Religion: God and the Emperor

Christianity’s most serious crisis since Commodore Perry in 1853 opened Japan to missionaries and traders this week faced the Church in Japan—a crisis so serious that U. S. missionaries may soon be driven from Japan, and Japanese churches slump for want of foreign funds. The Church found itself at odds with Caesar. Like many an unmilitant democracy, Japanese Christians of late years had followed the easy course of appeasement, tried at once to conciliate Japan’s rulers and still preserve the spiritual and temporal gains they had made in three generations of missionary work. Japan’s New Order, like many another autocracy, found its appetite merely whetted by concession, and asked for more.

Far-reaching were last week’s demands: 1) withdrawal of all foreign financial support and missionaries from Japan; 2) replacement of all foreign missionary executives by Japanese Christians (whose ears the Government can pin back without causing an international rumpus); 3) an amalgamation of all the Protestant sects in Japan. Significant was the proposed title for this new national body: the Genuine Japan Christian Church. Equally significant was the date which the Government set for the union: Oct. 17, the day on which Emperor Hirohito, himself considered a god by his subjects, dispatches a messenger to Ise to offer prayers at the shrine of his ancestress, Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess and founder of the Japanese Empire.

U. S. missionaries flocked to Japan almost as fast as U. S. businessmen after Commodore Perry opened the islands in 1853. Devout Americans have since sent more than $100,000,000 for missions to Japan, sent some $2,500,000 to Japan and

Korea in 1939. The Japanese Constitution guarantees religious freedom, but the Diet last year passed a Religious Bodies Law.

This placed Japan’s 350,000 Christians on an equal footing with its 41,000,000 Buddhists and 16,000,000 Shintoists, put all religions under the supervision of the Education Department, provided for the suppression of any sect which deviated from Japanese national policy. The Government, full of bland promises as usual, assured anxious Christians that no “Japanifying” of Christianity was intended. But Tokyo’s July spy sensation, when seven Japanese Salvation Army chiefs were among those arrested, gave the Government an excuse to change its mind, declare that Christian activities, like every other phase of Japanese life, “must conform to the new national structure” in order to contribute to Japan’s “cooperative Asia.” Shrine v. Cross. No U. S. churchman objects to the principle that Japanese converts should control Japanese Christianity.

Local authority—and local self-support—is the aim of all sound missionary endeavor. At the International Missionary Council at Madras in 1938, churchmen of all nations hailed the coming-of-age of native Christian leadership in Asia. But once a missionary district becomes independent, it is exposed to enemies from without and within. In Japan that independence came gradually after World War I, was paralleled by a growing hostility to Christianity in Japanese officialdom. Since churchmen and mission boards outside Japan made no conspicuous effort to stiffen Japanese Christians’ backbone, concessions to nationalism became inevitable.

State religion of Japan since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 has been Shintoism (“The Great Way of the Gods”), a native Japanese system of nature and ancestor worship. Shrine Shinto is worship of the Imperial ancestors. Since the invasion of Manchuria Japanese nationalists have emphasized its religio-patriotic importance.

Eight years ago, the Japanese Government demanded that Christian schools and some individual Christians take part in shrine ceremonies. Officially the Government tried to pass this off as a form of politeness to departed heroes, like D. A. R.-ism in the U. S. But Japanese don’t fool themselves: Shrine Shinto is a religious rite. The Government pressed Japanese Catholics and Protestants to join “patriotic” ceremonies at Shinto shrines, has been as insistent about it as Red-fearing U. S. school boards are about saluting the flag.

In Korea Presbyterians have closed their schools rather than permit pupils to take part in Shrine Shinto. But elsewhere in the Japanese Empire both Catholics and Protestants, with the sanction of their home mission boards, have paid obeisance at the shrines—thereby, according to many strict believers, taking the first step in apostasy. Early Christians chose martyrdom rather than do the same thing; make a token obeisance to the deified emperor of Rome.

