”

In addition to my first suggestion of an Ad Fontes movement, which is essentially a task for scholars, I would encourage Japanese pastors and laypeople to emulate the lived faith of exemplars like the Kagawas. Encompassing the spiritual and the social, poverty and work, the local and the global, the five principles of the Friends of Jesus is not a bad place to begin.

In the interest of space, I will only explore the first principle, to “Seek piety in Jesus,” because it may be the key to the other four principles. From the Kagawas’ perspective, “seeking piety in Jesus” meant devoting oneself to the regular practice of meditation, study of Scripture and Christian literature, and prayer. We hardly need to mention that Christian preaching, teaching, service, and public witness have always been grounded in the spiritual disciplines of meditatio, lectio, and oratio.

Here is how Kagawa describes his own experience and understanding of meditation in the Preface to his Meditations on God (1930).

As one who has learned to go deep into the forest for meditation, I often come away with dew-like drippings from that forest. In the middle of the night, at midday, at dawn, or at dusk, I have learned that the door for meditation is always open. Whether in the electric or steam train, hospital waiting room, prison cell, on the road, everywhere, I am offered a calm resting place in my heart to meditate on Almighty God. It is said that Francis of Assisi meditated and prayed while beholding the sun in broad daylight, and Plato tells us that Socrates would suddenly stop along the road to meditate for several minutes when walking with his disciples. When we read the Agama (early Buddhist scriptures), it seems the Buddha had the same custom. Jesus withdrew for 40 days and 40 nights to meditate in the wilderness, and spent sleepless nights in prayer and meditation in the mountains of Galilee. Those who draw upon the wellspring of meditation experience God dwelling intimately in our heart. Those who reside in the cackling business of the present machine civilization and wish to discover that ancient stillness have no choice but to struggle to enter the realm of meditation. After losing my sight, I was able to come into contact with this sanctuary and know great joy in the discovery of this fountain.

In times of inactivity or when I lack resources, meditation calls to me from beyond, lifting high the curtain on the divine dwelling place. From backstage, in the night of the typhoon, or the busy tumult of the street, I praise God through meditation. God is my place of Sabbath, my storage battery, and in meditation death and disillusionment vanishes, even the power of suffering is paralyzed. Almighty God even teaches an unlearned ⁹ person such as I to be content to rest in meditation.

I urge all tired and spiritually debilitated modern people first to return to your innate capacity for meditation, which is prior to seeing, reading, singing, or fighting. The child is in its mother’s womb for nine months, simply dwelling with eyes closed, with nothing to read and nowhere to run. The ingenious solution of meditation is that it is the viviparity ¹⁰ that attaches us to the breast of God. Like the child in the womb, I feel the pulse of God in quiet meditation, I am nourished by God’s blood, and with eyes closed I await the day I will dance out into the world of light. Before I take a breath, I live, I move, I am. Ah, this wondrous viviparity with earth’s great womb and breast! I cannot cease to pray that all humanity will return to this great womb and be reconnected to this blood relation to God. ¹¹

Affirming Confucian and Buddhist meditative practices, which he had learned as a child, ¹² along with the practices of St. Francis, Socrates, and Jesus, Kagawa also introduces a novel modern element into his description of silent meditation, deliberately choosing the biological word “viviparity” to refer to the bodily dependence of the child on its mother. Drawing freely on Asian, Western, and scientific sources in his own reflections on meditation practice, Kagawa leaps far ahead of the thinking of his day to assert that meditation or prayer connects human beings to the ultimate source of Life through our bodies. Kagawa claims that the practice of meditation returns us to an innate, living, intimate, and dependent relationship to God. Note his generous use of the metaphors of blood, womb, and breast to describe this relationship, and this was written long before the advent of feminist theology!

