What does it mean to be a Christian nationalist in Meiji Japan?: Religion, nationalism and the state

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Meiji Japan
• Shintō
• Uchimura Kanzō
• Nitobe Inazō
• civil religion
• separation of church and state

Introduction

Can one be a Christian nationalist – not in a derogatory sense but as someone who publicly admits he/she loves and is loyal to the nation – in Japan? The immediate reaction to the question would be ‘not impossible but quite rare’, given that Japan is not a Christian country. As of the end of 2020, there were just under 2 million Christians accounting for about 1.1% of the population.¹ Clearly Christianity is a minority religion in Japan, and it logically follows that a Christian Japanese nationalist would be rarer than a Buddhist Japanese nationalist when there are about 83 million Buddhists in Japan.² Furthermore, the memory of wartime propaganda about Japan being a divine country with the emperor as a living deity, an idea that was deeply intertwined with Shintō, Japan’s indigenous faith, remains vivid and strong. Some would argue that pre-war Japan was driven by Shintō-inspired nationalism.³ Shintō is privileged in this line of thinking because it is an indigenous faith as opposed to Buddhism which, albeit with a long history in Japan, has been clearly understood as an imported faith. In the study of nationalism, the affinity between a claim to indigeneity and nationalist agitation in the post-Romantic era is well recognised.⁴ From this perspective, therefore, combining Christian faith with a full commitment to the Japanese nation, in particular, in pre-war Japan, is seen as exceptional.

Albeit in a small number, there were still well-known Christians in Meiji Japan who were also proud to be Japanese including Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930) who professed his devotion to two J’s (Jesus and Japan) and Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), the author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), originally written in English and arguably one of the most influential propaganda pieces for Japan. Their cases suggest while it may have been far from the norm, it was certainly possible to convert to Christianity, a foreign faith, and to be a Japanese nationalist (or patriot, if you wish) in Meiji Japan. The question to be asked then is ‘what made it possible?’

As a way of contributing to a better understanding of Christian nationalism, the current article pursues the question, what made being a Christian nationalist possible in Meiji Japan, from a broadly sociological perspective and uses the question as an aid in exploring the relationship between religion and nationalism. In other words, the current article investigates the topic of Christian nationalism not in reference to theological concerns but as a social phenomenon and approaches the topic in reference to the idea of civil religion and the separation of church and state in modern polity.

Nationalism and how it works in the Japanese context

Before starting an investigation into Christians in Meiji Japan, a brief discussion of nationalism is due in order to bring in some more clarity. Nationalism is yet another contested concept and a large number of definitions has been suggested. Still, there is a general agreement in literature that it is about the principle of social organisation, about how a societal unit should be organised in reference to power and identity. It can be ‘a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’,⁵ a doctrine invented in nineteenth-century Europe which holds that ‘humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government’,⁶ ‘a fusion of patriotism with a consciousness of nationality’⁷ or an ‘ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity for a population which some of its members deemed to constitute an actual or potential “nation”’.⁸ As Smith has observed, what is shared in these definitions is a concern with a human grouping called a ‘nation’,⁹ which Benedict Anderson has famously defined as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’.¹⁰ In short, nationalism is an idea about how the world should be organised; it holds that the world should be organised based on the unit called the nation so as to enable it to secure its autonomy and identity.

As the concept of nationalism draws from that of nations, the discussion of nationalism often turns into that of nations. In this regard, Smith has identified three major perspectives: the modernist, primordialist/perennialist and ethno-symbolist.¹¹ The modernist perspective holds that nations are created by nationalism which is typically understood as a societal response to various phases of modernisation, be it the development of industrialism,¹² of market-based capitalism and the emergence of bourgeoisie¹³ or of a nation-state.¹⁴ For them, the nation is modern as it has been created to meet the demands of modernisation however understood. The primordialist view holds that the formation of a nation is an ingrained feature of humanity, and it is simply natural for humanity to form nations and use this category as a way of guiding their behaviour. The perennialists are not concerned with whether nations and nationalism are part and parcel of humanity but hold that nations are recurring phenomena in history and therefore it is not a modern innovation. The ethno-symbolic approach holds while nationalism as an ideological movement is modern, the nation needs to draw from pre-modern past in order to generate sufficient resonance.

The case of Japan occupies an interesting position in this debate. During World War II, the Japanese government presented itself in a primordial light claiming that Japan was a divine country continuously governed by the descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, a view which largely drew from a particular version of Kokugaku propagated by Hirata Atsutane (1776–1834) as well as restoration Shintō.¹⁵ Post-War scholarship has largely rejected this view and the currently dominant view is a modernist one that nationalism in Japan rose as a reformist movement in the face of threat of colonisation by western powers.¹⁶ In so far as the current article is concerned, nationalism of Meiji Japan is understood in line with the modernist perspective as an attempt to modernise the polity in order to survive in the Westphalian world order.¹⁷ As we shall see, the early Meiji government understood nationalism as a way of modernising/westernising Japan in order to become a full member of the society of modern states. Furthermore, its understanding of the relationship between nationalism and politics was also framed by what we call modernist understanding of nations and nationalism.

