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Chapter 9. “Smelling of Pickled Radish, Not Butter”: The Wartime Search for a Christianity Viable in Japan
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224 9 “Smelling of Pickled Radish, Not Butter” The Wartime Search for a Christianity Viable in Japan Gregory Vanderbilt The question of what might constitute “Japanese Christianity” came to the surface in the 1930s, at the time that military aggression on the Asian continent and increased political controls and mobilization of the populace , recognizable as fascism, were swept up into ideology that promised the “overcoming of modernity” and the purification of the national body. At that time, the first generation of Protestant Christian leaders, who had been born into samurai families before Christianity’s relegalization in 1873 and encountered the long-proscribed “foreign” religion within questions of how Japan might attain the civilization needed to survive in the world, were passing from the scene. The generation that was assuming leadership was one that had been born into the ideology historians and activists have called “the emperor system” and was now looking beyond aspirations to cosmopolitan culture to grounding in their own nation, as it was being defined for them as much as they tried to define it themselves. Despite reverberations in a different key with the struggle that wracked the German churches of the day, theirs was at the same time a conversation about the viability of Christianity itself as it travels to new situations. This essay vanderbilt 225 returns to the efforts and dilemmas experienced by one Christian of that second generation and his circle, moving from the context of participation in religion within the nation to the text of a Christian magazine he edited as the war intensified, the Voice at the Lakeside. Context: Religion and Nation in the Late 1930s At eight in the morning on August 13, 1937, five weeks after the war in China escalated with the “incident” at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing , a scene that was both startling and routine unfolded at the Imperial Shrine at Ise. Leading a delegation of nine, a Japanese Christian named Yoshida Etsuzō (1890–1942) performed the act of worship before the shrine, announcing himself as the representative of the Omi Brotherhood, an independent Christian community started some three decades earlier as the Omi Mission, when a young American teacher had come to teach at a rural commercial school as part of the Student Volunteer Movement and influenced a number of students, including Yoshida, toward declarations of Christian faith and life. In stilted formal language, he read aloud the ritual prayer, or norito: “Prosper and favor the reign of the Emperor who rules over the Great Eight Islands as Manifest Kami and make it a majestic reign and a prosperous reign. Grant that the august person of the Emperor be kept in ever increasing health and grace.” He declared that the “spiritual, educational, and social work” of the Omi Brotherhood, the name the organization had adopted three years earlier to shed the foreign overtones of “mission,” reverberated with the awakening “great Japanese spirit” and sought to bring peace to the people of Omi and to the countries of the world as they were incorporated into the Great Japanese Empire, the land of Japan’s deities or kami no kuni, a term that, due to nineteenthcentury translators and the language’s vagueness regarding pluralization also referred to the Kingdom of God. Another member of the group then offered a ritual song: “At the sacred barrier of Ise, everlasting prosperity / Oh shrine that is the foundation of the Imperial Line / Inner Shrine of the Fifty Bells, Shrine of a Thousand Ages, of Eternity / Here we ever come to worship, purifying ourselves.” Finally, together they performed the ritual two bows, two claps, and two bows, and then went home to Shiga prefecture.1 The episode did not pass unnoticed. Yoshida’s guide that day, the pas- [54.92.135.47] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:51 GMT) 226 chapter 9 tor-turned-novelist Okino Iwasaburō was exuberant over this “unforgettable ” act because, he said, Yoshida had gone to the shrine as a Christian, in “Christian attire” (his silk hat and formal morning suit, apparently), and announced himself to the kami (the deities revered at shrines—in this case, Amaterasu, the sun kami and imperial ancestress) as a Christian.(Yoshida had not, in fact, mentioned Christianity, but he had given both his own name and that of the Omi Brotherhood.) There was, declared Okino, no precedent of a Buddhist priest going in priestly garb to this “great shrine that surpasses shrine rankings, a shrine where the entire nation of Japan...