In an interview with Kagawa’s oldest daughter, Chiyoko, I asked what she remembered about her father’s personal practice of prayer. She said, “Seeking to follow the pattern of Christ, he prayed alone in the night. I never saw him pray because he prayed until dawn while the rest of us slept.” She also said that her mother, Haru, taught her a strong sense of God’s presence in nature as a child. “Whenever I did something wrong, my mother would take me to the local pine forest to pray. In the peaceful silence of that place, Mother prayed while I reflected on my behavior. I received an education other families did not offer.” ¹³

Theologically, the imitatio or participatio Christi is exactly what Kagawa intended in the first principle of the Friends of Jesus: 1. Seek piety in Jesus. Japanese scholars have tended to overlook or downplay the mystical dimension in Kagawa. Considering he was best known as a social reformer and activist, perhaps they do not quite know what to make of his mysticism. Their negative view of spiritual practices like meditation is also colored by the caricature of “the bleary-eyed, world-renouncing monk,” which is a legacy of the anti-monastic Protestant polemic that runs like a red thread through modern theology, philosophy, and literature. One notable modern exception to this negative portrayal of mysticism was the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who in his 1932 Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion ¹⁴ emphasizes precisely the “active element” in the great Christian mystics such as St. Paul, St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis, and Joan of Arc. Bergson says that the great Christian mystics, among whom I think we should place Kagawa, do not flee or reject the world; on the contrary they embrace it “to effect a radical transformation of humanity by setting an example.” ¹⁵

While I cannot elaborate here on Bergson’s argument, I believe Kagawa’s spiritual practice is, in fact, a key to understanding his ministry and thought. In “A Reconsideration of Eastern Thought,” he sheds more light on his positive, indigenous approach to meditation. In a section on the Ming-era Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming, Kagawa expresses his preference for seiza over zazen.

Wang Yangming also advocated dedication to self-discipline, and primarily suggested seiza, meaning to ‘be settled’ whether one is ‘silent in the midst of activity or active in the midst of silence.’ Seiza has a different nuance than zazen. While his disciples were to avoid escapist forms of meditation, he said seiza was good for quieting one’s heart in order to discover Heaven. ¹⁶

The key phrase that describes Kagawa’s meditative practice well is to be “silent in the midst of activity or active in the midst of silence.” This coincides with the earlier description from Meditations on God and is an apt characterization of the Kagawas’ extraordinarily active and productive life and ministry in the context of early twentieth-century Japan. The Friends of Jesus principles bring together the contemplative and active dimensions of Christian witness in a remarkable way.

America’s “grand narrative” is a “civil religion” that often conflates national and religious identities. Many church sanctuaries fly the American flag alongside their denominational flag, so it is not surprising that the flag and the cross are conflated in the hearts and minds of so many of our citizens. This “grand narrative” also undergirds the myth of American exceptionalism, which understandably makes many countries uneasy. As an American citizen and a Christian, I, too, am very uneasy when the cross and the flag are conflated.

Perhaps Japan’s “grand narrative” is the modern, “invented tradition” of Japan as a homogeneous country, an extended family with the emperor and imperial household at the head. In our twenty-three years in Japan, my family and I had the joy and privilege of living in Kofu, Kanazawa, Kobe, and Tokyo. The rich differences in geography, dialect, disposition, history, and cultural traditions, even between these three districts of Kantō, Kansai, and Hokuriku, challenge the modern myth of Japan as a homogeneous nation.

Compelled by the “pilgrim principle,” Christians are like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor’s New Clothes, in the unique position of being called to boldly yet gently unmask our own country’s “grand narratives,” especially when these narratives are manipulated to promote narrow and dangerous political or ecclesiastical agendas. Our dual citizenship in our nations and as members of the “one holy catholic and apostolic Church” links us to “the universal and humanity in general.” But the Christian calling to unmask the “grand narratives” does not mean becoming an enemy of one’s people; quite the opposite, it calls forth a love that may, in some cases, even lead to martyrdom.

As I conclude these reflections on the challenge of mission in Japan, I believe that the first missional task is for Japanese Christians to learn to be at home, carefully studying the history of the churches in their land, emulating the spirituality and witness of their fathers and mothers in the faith, and debunking the nationalistic aspects of their grand narrative, being neither arrogant nor faint-hearted concerning the dominant ideologies in their land! Though Christian indigenization, enculturation, and contextualization may likely take several centuries in Japan, I pray that one day, the world’s churches will be enriched by the distinctive and beautiful Japanese contribution to the great global chorus of Christ followers!

With thanks and blessings.