Religion: Japanese Jew

Rabbis and Israeli government officials crowded around the open doorway as an elderly man was wheeled into the second-floor operating room of Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Shaare Zedek Hospital, where Mosaic law is observed so strictly that nurses are forbidden to write on patients’ charts on the Sabbath. The sheet-draped patient: Abram Setsuzau Kotsuji, 60, a descendant of Shinto priests. The surgery: circumcision, as part of his conversion to Judaism. As the mohel (circumciser) lifted the knife, he repeated the ancient formula: “Blessed be the Lord our God who has sanctified us and commanded us to circumcise the convert.”

After a rigorous examination in Jewish law, circumcision (eased with local anesthesia), and a symbolic cleansing immersion in a pool, ex-Shintoist Kotsuji last week became a full-fledged Jew with (as one rabbi put it) “all its rights and all its troubles.”

Tortuous Road. For Setsuzau Kotsuji, the road to the Jewish faith was long and tortuous. As a child, in Kyoto, Japan’s temple-filled ancient capital, he discovered the Bible in a secondhand bookshop. Kotsuji entered a Christian mission school, studied Hebrew, became a Presbyterian; he later studied philology at the University of California, earned a doctorate at Kyoto University. Acknowledged as Japan’s top Hebraist. Kotsuji wrote a Hebrew grammar, tutored scholarly Prince Mikasa, youngest brother of Nippon’s Emperor Hirohito.

During World War II, when Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, Kotsuji feared persecution for his Semitic sympathies and fled to Manchuria; he returned later to teach at Kantogakuin, a private university in Yokohama. As he recalls it, he was in a spiritual quandary. ul had stopped practicing Christianity because I found the Trinity doctrine unreasonable. I abhorred Buddhism because it is a skeptical religion, without a central idea or purpose. I could not return to Shintoism’s immaturity, its inadequate guide for living.” Jewish friends introduced Kotsuji to leaders of the newly founded, Jerusalem-based World Union for the Propagation of Judaism, which hopes to break down traditional Jewish antagonism toward proselytizing and seek converts.

Ripe for Conversion? Kotsuji’s conversion was an impressive milestone for the World Union. Although a small, offbeat Japanese sect believes that its members are remnants of Israel’s lost tribes, there are only a few Jews in Japan; previous converts have been women who married Western Jews and accepted their husbands’ religion out of familial loyalty.

Says Convert Kotsuji, who plans to found a Jewish mission in Japan: “Shinto falls far short of attaining the Jewish ideals of monotheism and cleanliness.” Adds World Union Director Israel Ben Zeev: “The Japanese are ripe for conversion. Eventually, they will become either Christians or Jews. But as long as Hiroshima is still fresh in their minds, they are not likely to accept Christianity.”