Thus far Japanese Christianity has shown little inclination towards martyrdom in either the early Christian or hara-kiri tradition. Significantly silent has been Japan’s most famed Christian, myopic Toyohiko Kagawa, a Presbyterian convert and founder of the Kingdom of God movement, who privately deprecates Japanese supernationalism but avoids public condemnation of it. When Christian Kagawa visited India last year, Mohandas Gandhi took him to task for this. Kagawa hinted that to speak might lose him his life.

Said Gandhi: “I would declare my heresies and be shot. … I should ask you to declare your views against Japan and in so doing make Japan live through your death. But, for this, inner conviction is necessary.” Said Kagawa: “The conviction is there. But friends have been asking me to desist.” Said Gandhi, knowing nothing of doing nothing except on the advice of friends: “Don’t listen to friends when the friend inside you says ‘Do this.’ ” Purge. First victim of the new nation alist purge in Japan last week was the Salvation Army. After dismissing its for eign officers, cutting off relations with British headquarters and abolishing all military titles, the Army changed its name to the “Salvation Body” so that it might “henceforth conform to genuine Japanese principles.” Still hanging in the balance is the fate of other foreign missions in Japan (biggest are Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Congrega-tionalist), with some 700 U. S. missiona ries. But Japanese Protestants met twice last week to organize the Genuine Japan Christian Church, favored the severance of every foreign tie, fusion of all sects, Japanese supervision for all Christian ac tivity in occupied parts of China. Slated for head of the new united church was Bishop Yoshimune Abe, who rules Japan’s Methodists. The Japanese Methodist Church formerly elected bishops for a four-year term. Last October, when Bishop Abe was chosen, the Japanese Government stipulated that he should hold office for life. The Methodists obediently changed their constitution. With the favor of Japan’s nationalist rulers, Bishop Abe may receive powers over Japanese Christians similar to those which Hitler’s Reich-Bishop Ludwig Miiller tried in vain to use on German Protestants.

Bishops at Sea. Hardest hit at the moment is the Japan Episcopal Church.

A rump session of its House of Bishops, meeting under governmental pressure, forced the resignation of the three British bishops and sent word to the three U. S.

members of the hierarchy—Bishops Charles S. Reifsnider of North Kwanto, Shirley H. Nichols of Kyoto and Norman S. Binsted of Tohoku, all of whom were in the U. S. to attend next month’s Episcopal triennial General Convention at Kansas City—that they too must resign. The four native Japanese bishops who will now rule the church’s 30,000 communicants voted to reject all foreign financial aid. Probable shot: withdrawal of the 85 U. S. Episcopal missionaries in Japan (they could not live on a rice-Christian’s income), closing of many an Episcopal mission, slimmer salaries for native clergymen and catechists.

Fortunate are U. S. Episcopalians to have as their presiding bishop in such a crisis the Right Rev. Henry St. George Tucker, Bishop of Virginia. Lanky, practical Bishop Tucker spent 24 years as a missionary in Japan, eleven of them as Bishop of Kyoto, still claims he can preach more fluently in Japanese than in English. .

He has acted as Far Eastern diplomat for both his church and the U. S. Army. Last week Bishop Tucker hastily summoned Bishops Reifsnider, Binsted and Nichols to Manhattan for consultation, dispatched the two former to Japan for first-hand news, kept Bishop Nichols in the U. S. for advice as the situation develops. Meanwhile he kept mum. Judging from the Japanese Episcopal Church’s last two clashes with the Government, the outlook was none too bright. Last year the president of Episcopal St. Paul’s University, Tokyo, was forced to resign because, in reading the hallowed Imperial rescript on education in chapel on a national holiday, he stood on the altar steps, below the lectern where the Bible is read, thus ranking the Mikado lower than God.

Not jolted into any unwonted summer activity were the mission headquarters of other U. S. denominations, most of which occupy begrimed buildings on Manhattan’s lower Fourth and Fifth Avenues. Mission secretaries complacently recalled China’s stand in 1927 when the Nationalist Government insisted that natives head every Chinese Christian college and school. Then pessimists thought missions in China were done for. Now, thanks to dogged heroism during China’s war, missionaries have more influence there than ever before. But China was not trying to become a totalitarian state. In Japan the time may soon come when Christians will have to become martyrs or see Christianity disappear in all but name.