A brief history of Christianity in Japan

Christianity is not an indigenous faith in Japan. While Nestorianism was welcomed and thrived in Tang China from the seventh to the end of eighth centuries, it is generally agreed that it did not spread to Japan at that time.¹⁸ Japanese people’s first meaningful encounter with Christianity is customarily dated in 1549 when the Jesuit missionary led by Francis Xavier entered Japan following the Vatican’s directive. However, it has been established that it was in 1542 or 1543 that Christianity was first introduced to Japan when three Portuguese traders took refuge in a Japanese island of Tanegashima from a storm.¹⁹ In this case, Christianity was brought to Japan inadvertently with western goods as well as the gun.

Once introduced, Christianity spread fast in Japan. It is claimed that by the first decade of the seventeenth century, out of a total population of around 20 million, some 300,000 Japanese had converted to Christianity.²⁰ This accounted for 1.5% of the total population, almost at the same level as in the twenty-first century as seen above. However, the honeymoon period did not last long. Already in 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), a warlord who had managed to bring the prolonged civil war to a close and established himself as the ruler of almost pacified Japan, issued an edict banning missionary activities and ordering foreign missionaries to leave Japan. The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868) at first did not actively pursue anti-Christian policies but from the 1610s, they started to work to eradicate Christianity in Japan. The prohibition of Christianity was also pursued in the form of the temple guarantee system (terauke seido 寺受け制度), a system by which commoners must register with a Buddhist temple to prove that they were not Christian. The system evolved over the years and the Buddhist temple became a de facto organ of the state as it kept record of its parishioners and issued various certificates necessary for moving house, marriage, employment, travel and so on to them. Legally, the persecution of Christians came to a full circle when the Sakoku edicts of the 1630s granted the monopoly of foreign trade to the Shogunate and prohibited the Japanese from going abroad and those who were living abroad were banned from coming back.

A wide range of factors has been identified as reasons for why Christian missionaries were quite successful in the first several decades of their arrival in Japan. According to Neil Fujita, the timing of Christianity’s arrival in Japan is one of the main reasons. Christianity arrived during the prolonged civil war in Japan, which meant there was no centralised control over the missionaries’ activities and the missionaries enjoyed relatively free access to all parts of Japan.²¹ While George Elison agrees that the rapid spread of Christianity in the ‘Christian century’ of Japan (1549–1639) was something to do with the disjointed polity of Japan during the civil war, he argues that missionaries were at the whim of warlords, many of whom were motivated by foreign trade and commercial possibilities associated with Christian missionaries.²² Some warlords used the Christian missionary work to counter the strong influence of Buddhist temples. The best-known example of this is Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), who is widely seen as getting close to Christian missionaries in order to curb the influence of the Buddhist Ikkō sect, in particular.

The ban on Christianity was firmly in place by the mid-seventeenth century and those who did not abandoned their faith despite persecution went underground.²³ The environment started to change in 1853 when Commodore Perry appeared in Edo Bay demanding the Tokugawa Shogunate to open some ports to support their whalers. What Perry was engaged is known as gunboat diplomacy and faced with a threat of use of overwhelming force, the Shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa with the United States in 1854 which granted the US vessels access to two ports and allowed the US to set up a consulate. The Shogunate then signed similar agreements with the United Kingdom (1854), Russia (1855) and France (1858), which effectively put an end to the Shogunate’s seclusion policy. The 1858 US-Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce specifically stipulated the freedom of religion of the US citizens residing in the designated settlement and Christian clergy were allowed in Japan to cater for foreign residents’ spiritual needs. Not only Protestant sects but also Catholic and Orthodox missionaries started to arrive, although proselytising was still banned by the Shogunate.

Even after the change of regime in 1868, initially the Meiji government followed the Shogunate’s practice regarding Christianity and affirmed the prohibition of Christianity in the Five Public Notices published in 1868. Largely due to strong protest from western countries, the Meiji government felt necessary to repeal the Five Public Notices in 1873 and argued that the prohibition of Christianity did not need explicit mention any longer since it was fully understood, effectively lifting the ban on the faith.²⁴ In short, the Meiji government’s policy shifted from an outright ban on Christianity to toleration. The de facto freedom of religion in Japan was finally codified in the Meiji Constitution of 1889. The Article 28 says: ‘Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief’.²⁵ It is under these circumstances that the focus of the current study, Japanese Christians who were also overtly nationalist, lived and pursued their ideal.

