HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
On June 28th, 1885, a small group of devoted women Friends were holding a parlor meeting in the city of Philadelphia. They had been moved by the newly awakened evangelistic fervor of the times, and were deeply concerned to share their joy and satisfaction in the new life with their "sisters""' in non-Christian lands. They had -been meeting under this concern for some three years but as yet had not found just the direction they sought for their endeavors. In this June meeting, two young men "of education"(1) from Japan, met with them and encouraged them to believe that the door was open in their country for such religious teaching as that of Friends. These two youths, in America at that time for study, became in later years, each in his own way, men of very great significance to the Christian movement in their country. Their names were Inazo Nitobe and Kanzo Uchimura. It was they who first definitely linked together the names of Friends and the Japanese. In the fall of the same year the first emissaries of the Womens Foreign Missionary Association of Friends of Philadelphia, Joseph and Sarah Ann Cosand, started across the Pacific.
But before we dip into their experiences we must know something of the Japan which they were to find on arrival. It was only thirty years since it had grudgingly let down the bars for the life of the world to enter. For well over two hundred years before that, the policy of its rulers had been one of absolute exclusion of Western influences, based on fear of Western aggression. A few Dutch traders only were suffered to linger on under rather humiliating conditions in Nagasaki, but otherwise life in Japan had been an introverted one. The cultural gifts previously received from China were polished and perfected, but without new material to work on, the spirit of man becomes stale. Society was static, and it was the deliberate policy of the military shoguns who ruled, to make it so. Members of the Tokugawa family had held that position since 1603, and kept a firm hand on their feudatories, many of whom were strong enough to make trouble, if given an opportunity. In the society of that time there were knights, the Samurai class Who fought for their overlord, and were fed by him; farmers who held their land in fief from the knights, and raised rice for the whole nation; and merchants who were almost out of the picture. The pattern of life was surprisingly like that of Europe in Feudal times. Although the organization of society was essentially a military one, and the law, martial law, yet the strong rule of the shogun at its center insured long years of enforced peace, and the result was effeminacy among the fighting class. In the felt need for new stimulus, and in curiosity about the West, coupled with the decay of military strength, the stage was set for Perry when he came in1853, representing the government of the United States. The unilateral character of the treaties that were signed at that time, entered deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese nation. The whole force of the people was directed to a self-discipline, that would make them able to meet the West on its own plane and to deal with it on the level. Hence there followed two decades of intense and deliberate Europeanization. Changes followed each other rapidly. In l868 the Shogun resigned, and the Emperor whose functions had been purely ceremonial ', was now restored to the center of the picture. The oath that he took at the beginning of this era was democratic in outlook. The next year feudalism was abolished, and a parliamentary system was later inaugurated. The capital was moved from Kyoto to Tokyo(2), to symbolize a new policy. A public school system was set up in 1872. Science and Western learning were encouraged, and all old usages and policies were reexamined. Japan intended to keep abreast of the nations of the modern world. And with it all, as Dr. Anesaki says, there was a sense of exhilaration like that after a thunder storm.
There is no doubt that this movement was carried to an extreme. Young men came almost to idolize those who could give them this "new knowledge". The study of English or "horizontal writing" as it was called, became the rage, and the ways of the West were thought of is almost equivalent to civilization.
As a dynamic force in Western life, Christianity also came in for its share of popularity, and its missionaries were given a ready hearing. It had been forbidden under pain of death until 1873 but in the new treaties signed with foreign powers, it was expressly allowed. That stream of Christian influence with which our story is concerned, began in Yokohama tinder the teaching of American missionaries. Having once obtained a foothold there it spread like wild fire to other parts of Japan. Statistics of those years tell us that in 1878 there were 44 churches and 1617 believers; in 1885 168 churches and 11,000 believers. There were even some who said that Japan would be Christianized within ten years.
This reception of their message must have been very heartening to the missionaries, but looking at it from later times, we know that it was not altogether healthy. Reaction had to come, and then those who had joined from political or social motives fell away.
The Problem Faced by Quaker Missionaries
A committee room in the Hijirizaka Meeting HouseThe Christian movement was at the crest of the wave when the Cosands landed in Japan, It was a recognized force in the life of the capital. The New Testament had been translated five years previously; Christian schools had been started, foremost among which was the Doshisha in Kyoto, recognized as a university in 1884. And now Quakerism had come to seek foothold in the soil of Japan. It was a necessarily different procedure from that by which it got its start in European centers. There the soil had been prepared by centuries of Christian thought and life, and growth was a natural result of juxtaposition. As Howard Brinton has said, "Quaker missionaries in Japan face a peculiarly difficult problem. Beginners in the faith must be sought and taught through a teaching ministry largely confined to the historical and ethical basis of Christianity. To get beyond this introductory stage to the establishment of conditions in which a transforming experience of the Quaker type can be attained, is by no means easy". ***** "After World War when our service work in war-stricken areas developed finally into the establishment of Quaker embassies in a number of European cities, a procedure more congenial to our essential doctrines, ***** something peculiarly our own, suited to the genius of our Society, was developed(3).
Difficult it was, and in some sense uncongenial to Quakerism, but no other way has yet been devised for "the publishing of truth" tinder such circumstances, except this beginning from the ground up. With the religious background which Quakerism found in Japan, there was nothing for it but to confront the ideas and the faith established there with those which it believed were of more eternal value. Time would be the judge.
