https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6258-7204
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ABSTRACT
The article aims to better understand Christian nationalism by investigating the cases of Uchimura Kanzō and Nitobe Inazō, two well-known Christians of Meiji Japan. In Meiji Japan, Christianity was a recently re-introduced and foreign faith which was not aligned with the Japanese way of life. However, both Uchimura and Nitobe converted to Christianity in their youth and dedicated their life to the development of Japan. The article investigates what made this possible. It pays particular attention to the relationship between politics and religion and the Meiji government’s attempts to adopt the western view of the relationship to the nascent Japanese state. It argues that the invention of state Shintō as a non-religion but an indispensable part of the Japanese polity by the Meiji government created space where Christian faith and Japanese nationalism could co-exist, the space which was increasingly squeezed as Meiji turned to Taishō and then to Shōwa.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, Religion Yearbook, 2022 [宗教年鑑 令和, 4年版] (Tokyo: Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, Citation2022), 35.
2 Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, Religion Yearbook, 35.
3 See, for instance, Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
4 Anthony Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
5 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 1.
6 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Forth, Expanded Edition) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1.
7 Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016), 2.
8 Anthony Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Oxford: Polity, 2001), 9.
9 Smith, Nationalism.
10 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Edition) (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
11 Anthony Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998).
12 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.
13 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
14 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge; Polity Press, 1985); and John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
15 Kevin Doak, ‘Narrating China, ordering East Asia: The discourse of nation and ethnicity in imperial Japan’, in Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, eds. Kai-Wing Chow, Kevind Doak and Poshek Fu (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 85–113.
16 Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, chap. 9.
17 Atsuko Ichijo, Nationalism and Multiple Modernities: Europe and Beyond, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), chap. 5.
18 There is some suggestion that because Buddhist monks who went to Tang China to study Buddhism were certainly aware of Nestorianism, it is very likely that there were some interaction, intellectual or material, between the Japanese of the Heian period and Nestorians as seen in a replica of the Chinese Nestorian monument found in Mount Kōya (Thelle 2003). Peter Yoshirō Saeki (1871–1965), a Japanese scholar of religion, maintained that the Nestorians conducted missionary activities in Heian Japan (Morris Citation2016).
19 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, ‘Japan-Portugal Relations (Basic Data)’, https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/europe/portugal/data.html#:~:text=The%20first%20contact%20between%20Japan,boat%20was%20blown%20off%20course (accessed May 11, 2023).
20 John Breen and Mark Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses, eds. John Breen and Mark Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 1.
21 Neil Fujita, Japan’s Encounter with Christianity: The Catholic Mission in Pre-Modern Japan (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1991), 248–73.
22 George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MT: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991).
23 While banned and expelled from the country by mid-seventeenth century Christianity left a mark on Japanese intellectual life. One of the most remarkable examples of this is Hirata Atsutane (1776–1834), a well-known Kokugaku scholar. It has been noted that Atsutane’s cosmology based on what he envisaged as the true form of Shintō was coloured by Christian theology with which he came into contact through his immersion in Dutch Learning (Richard Devine, ‘Hirata Atsutane and Christian sources’, Monumenta Nipponica, 36, no. 1 (1981): 37-54; and Donald Keene, ‘Hirata Atsutane and western learning’, T’oung Pao, 42, no. 1 (1953): 353–380).
24 Shigeru Tanaka, ed., Religion Overcoming the State (Osaka: Tōhō-shuppan, 2016) [田中滋(編)『国家を超える宗教』、大阪:東方出版], 51; and John Breen, ‘Beyond the prohibition: Christianity in Restoration Japan’, in Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses, eds. John Breen and Mark Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
25 Kate Wildman Nakai, ‘Between secularity, shrines, and Protestantism: Catholic higher education in prewar Japan’, Japan Review: Journal of the Intercultural Research Center for Japanese Studies 30 (2017): 100–1.
26 Tomoo Saitō, ‘The formation of the foundation of the modern theocratic state and the separation of church and state’, Shūkyō Kenkyū 92, no. 2 (2018) [斎藤智朗、「近代祭政一致国家成立の基盤形成と祭教分離」『宗教研究』].
27 Kiri Paramore, Ideology and Christianity in Japan (London: Routledge, 2009), 131.
28 Nakai, ‘Between’, 100; Tanaka, Religion, 46; Koremaru Sakamoto, Early Modern and Modern Shintō (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2007) [坂本是丸『近世·近代神道論考』東京:弘文堂]; and Saitō, ‘The formation’.
29 Nakai, ‘Between’, 100.
30 James Mark Shields, ‘Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the “Religious Secular”’, Japan Review: Journal of the Intercultural Research Center for Japanese Studies 30 (2017), 80.
31 Sakamoto, Early Modern and Modern Shintō.
32 Nakai, ‘Between’.
33 Hans Martin Krämer, ‘How “Religion” Came to be Translated as shukyō: Shimaji Mokurai and the Appropriation of Religion in Early Meiji Japan’, Japan Review: Journal of the Intercultural Research Center for Japanese Studies 25 (2013).
34 Saitō, ‘The formation’.
35 Shields, ‘Immanent frames’, 83.
36 Sakamoto, Early Modern and Modern Shintō; and John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
37 Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shintō, 10; Sakamoto, Early Modern and Modern Shintō, 368–9; Saito, ‘The Formation’; and Tanaka, Religion Overcoming the State, 46.