Meiji Japan and the problem of ‘religion’

In discussing the treatment of Christianity and Christians in Japan in the processes of the ‘opening up’ the country pursued by both the Tokugawa Shogunate and Meiji government, it is more helpful to place the situation surrounding Christianity within a wider context of the Meiji government’s problem with ‘religion’. Many have noted that the concept of religion as understood in the West did not exist in Japan at that time, and a new word (宗教, shūkyō) had to be devised in order to translate the concept.²⁶ However, the Meiji elite was keenly aware of the importance of ‘religion’ in ensuring the cohesion and unity of the polity after intensely investigating western countries. Itō Hirobumi acknowledged the importance of religion in state-building based on his observation of the role Christianity played in western countries, but publicly stated that neither Buddhism nor Shintō could fulfil the role at a Privy Council meeting: ‘ … Shintō is a learning based on the teachings of our imperial ancestors, but its power as a religion to direct the minds of the people is weak’.²⁷

Itō’s comments were reflected on the Meiji government’s shifting policies regarding religion. Initially, the young Meiji government attempted to pursue a theocratic regime drawing from restoration Shintō under the ideal of the unity of ritual and politics as proclaimed in 1868.²⁸ The Meiji government’s early drive towards a Shintō-based theocracy resulted in an anti-Buddhist movement called haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈, ‘abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni’). The movement was triggered by the official attempt of separating Shintō from Buddhism along the line suggested by Kokugaku scholars, which was not necessarily intended to be a persecution of Buddhism. However, it eventually led to the destruction of Buddhist temples and their properties in various parts of Japan as well as many Buddhist monks being forced to return to secular life. Witnessing the unexpected unleashing of violence, the Meiji government shifted its focus on the search of more secular way of fostering ‘national cohesion, loyalty to the emperor, and a commitment to goals set by the state’²⁹ .

What the young Meiji government saw as a problem in establishing a new regime in the Westphalian world order was the syncretism of Shintō and Buddhism which had been practised over the centuries in Japan. Buddhism, which was introduced in Japan in the sixth century, had merged with Shintō (which was never a unified nor systematised form of faith) in various manners and it was not unusual for a Shintō shrine to be built within the Buddhist temple’s compound or Shintō deity to be worshiped as a reincarnation of a Buddhist deity. The early Meiji government saw this syncretism as an obstacle in establishing a renewed Japanese polity in contrast to the Tokugawa Shogunate which arguably followed a kind of secularism by pursuing ‘pragmatic’ separation of faith and politics.³⁰ The Meiji elite were faced with two new factors which the Tokugawa Shogunate did not have to deal with: the Kokugaku-influenced ideology of the unity of rituals and politics and the view of western countries which looked down on the practice of syncretism.

In discussing the syncretism of Shintō and Buddhism in pre-Meiji Japan and a relatively easy conversion of Buddhist monks to Shintō priests during the haibutsu kishaku movement, Sakamoto argues because Buddhism as a universal faith required a different sort of religiosity from Shintō as a basic faith, it was unproblematic for the two faiths to be mixed and coexist.³¹ This suggests that the religiosity in pre-Meiji Japan was qualitatively different from what western countries had come to expect due to the Reformation and the gradual advancement of the separation of church and state. The Meiji government had to negotiate its way into the international community with different understanding of religion and its role in society from the western countries. In other words, the Meiji government’s problem with ‘religion’ was more international than domestic.

The Meiji elite’s attempts to solve the ‘religion’ problem were hinged on how to treat Shintō given the government’s initial ambition to unify rituals and politics. Their efforts did not constitute a coherent and focused movement towards secularism but developed in response to practical concerns about potential problems arising from competition between followers of Shintō and other faiths.³² In this regard, the act of translating ‘religion’ into Japanese appeared to have played a major role in shaping the Meiji government’s solution to the ‘religion’ problem. As mentioned earlier, the term ‘religion’ did not have an equivalent in the contemporary Japanese language, and when the concept of religion needed to be translated, a range of terms was suggested. Although presently the established translation of religion is shūkyō (宗教), there were other terms tried out by intellectuals and clergy of various faiths in the Meiji period including jikyō/chikyō (治教).

In this regard, the contribution by Buddhists of various reformist orientations should not be overlooked. For example, Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911), a Shin Buddhist priest who also went on a study tour in Europe, engaged with a serious discussion of what religion was and questioned if Shintō was a ‘proper’ religion. He argued that Shintō was civic teaching (Jikyō/chikō), not religion, and it was more like Confucianism under the Tokugawa Shogunate. In contrast, Buddhism was sectarian teaching (shūkyō) and it is in the same category with Christianity.³³ In questioning if Shintō qualified as a religion, Shimaji contributed to the formation of a policy that deemed Shintō shrines as a non-religious institution but an inseparable part of the Japanese polity.³⁴ The Buddhists’ engagement with the ‘religion’ problem was also observed in the case of the New Buddhist Fellowship instituted by a group of reformist Buddhists in 1899. The Fellowship, while resisting the separation of religion and politics in the western sense, argued for free investigation of Buddhism as well as other religions and the number six of its Statement of General Principles says: ‘We believe the government should refrain from favouring religious groups or interfering in religious matters’.³⁵

The Buddhists’ engagement in the debate on religion therefore facilitated the formation of state Shitō, which was not a religion as such but an embodiment of the Japanese polity.³⁶ Because state Shintō was officially deemed to be a non-religion but part and parcel of the Japanese polity, it was possible to be a devoted Buddhist or Christian at the same time as respecting state Shintō by observing its rituals.

