The Cross in the Dark Valley: The Canadian Protestant Missionary Movement in the Japanese Empire, 1931-1945 by A. Hamish Ion (review)

150BOOK REVIEWS Much work needs to be done in this field. Few topics seem more relevant to Catholic scholars. This book, alas, is useful only to the extent that it calls attention to a biographical approach that might well prove fruitful in the future. Thomas C. Reeves University of Wisconsin-Parkside Canadian The Cross in the Dark Valley: The Canadian ProtestantMissionary Movement in the Japanese Empire, 1931-1945. ByA. Hamish Ion. (Walterloo, Ontario , Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 1999. Pp. xvi, 428. $54.95.) This book is a continuation and ultimately the third volume to Ion's previous publications, The Cross and the Rising Sun, Volumes 1 and 2 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990, 1993), which study the Canadian and British Protestant movements in the prewarJapanese Empire. This supplementary volume to the first, one which traces the Canadian Protestant missionary movement in the Japanese Empire, 1872-1931, investigates the last stage of the "missionary age" covering the history of Canadian-Japanese international relations as well as Canada's relations withJapan's two major colonies, Korea and Taiwan, and with Japan's client state of Manchukuo, 1931-1945. This refined, academic study by far outshines Ion's previous studies. His acquisition of rare documents and oral histories in Japan as well as the extensive collection and utilization of Canadian and British materials provides the reader with a well-balanced historical overview of missionary work inJapan. Ion's fine point is that he focuses not only on the missionary movement from Canada, but the Japanese receptivity to Canadian missionary activities. Ion focuses extensively on the experiences of Canadian United Church missionaries in the Japanese Empire starting in 1931, including the missionaries' educational and medical works in addition to their evangelical and social works. Of particular importance were the missionary struggles with the Shrine question, the problems of church union in Japan, and the missionaries' attitudes on Japanese political developments from the Manchurian Incident to the Anglo-JapaneseAmerican War. As a scholar of the history of international relations, I find that this work certainly achieves its purpose—to investigate the Canadian-Japanese informal international and personal relations, that is, the reciprocal influence of cultural interaction between Canada andjapan. Apart from these accolades, this critic would like to encourage future investigation on the Japanese internal history termed "the Dark Valley." Ion's view coinciding with the postwar Japanese enlightened thoughts at times misses the continuity, hence the transition, between the prewar Japanese matters and the postwar. His conclusion that, "The missionary age died in failure" with the Pacific War as a turning point, sets Ion's next task as that of reviewing the causes BOOK REVIEWS151 of failure that developed up to that point. Consequently, how to ascertain the continuity or discontinuity between the prewar and the postwar conditions in Japan deserves further investigation. Unfortunately many history books leave the impression that changes occurred at sharp static intervals when in fact gradual transitions existed. Furthermore, Ion emphasizes that the Canadian missionaries are generally more egalitarian and democratic and less identified with imperial political and cultural expansion than their British colleagues, and additionally, more tolerant and less patronizing than the American. I am sure that, in time, he would not only trace the legacy of the missionary connection between Canada andJapan, but bridge the gap between the end of Canada's Victorian missionary age and the postwar survival of its legacy. So, it is to be expected that Ion's next study should investigate the Canadian-Japanese international and personal relations from the postwar period. Hiroaki Shiozaki Nagasakifunshin Catholic University Nagasaki, fapan Latin American Colonial Habits. Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. By Kathryn Burns. (Durham: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 307. $49.95 clothbound; $17.95 paperback.) After the Inca capital of Cuzco became Spanish in the early 1530's, it lost its paramount political place in the Andean world, but it remained an important urban center in which the ancient traditions mixed with the cultural, economic , and social imports from the "Old World." In this setting, the three nunneries founded in that city stand as institutions in which the two peoples, Spaniards and indigenous,negotiated their worldly interests...