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CHAPTER FIVE Christianization in Japan The fifty years from 1881 mark a long period of tranquillity before the crises of the 1930s. An epoch ofinstitution building, these years would prove to be the golden age ofthe missionary movement. It was during this period that the flood-tide of the voluntary endeavour which began in the late nineteenth century reached its crest, at about the time of the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, and then gradually began to recede. The First World War accelerated the decline, for during these four years the missionary movement in the Japanese Empire was isolated from the dramatic changes in Western society produced by the war. The Canadian Methodist pioneers could only guess at the challenges of the future. Cochran, McDonald, and Eby found themselves back in Tokyo in 1881, and it was clear to them that an anti-Western and anti-Christian mood was running high inJapan. There were a number of causes for this: Japanese irritation at their failure to obtain treaty revision with Great Britain during the late 1870s, and reaction against the flood of Western ideas entering Japan, especially scientific scepticism . In their efforts to develop Japanese theories of civilizations, Japanese intellectuals were becoming more selective of the ideas they accepted from the West. For the moment, this worked against Christianity . There were differing opinions about how the Canadians should be dealing with this unwelcome change in Japanese society. Cochran and McDonald, with the backing of Alexander Sutherland, the Missionary Society Secretary in Toronto, advocated caution. Not so Charles Eby, the most evangelistic of them all, who looked forward to meeting the anti-Christian challenges head on. By the mid-1880s, throwing all caution to the winds, Eby was calling for an unbridled and massive evangelistic assault on Japan. While the student volunteer movement Notes for Chapter Five are found on pp. 234-35. 87 88 THE CROSS AND THE RISING SUN was getting underway in Canada in the mid-1880s, Eby was calling for volunteers to come out to Japan. Although ten years later Alexander Sutherland's active dislike for Eby and Eby's barely controllable enthusiasms led to his forced retirement from the mission field, in the 1880s Eby was the most dynamic Canadian missionary inJapan and, in a real sense, the decade belonged to him. As a missionary on an evangelistic rampage, Eby had a profound impact on the future of the Canadian Methodist mission. His excesses played into the hands of Sutherland and McDonald and their successors, who espoused policies of extreme caution. Such caution came to characterize Canadian Methodist missionary endeavour in Japan, almost unbrokenly in the years after the mid-1890s. In a positive sense, Eby did capture, however fleetingly, the optimistic spirit that pervaded the Japanese Christian movement as a result ofthe May 1883 evangelistic meetings held in Ueno Park in Tokyo.1 As well, he was responsible for bringing out to Japan many of the student volunteers, the successors of the old guard whose caution he disparaged. EBY AND IMMEDIATE CHRISTIANIZATION On his return to Tokyo from Kofu in 1881, it was the challenge of scientific scepticism that brought out the combativeness in Eby's volatile nature. Darwinian ideas had been known inJapan for some time. Hiraiwa Yoshiyasu admitted that he had read Darwin as a student at the Kaisei Gakko.2 During the early 1870s, the conflict between evolutionary ideas and Christianity seemed to pose no difficulties to teachers of science like E. W. Clark and W. E. Griffis. Not all Western teachers in Japan were Christians, however, and the popularity of Darwinian ideas began in October 1877 with three lectures given by Edward S. Morse before large audiences at Tokyo Imperial University. "It was delightful ," Morse later recorded, "to explain Darwinian theory without runningup against theological prejudice as I often did at home."3Japanese enthusiasm for Darwin stemmed partly from the fact that his views provided them with Western ideas they could use to discredit Christianity . In 1877, Tom Paine's arguments had been similarly employed by a Japanese graduate of Cornel1.4 Because they gave hope that Japan's goals could be achieved, evolutionary ideas especially appealed toJapanese intellectuals. Christianity became the immediate target for Japanese intellectuals, for it was now seen as a manifestation offoreign interference which was hindering the progress toward fulfilling national goals. Among those who showed particular interest in evolutionary ideas were the students at Fukuzawa Yukichi's Keio Gijuku. Both Morse and Ernest P...

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