The position that Shintō was not a religion was confirmed in 1882 by the government’s decree that prohibited Shintō priests from conducting ‘religious activities’ including conducting funerals.³⁷ Sakamoto documents how deep the Meiji policy makers were committed to this idea.³⁸ They repeatedly asserted while Shintō might indeed be religious in its nature, because of the demand of politics, it was regarded as a non-religion. By the eve of the Pacific War, the Japanese government was increasingly demanding Shintō rituals to be observed and reverence should be paid to Shintō shrines on state occasions. However, constitutionally, there was a freedom of religion as Shintō shrines were not religious institutions, and it was more strictly observed in Meiji Japan.³⁹

Christianity was not very visible in the debate on what religion was and whether Shintō was a religion or not. However, as noted earlier, for the nascent Meiji polity, the freedom of religion was a primarily matter of international relations in its dealing with western powers. In its efforts to repeal what was known as unequal treaties signed at the end of the Edo period, it was keen on impressing the western countries that Japan shared their values and the freedom of religion, or the freedom to practice Christianity, was one of the points about which the Meiji government had to convince the western powers. Internally, it is argued that the while the Meiji government was not very concerned with the extent to which Buddhism might exert its influence as they saw Buddhism was in decline after a few centuries of de facto state protection, they were concerned with the possible influence of Christianity on Japanese people. The government was concerned that Christianity might induce social unrest, that Christianity might invite foreign intervention, and that Christianity might challenge the legitimacy of the Meiji state centred on the divine nature of the emperor drawing from Shintō.⁴⁰ Breen argues that the ‘leadership knew that Christianity could not be banned; it had, in some form or another, to be controlled and accommodated’.⁴¹ The invention of state Shintō as a non-religion was therefore, at least in part, the Meiji elite’s answer to what they perceived as a threat of Christianity to Meiji Japan.

In this regard, a report by Yosuke Nirei on an unexpected rise of Unitarianism in Japan of the 1890s and 1900s is of some interest to the current article. After the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), against the background of national euphoria, the elite were concerned that the Japanese polity was lacking in a proper moral and religious foundation.⁴² These leading intellectuals, policymakers and opinion formers, many of them were ex-samurai who were trained in neo-Confucian metaphysics and had internalised its rationalistic and naturalistic worldview, were attracted to Unitarianism as it was seen as a rational and humanistic form of Christianity which was strongly associated with social progress. In particular, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), one of the leading intellectuals of Meiji Japan, who also supported the introduction of Unitarianism in Japan, is reported to have stated that ‘Whether or not [Unitarianism] can be called a religion is not my immediate concern. But if [Unitarianism] says that the purpose of its teaching is to uplift the level of humanity, liberate the work of intellectual power, uphold universal brotherhood, and that it can infuse virtue in terms of both individual and family relationship … this is Japan’s urgent need today’.⁴³ This suggests that the view of Christianity as a potential threat to Japanese society was not uniformly shared by the elite of the time. In the case of Unitarianism, it was chiefly understood and presented as a tool for social progress and improvement rather than a religion (or sectarian teaching in Shimaji’s terminology).

Coleman argues that state Shintō, the Meiji government’s answer to the ‘religion’ problem, was a state-sponsored civil religion on a par with Roman emperor worship.⁴⁴ In his view, civil religion is ‘a religious system given to the social integration of society. It performs the function of religion stipulated by Durkheim, the religion of national identity and solidarity’.⁴⁵ Others examine the ‘invention’ of state Shintō in reference to secularism. Nakai sees it as an expression of passive secularism as opposed to active secularism⁴⁶ while Takashi Kibe argues that it was a consequence of strong religious nationalism taking over the initial drive by the Meiji elite to push secular nationalism.⁴⁷ In short, Christianity in Meiji Japan found itself under quite ambiguous circumstances in reference to the relationship between church and state. The Meiji elite was in dire need of some integrative force to establish a new polity, but they found it difficult to identify a particular one as the way religiosity had worked in Japan was not very similar to that in the West. Practitioners of various faiths also struggled to get to grips with the idea of religion and to articulate its relationship with the state. The invention of state Shintō as a non-religion, as an indivisible part of the Japanese polity, created space for Christianity as a foreign religion to come in and (re)establish itself but the prevailing understanding of religion itself was not what Christian missionaries and Christians were used to.

Being a Christian nationalist in Meiji Japan

While Christianity was certainly seen as ‘foreign’ in Meiji Japan despite the history of ‘hidden Christians’ under the Tokugawa Shogunate, there were some prominent Christians who can be described as nationalists as they were also publicly committed to Japan. This section reviews some examples of Christian nationalists in Meiji Japan to investigate what factors made it – being a Christian nationalist in Meiji Japan – possible.⁴⁸

