Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality by Michel Mohr (review)

Compared with their nearest counterparts in South Korea and the Sinophone world, the strains of Christianity dominant in Japan stand out for their theological liberality and relative amity toward other religious groups and teachings. In no polity of East Asia do Christians constitute an overwhelming majority of the population; in most, including Japan, they remain a small minority. The very distinct disposition of Christianity in Japan must therefore result not only from demography, but also from factors in history. Although writers of English have in fact been chronicling Protestant Christianity in Japan continuously since its introduction there in the mid-nineteenth century, the Japanese encounter with the one Christian group that has been arguably the most committed to liberal theology and cooperation across religions—the Unitarian Church—has only recently become the subject of a comprehensive monograph: Michel Mohr’s Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality. Unlike most previous literature in English about Unitarianism in Japan, Mohr’s research is not limited to sources written in that language. It not only draws on the formidable archives of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, but also cites copiously from contemporary sources in Japanese, with special emphasis on serial publications.

This welcome study treats events from the first suggestion in the Japanese press (in 1886) that Japan might adopt the Unitarian creed to the establishment and development of a Unitarian mission in Japan and its closure in 1922 following the final refusal of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) to grant its Japanese branch full autonomy. Laudably, the study documents not only developments among the associates of the mission proper, but also the interpretations and uses of Unitarianism by parties in reformist Japanese Buddhist circles, at Waseda University, and in Japan’s socialist and labor movements. As the title suggests, the theme of universalism binds together these disparate developments; here, too, the author’s concerns are not limited to imported European notions of universality, but instead extend to the possibility of indigenous sources for universalism and to its use removed from the Unitarian world. The three main sections of the text employ three metaphors: “Seeds and Transplant,” “Bloom and Tensions,” and “Fracture and Rebuttals.” Not solely for the sake of metaphorical consistency, this review will propose that the final section could also be read as “Withering and Hybridization.”

The first chapter in “Seeds and Transplant” begins by discussing the parameters of the study, setting up a contrast between the Meiji-era search for “universal truth” and the “surge in chauvinist expressions and . . . the emergence of Japanese colonialism” (p. 4). Elsewhere, the chapter notes competing claims within “universalism” itself—one an appeal to the universal nature of religion and the other “an attempt to justify supremacy on the world stage, meaning quite the opposite of what this word seems to imply”—that gave “two diametrically opposed meanings” to the term (p. 16). The second chapter covers the 1887 dispatch of Unitarian representative Arthur May Knapp from the United States to Japan in response to an invitation by the political journalist Yano Fumio (Ryūkei); Knapp’s departure and succession by Clay MacCauley in 1890; and ambitious early efforts by the mission to build (and rebuild) its headquarters, operate a school of instruction in liberal theology, and spread its message—an aim it pursued through publication (of a periodical that merged in 1898 with Japan’s leading Christian journal, Rikugō zasshi), direct mailings, and public lectures. Contrary to its title, the section’s final chapter, “The Wavering of Early Japanese Support,” opens with the abrupt decision of the Boston headquarters of the AUA to stop funding the Unitarian school in Tokyo in 1895, which in the long term sabotaged the prospects of Unitarianism in Japan. Meanwhile, in the atmosphere of growing national self-confidence and self-assertiveness of the 1890s, some prominent Japanese allies of the Unitarian cause, including Kaneko Kentarō and possibly Fukuzawa Yukichi, proved themselves fair-weather friends. From 1900...