Abstract
Sometime during the U.S. occupation of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in Japan, asked an aide to determine the number of Christians in Japan before and after the war. MacArthur was eager to know. In an effort to Christianize and so democratize the Japanese, he had encouraged hundreds of missionaries to come to Japan. He even authorized the use of military facilities to distribute one million pocket-size Bibles. If these efforts were not to be in vain, there had to be a significant increase in the number of converts. A report was duly prepared by the General Headquarters' Religious Division, which concluded that “the number of Japanese Christians was 200,000 before the war and 20,000 after the war.” Colonel Nugent, chief of the Civil Information and Education Section, anticipating his commander-in-chief's response, exclaimed “that's not enough”—whereupon one of Nugent's staff in the Religious Division became so furious that he added some zeros to the original numbers. Soon a happy MacArthur started boasting in his speeches that “Christianity is spreading all over Japan. Christians in Japan are now two million.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sodei Rinjiro
This article is based on a paper prepared for the Organization of American Historians Conference on 30 March 1995. It was revised for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in July 1995.
Notes
Oral history records compiled by Faubion Bowers and deposited at Columbia University in New York, NY. Quoted with the personal permission of Faubion Bowers. See also Douglas MacArthur, “We Must Complete Victory,” in his A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (New York, NY: Frederic A. Praeger, 1965, p. 183.
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