Uchimura Kanzō’ and his two J’s

Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), one of the best-known Christians of Meiji Japan, was born at the end of the Edo period as the eldest son of Uchimura Yoshiyuki, a samurai of Takasaki Domain, and his wife Yaso. He was taught Confucianism by his father since he was young. His family moved to Takasaki in 1866 and at the age of 11 he started to learn English. In 1873, he went to Tokyo on his own to enrol in an English language school with a view to securing a governmental job. In 1877, he was admitted to the Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC) in Sapporo where teaching was mainly delivered in English, partly because of the vision of developing Hokkaido and partly because of the scholarship offered to him. It was at the SAC that Uchimura was introduced to Christianity by senior students who were taught by William S. Clark (1826–86),⁴⁹ who insisted on providing moral education at the SAC based on the Bible and through his deep Christian faith.⁵⁰ Originally Uchimura was not inclined to commit himself to Christianity. He signed the ‘Covenant of Believers in Jesus’ drafted by Clark when his classmates signed it and started to study the Bible and hold prayer meetings with his fellow students.⁵¹ He was formally baptised by a Methodist missionary in 1878. He and his fellow students quickly became disillusioned with the western missionary’s way. They came to be referred to as the Sapporo Band.⁵² He graduated from the SAC at the top of the class in 1881 and found a position in the government promoting fishery in Hokkaido. In 1882 he and his fellow believers established an independent church in Sapporo. Next year, in 1882, he resigned from his post in order to become a missionary. He then taught at an agricultural school and took up a post in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce working on the catalogue of Japanese fishing stock. Following his failed first marriage, he moved to the United States to further his education in 1884. After working as a carer at a facility for mentally disabled children, he enrolled in Amherst College in 1885 graduating it with a BSc in Science in 1887. He then enrolled in Hartford Seminary with a view to become a missionary but return to Japan in 1888 without completing his study.

After returning Japan, Uchimura’s professional career was somewhat bumpy. He took up a series of teaching positions and worked as a journalist, but by the mid-1900s, he resigned as a journalist and became an independent publisher. He was more successful as a religious leader: he initiated and developed the non-church movement, continued to deliver weekly lectures on the Bible until his death, worked with Tanaka Shōzō and others to seek justice in the poisoning of local population by the Ashio Mine, led the pacifist opposition to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and published widely on his Christian faith. His early publication in English, Japan and the Japanese (1894) and How I became a Christian (1895), made him known as an advocate of Japan and the Japanese in the English-speaking world. He passed away in 1930 a couple of months after giving a public lecture on Paul.

As the description above shows that, like many others, Uchimura embraced Christianity while he was being educated to contribute to the development of Meiji Japan; in other words, there was strong linkage between his belief in Christianity and dedication to the development of Japan. This alignment of the Christian faith and devotion to the country was conditioned by the Meiji government’s education and development policies. In order to catch up with the advanced West, the Meiji government hired many foreign experts as teachers at various levels in order to efficiently disseminate knowledge among the young who were expected to work towards the development of Japan. The hired foreigners were often Christian, and they often worked to spread the Christian faith to their students as in the case of William Clark at the SAC. While the young people in higher education were not officially encouraged to convert to Christianity, they worked in the environment in which they did not see contradiction to become Christian in order to effectively contribute to the development of Japan in the world dominated by Christianity-based values.⁵³

Uchimura was no exception. He is well-known for his public pronunciation that his life was devoted to two J’s, Jesus and Japan, and for him, faith and nationalism was inseparable.⁵⁴ The first mention of his two J’s has been found in his letter of 1889 in which Uchimura described his position as ‘Christo-national’.⁵⁵ Despite the infamous lese-majesty incident of 1891, which projected him as ‘an enemy of people’ (about this, more later), his conviction that Jesus and Japan were one and the same continued to be strengthened and his view was increasingly articulated in a prophecy-like manner: once the existing order was destroyed, Japan would rise as ‘a cloud’ and ‘a dragon’ and Christians would be bridging the East and the West.⁵⁶ By World War I, Uchimura was discussing ‘Japanese Christianity’, the Christianity ‘received by the Japanese directly from God without any foreign intermediary’, which was ‘the spirit of Japan inspired by the Almighty’, not a ‘Christianity peculiar to Japan’.⁵⁷ The identification of Jesus and Japan in Uchimura’s thinking was not influenced by the need to accommodate particular socio-historical factors in maintaining belief in Christianity but informed by his conviction of the importance of direct connection with God through the Bible reflecting his distrust of the work of foreign missionaries in Japan.⁵⁸

In Uchimura, the dedication to the transcendental truth, Christianity, was deeply intertwined in the dedication to the particular, the Japanese nation: Jesus and Japan were one and the same. In fact, in his mind, the pursuit of the universal, Christian faith, was only possible when the particular, the Japanese nation, directly engaged with Christianity.⁵⁹ The emphasis on the direct engagement could be a consequence of his Protestant faith. Uchimura was introduced to Christianity by the legacy left by Clark at the SAC, which emphasised the engagement with the Bible as well and prayer. His conviction that a direct engagement with God was the only way to truth is demonstrated in the fact that he initiated and promoted the non-church movement in Japan. At the same time, his thinking fits the general post-WWI intellectual climate surrounding nationalism. As seen in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918, the logic of nationalism, in particular, the principle of the nation’s right to self-determination, underpinned international liberalism the emerged after WWI.⁶⁰ The League of Nations, an embodiment of international liberal order, was based on the respect and protection of state sovereignty, a principle that still underpins the United Nations and the vision of world order centred on it. Here, the universal values of peace, democracy and prosperity are seen to be achievable when the particularity of each member of the society of states is ensured. In other words, the universal is possible only with acceptance of the particular, not with the elimination of it: being an internationalist did not contradict with being a nationalist as both positions supported each other. It is highly unlikely Uchimura was reproducing a newly emerging intellectual dynamic about internationalism and nationalism in the aftermath of WWI but he was developing his thinking in this climate.