38 Sakamoto, Early Modern and Modern Shintō, chap. 2.
39 Nakai, ‘Between’.
40 Tanaka, Religion Overcoming the State, 53; Breen, ‘Beyond the Prohibition’; and Breen and Teeuwen, A History of Shintō.
41 Breen, ‘Beyond the prohibition’, 90.
42 Yosuke Nirei, ‘Towards a modern belief: Modern Protestantism and problems of national religion in Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 1 (2007).
43 Nirei, ‘Toward’, 157.
44 John Coleman, ‘Civil Religion’, Sociological Analysis 31, no. 2 (1970).
45 Coleman, ‘Civil Religion’, 76.
46 Nakai, ‘Between’.
47 Takashi Kibe, ‘The irony of secular nation-building in Japanese modernity: Inoue Kowashi and Fukuzawa Yukichi’, in Religion and Nationalism in Asia, eds. Giorgio Shani and Takashi Kibe (London: Routledge, 2020).
48 The section focuses on individuals. As to how Christian organisations, in particular, missionary educational institutions negotiated their existence in post-Meiji Japan, see Nakai, ‘Between secularity, shrines, and Protestantism’. The work contains an insightful analysis of denominational differences in dealing with the Japanese government, which sheds light on the ways in which Christianity as an organisation adjusted and evolved in post-Meiji Japan.
49 William Clark held a doctorate in chemistry and taught chemistry, botany and zoology. He also served as a colonel in the Civil War. He was the President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College when officials from the Meiji government came to investigate how modern agriculture was taught in the West. He was subsequently invited by the Japanese government to lead the newly founded Sapporo Agricultural College and arrived in Japan in 1876. While he was a devout Christian, he accepted the Japanese government’s invitation to contribute to the development of modern agricultural education not to engage with quasi-missionary work. Oshiro (Citation2007) argues that Clark’s missionary activities at the SAC stemmed from an off-chance incident on his way to Sapporo with the Japanese official named Kuroda Kiyotaka in which Kuroda, having witnessed loudly behaviour of Japanese youth, asked Clark to incorporate some moral training in the SAC’s curriculum. Given his deep commitment in Christianity, he introduced the Bible in the SAC’s curriculum and provided opportunities for the SAC students to become familiar with Christianity.
50 George Oshiro, ‘Nitobe Inazō and the Sapporo Band: Reflections on the Dawn of Protestant Christianity in Early Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 1 (2007), 102.
51 Tatsuya Akae, ‘Uchimura Kanzō and his “Two J’s”: The Genealogy of Christian Nationalism’, Shisō no. 1179 (2022) [赤江達也、「内村鑑三と『二つのJ』:キリスト教ナショナリズムの系譜」、『思想』、no. 1179].
52 John F Howes, ‘Christian Prophecy in Japan: Uchimura Kanzo’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 1 (2007).
53 Oshiro, ‘Nitobe Inazō’; and Howes, ‘Christian prophecy’, 129.
54 In his 1926 essay, ‘Two J’s’, Uchimura famously proclaimed: ‘I love two J’s and no third; one is Jesus and, and the other is Japan. / I do not know which I love more, Jesus or Japan’. He then explained his commitment to the two J’s as follows: ‘Jesus makes me a world-man, a friend of humanity; Japan makes me a lover of my country, and through it binds me firmly to the terrestrial globe’ (Hiroshi Shibuya and Shin Chiba, ‘Editors’ preface’, in Living for Jesus and Japan: The Social and Theological Thought of Uchimura Kanzō, eds. Hiroshi Shibuya and Shin Chiba (Grand Rapids, MI: Willam B. Eerdermans Publishing, 2003), x).
55 Akae, ‘Uchimura Kanzō’, 10.
56 Ibid., 11.
57 ‘Uchimura Kanzō’, 12–13.
58 Howes, ‘Christian prophecy’, 134.
59 Akae, ‘Uchimura Kanzō’.
60 James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
61 Nirei, ‘Toward’, 168.
62 Tatsuya Akae, ‘The politics of the <hesitating> body: Uchimura Kanzō’s lese majesty incident or the relationship between the state’s ritual space and the <collective> body’, The Annual Review of Sociology, no. 17 (2004) [赤江達也、「<ためらう>身体の政治学:内村鑑三不敬事件、あるいは国家の儀式空間と< 集合的>身体·論」、『年報社会学論集』, no. 17].
63 Akae, ‘The Politics’, 8.
64 Oshiro, ‘Nitobe Inazō’, 109.
65 Oshiro, ‘Nitobe Inazō’, 118.
66 Ibid., 100–1.
67 Ibid., 122.
68 Sakamoto, Early Modern and Modern Shintō.
69 Toshimaro Abe, Can Religion Overcome the State?: An Examination of Modern Japan [『宗教は国家を超えられるか:近代日本の検証』] (Tokyo: Chikuma-Shobo, 2005).
70 Abe, Can Religion Overcome the State?
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Atsuko Ichijo
Atsuko Ichijo is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University, UK. Her research interest is in the field of nationalism studies and is the author of: ‘“Overcoming modernity”, overcoming what?: “Modernity” in wartime Japan and its implication’, (2022), International Journal of Social Imaginaries, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 107-128; ‘Kokugaku and an alternative account of the emergence of nationalism of Japan’ (2020) Nations and Nationalism; ‘The articulation of national identity in early twentieth century East Asia: Intertwining of discourses of modernity and civilisation’ (2018) Asian Studies Review, Vol. 42, Issue 2, pp. 342-355. She is a member of the editorial team of Nations and Nationalism.