Uchimura was not alone in being convinced of the truth of Japanese Christianity. Kishimoto Nobuta (1866–1928), a Christian and renowned scholar of religion, referred to Japan’s Christianity when he predicted that Christianity would ultimately become Japan’s leading religion at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. His ‘Japan’s Christianity’ was ‘not Protestantism or Catholicism, nor any denominations of foreign origin’ but ‘Christianity of Jesus Christ’, which would overcome internal division in the faith.⁶¹ In Kishimoto’s argument, as in the case of Uchimura, the emphasis was placed on the Japanese nation’s direct relationship with God without mediation. In other words, in his view, too, the transcendental could only be reached through the particular without any foreign mediation.

In examining Uchimura’s case, we cannot overlook Uchimura’s so-called lese-majesty incident of 1891, in which a public outcry against what Uchimura saw as ‘a minor issue’ forced him to resign from his teaching position. On 9 January 1891, Uchimura’s school conducted a ceremony to pay respect to of the Imperial Rescript on Education by bowing to the Meiji Emperor’s signature. There was certainly some concern that it could lead to some conflict with being a committed Christian if one would pay respect to the Emperor’s signature, but Uchimura, having reasoned that paying respect was not worshiping, i.e. a religious act, did not object to participating in the ceremony. When his turn came, Uchimura slightly lowered his head but did not bow deeply as others. This was seen as an insult on the sovereign, and he was subjected to fierce criticism from students, fellow teachers and the wider public. He was perplexed by the public reaction but agreed to re-perform the ritual as in his view, bowing to the Emperor’s signature did not constitute worship, but because he was sick in bed on the day of the ceremony, his colleague performed bowing on his behalf. This failed to placate the enraged public opinion and he resigned from his post in the following month.

Uchimura’s lese-majesty incident is often portrayed as a conflict between his Christian conscience and the state-imposed rituals, an issue of the freedom of religion, but Uchimura himself did not see it as such. It is reported that in his view, the whole thing was a minor incident completely blown out of proportion.⁶² If we respect Uchimura’s own words, the incident simply suggested that Uchimura did not know how to demonstrate that he was a patriot at the same time as a devout Christian at the ceremony.⁶³ In other words, the Meiji Japanese society had not developed a diverse enough repertoire of gestures and behaviour in the public space to convey an identity of a Japanese Christian nationalist.

The case of Nitobe Inazō

Another well-known Christian of Meiji Japan who is also known for his commitment to Japan is Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933). Nitobe was Uchimura’s classmate at the SAC and he effectively encouraged Uchimura to embrace Christianity by signing the ‘Covenant of Believers in Jesus’ before him. Like Uchimura, he was a son of a samurai of Morioka Domain and was initially trained in the Confucian tradition. However, with the Meiji Restoration, he started to learn English and went to Tokyo to live with his uncle to advance his study in 1871. He was admitted to the SAC in 1877 together with Uchimura and was one of the first to sign the ‘Covenant’. Again, like Uchimura, Nitobe was introduced to Christianity at the SAC when he was pursuing his ambition to serve the country by studying agriculture. It is reported that Nitobe wanted to maintain his family’s long-standing commitment to agriculture and that he was also motivated by the Meiji Emperor’s explicit recognition of the family tradition to dedicate themselves to agricultural development.⁶⁴

After graduating from the SAC in the second place, Nitobe briefly attended Tokyo Imperial University but, disappointed with the level of education there, he travelled to the US primarily to study economics in 1884. He studied economics and political science at John Hopkins University, and it was while he was pursuing his undergraduate degree that he became a Quaker. While he was studying, he was appointed an assistant professor at the SAC on the condition that he would complete a doctorate in agricultural economics before taking up the post. He then moved to Germany and completed his doctorate in three years. On his way back from Germany, he married Mary Elkinton who he met through the Quakers’ meeting, and she accompanied him to Sapporo where he took up the promised post in 1891. He left the post in 1897 and spent a few years writing in English and Japanese, eventually took up a position of the technical advisor to the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan in 1901. From this point, he followed a career path combining being a bureaucrat, a university educator and a diplomat. He served as an Under-Secretary to the League of Nations in charge of intellectual co-operation from 1920 till 1926. After retirement, he briefly served in the House of Peers, but he was increasingly under attack from the right-wing forces as well as military for his critical stance towards Japanese expansionism. When Japan withdrew from the League, he was devastated but attended a conference to defend Japan’s position in Canada where he was taken ill and passed away.

While Nitobe was attacked by the right-wing as unpatriotic towards end of his life due to his questioning of the legitimacy of Japan’s expansionism arising from his commitment to pacifism, he was largely seen as the promoter of Japan and defender of Japanese position for most of his life although his commitment to the Christian faith was well known. Before he travelled to Germany from the US for his doctorate, he was engaged with an energetic campaign to revise the so-called unequal treaties, which he saw undermining Japanese sovereignty, by making a number of impassionate speeches advocating for revision. It is reported as he spoke ‘ … tears sometimes interfered with his words. Quakers so sympathised that many meeting houses asked him to present his appeal to them. In reply to these requests he made about thirty speeches’.⁶⁵ Clearly his Christian faith presented no conflict with his loyalty to Japan. Nitobe is arguably best known for his Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) in which he attempted to identify commonalities between the traditional Japanese culture and western culture. The book went down very well with western readers, but when it was translated into Japanese, it was criticised for presenting samurai ethics heavily coloured by references to Christian virtues by some. However, Nitobe did not apologise for the book’s Christian bias.⁶⁶ For him, seeing similarities between Christian and Japanese traditional values was not a contradiction, but an effective way of introducing Japan to the world to persuade them that Japan was a full member of a modern, international community.

Nitobe’s Christian faith never became a matter of public concern unlike Uchimura’s case. While Uchimura, who graduated at the top of the class, was overlooked in terms of appointment at the SAC, Nitobe was appointed as an assistant professor while he was still studying in the US. This was said to reflect changes in the SAC; by the late 1880s, the emphasis on Christian morality introduced by Clark had subsided and with the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889 and the Imperial Rescript on Education the following year, the feeling that devotion to Christianity was not fully compatible with being a loyal subject of Japan started to surface. Nitobe was said to be responsible for writing up a brochure entitled The Sapporo Agricultural College prepared for the Chicago World Exposition in 1893. The brochure did not mention anywhere the Christian influences in the school’s early history. Though it is unknown whether this was Nitobe’s intention or a result of editing by someone else, it certainly suggests changes happening in regard to the place of Christianity in Meiji Japan.⁶⁷ Still, he served the Japanese government in various capacities and represented Japan in the international arena after leaving the SAC. He even defended the Japanese position regarding the Mukden Incident, though he was critical of the Japanese military in reference to the Shanghai Incident of 1932.

What made it possible for Uchimura and Nitobe?

As the brief examination of the cases of Uchimura Kanzō and Nitobe Inazō above shows that it was possible for them to be committed Christians as well as Japanese nationalist in Meiji Japan. While the number of cases under investigation is very small, we should still be able to identify factors that would help us comprehend under what conditions a Japanese Christian can also maintain his/her commitment to Japan despite the potential theoretical/theological contradiction.

Uchimura and Nitobe followed a very similar trajectory. Both were born in a samurai family at the end of the Tokugawa’s reign and were originally educated in the neo-Confucian tradition, the dominant school of thought at that point. As it has been pointed out earlier, neo-Confucianism is seen to place an emphasis on rationality and logical explanation, which should have primed both for a kind of secular orientation shared by many Meiji elites including Fukuzawa Yukichi. With the change of regime, both started to learn English as a way of getting on with life in a new Japan. Both enrolled in the SAC in order to contribute to the further development of Japan, where they encountered Christianity. Both decided to embrace Christianity without seeing any contradiction between wanting to work for Japan and believing in Christian teaching. Both spent time in the US to further their study while reinforcing their faith. In Uchimura’s case, his experience in the US made him commit even deeper to the non-church movement he had initiated but Nitobe joined the Quaker denomination. Uchimura was not called back by the SAC despite graduating it at the top of the class while Nitobe was appointed as an assistant professor on the condition of acquiring a doctorate. It appears Uchimura’s commitment to Christianity was seen troublesome while Nitobe’s was not. Both returned to Japan to pursue their career, and both remained committed to both Christianity and Japan. Uchimura did not lose his commitment to two J’s despite the so-called lese-majesty incident. He supported the Japanese government at the First Sino-Japanese war (1894–95) though became disappointed with the government’s behaviour when seeking settlement to the war. He did not support the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), but his public lectures continued to attract large audience and he even started to envision realising true Christianity in Japan. Nitobe defended Japan’s position vis-à-vis the Mukden Incident despite his commitment to pacifism and background to have served as an undersecretary at the League of Nations. He did not defend the Japanese government at the Shanghai Incident, for which he came under attack, but he still tried to speak for Japan at an international conference held after the Japanese withdrawal from the League. Neither gave up their faith nor denounced Japan in their lifetime.

What made this – being a Christian and equally committed to the Japanese nation – possible? The short answer the investigation so far suggests that it was because state Shintō was officially made a non-religion. Contrary to the prevailing view that the Meiji Japanese state was a type of theocracy, because the supposed sacrality of the Japanese state was not justified by a religion but by the longevity of the imperial line, being committed to both Christianity and Japan did not create internal conflict for Uchimura and Nitobe; in other words, it was because the question of loyalty was not presented or understood as an ‘either-or’ question since the Meiji state was presented and understood as a non-religious entity. Uchimura did not object to paying respect to the emperor’s signature; in fact, he did bow to it but not deeply enough to some. Furthermore, this was just a matter of semantic; again, as seen in Uchimura’s conviction in the emergence of Japanese Christianity which would be the testimony to the glory of both Christian faith and Japan, the absence of conflict between faith and nationalism was a lived reality for at least Uchimura and Nitobe. This can be made sense of by referring to the relationship between the universal (in this case, Christianity) and the particular (the Japanese nation). For Uchimura and Nitobe, the pursuit of both was not contradictory because they were mutually dependent. This can be best illustrated in the relationship between internationalism and nationalism in the post-WWI world. Internationalism as a pursuit of peace was deemed to be only possible through securing the particularity of nations, and the only authority that could guarantee the nation’s particularity was an international framework. In other words, their life was embodiment of how nationalism worked in reference to religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Or we can apply another dichotomy of religion (Christianity) vs the secular (nationalism). Because the commitment to the Japanese state or nation was understood as a this-worldly value, there was no conflict between pursuing one’s Christian faith and dedicating oneself to the advancement/progress of one’s nation. In this line of argument, a division of labour between religion and nationalism is supposed; the former looks after the other worldly concern while the latter takes care of this worldly concern.

Both explanations appear to be plausible but given the widely recognised ‘religious’ overtone of the Meiji state, we may need to recall an earlier point that in pre-Meiji Japan, syncretism of Buddhism and various forms of Shintō was a norm for centuries. This could be seen as a very effective way of managing the relationship between the state and religion by the Tokugawa Shogunate, but also it may suggest some question about the religiosity in pre-Meiji (and possibly contemporary) Japan. Syncretism of Buddhism and Shintō was maintained because Japanese society was never faced with the need to choose one or the other as Sakamoto reminds us.⁶⁸ This in turn may be to do with the nature of Buddhism as a faith – clearly not a monotheism – and Shintō as something that has never been unified or systematised.

Concluding remarks

The article has set out to investigate the nature of Christian nationalism by examining two Christian nationalists of Meiji Japan. Despite the widespread view that the Meiji state was a type of theocracy sanctioned by state Shintō, the investigation has found that Shintō was deliberately made a non-religion by the Meiji elite. While they were convinced of the importance of religion as an integrative force of a polity (though the majority of them were either atheist or agnostic, most likely owing to their education in the neo-Confucian tradition), they did not find Shintō a reliable force. They were also under pressure to guarantee the freedom of religion, i.e. the freedom to practice Christianity, from western powers with whom they were negotiating the revision of so-called unequal treaties. These circumstances produced an intellectual acrobatic act to declare state Shintō as a non-religion but made part and parcel of the Japanese polity which was legitimated by the supposed longevity of the imperial family.⁶⁹ This created enough space for some Japanese Christians to maintain their faith while remaining loyal to the Japanese nation.

The investigation carried out in the article strongly points to the nature of the state as a major factor that made Christian nationalism in Meiji Japan possible. The Meiji elite was consciously modernising the Japanese polity by emulating western states in order to ensure Japan’s survival as an independent state in the expanding Westphalian order. The Meiji elite acknowledged the importance of religion as an integrative force of a modern, i.e. western state but found Shintō wanting. Partly due to the necessity to placate western powers by guaranteeing freedom of religion, Shintō was officially made a non-religion and the state’s legitimacy was anchored to the alleged unbroken line of imperial succession.⁷⁰ This made the Meiji state non-religious, if not fully secular, which enabled a version of the separation of church and state granting some space for individuals to pursue their conscience in the private sphere. Furthermore, because the Meiji state’s aim was to modernise/westernise Japan, the propagation of Christianity was tolerated in the place of learning where the cutting-edge western sciences were taught by experts invited from the West. Consequently, ambitious young people (predominantly male) were trained in an environment in which Christianity was strongly associated with progress and in which they did not see any contradiction between being committed to the betterment of the Japanese nation and believing in Christianity. The fact that the global intellectual climate that promoted international liberalism, in particular, after WWI, was built on the respect for the particular could have also played a role in making being a Christian Japanese nationalist possible.

The current article has not fully looked into the influence of the tradition and practice of syncretism in Japan. In early Meiji era, there was some radical and even militant movements to purify Shintō, in particular from long-standing Buddhist influence by supporters of restoration Shintō. This petered out relatively quickly, partly because of the Meiji state withdrew its support for the effort. The fact that syncretism of Shintō and Buddhism (and possibly some versions of Taoism) was widespread in pre-Meiji Japan itself raises a question about the nature of religiosity in pre-Meiji Japan. As shown in the debates surrounding the translation of the term ‘religion’ into Japanese, religiosity of pre-Meiji Japan could have been qualitatively different from what was experienced in the powerful western countries, which could have had an impact on the conditions in which being a Christian at the same time as a Japanese nationalist was possible.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

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, 2022), 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 2016).

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 (2007) 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?