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Conclusion This book has charted, over a period of 80 years, the course of the British missionary movement in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Against a background of changing political, economic, military, and religious fortunes, British missionaries practised Anglo-Japanese relations at the personal level. Although the legacy of such an approach cannot be measured in material terms, it produced 'profound and lasting results. As this study has shown, the voluntary missionary movement made up of men and women from a variety of social and educational backgrounds was of considerable importance, not only in Anglo-Japanese relations, but also for our understanding of Korea's and Taiwan's colonial experiences. Missionaries are sometimes seen in simplistic terms as witnesses to the gospel or as agents of imperialism. However, this investigation of British missionaries has revealed that they represented something more complex. British Protestants were not only Christian missionaries but also informal agents of their own country and civilization. However , they were not merely representatives of Western culture impacting upon the societies of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. What took place between the missionaries and the Japanese, Koreans or Taiwanese was a complex process of cultural interaction in which reciprocal influences were important in shaping the attitudes and perceptions of both groups. What missionaries were and what they carried with them often produced results of which missionaries themselves were unconscious. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the actions or ideas of one side or across the cultural divide abound. Missionaries felt called to "preach the gospel," and all that they did stemmed from that basic premise. They saw evangelism as the major task, with education as an adjunct. When, as in Japan, evangelism did not fare as well as expected and educational work faced severe competition from government and private schools, the social gospel came to the rescue by providing an humanitarian motive for social work. Nevertheless, it has to be stressed that the most enduring legacies from British missionary contact with Japan were those that normally posed neither a direct intellectual challenge to the indigenous culture nor were subject to the whims of fashion to the same degree as foreign intellectual ideas. Because it challenged and demanded change in traditional cultural norms, it was difficult for Christianity to overcome cultural barriers. From the start, the resistance of traditional intellectual forces and the new nationalism that emerged under the pressures of modernization (pressures that differed in each of the three areas) gave the mis257 258 THE CROSS AND THE RISING SUN sionary movement little chance of ever achieving its goal of Christianizing Japan, Korea or Taiwan. The high cultural level and high literacy rates of Japan made the Japanese intellectual tradition particularly sophisticated and resistant to foreign religions. Moreover, the modernization ofJapan did not create increased opportunities for Christianity because Japan's very success in modernizing without Christianity led to the formation of new, unique, and apparently insurmountable barriers . Modernization brought with it a growing secularization and a weakening of the hold of traditional religions in Japan. However, new religions did emerge, the most significant being the Emperor cult, which developed within the context of a revived form of State Shinto and was a specific attempt to associate modernization with national cultural symbols. It also catered to the psychological needs ofJapan which could be satisfied in quasi-religious worship and an outlet for nationalistic and patriotic emotions. Yet, as the persecution of the Omotokyo reveals, some new religions did not meet the approval of the government authorities, who sought to use religious beliefs solely to improve "public morality." In addition to new religions, Marxism also came to pose difficulties for Christianity because of socialism's appeal to young intellectuals who otherwise might have been attracted to Christianity. Although Marxism met with greater government opposition than Christianity, it was a new philosophy that appeared to offer practical solutions to the problems of Japanese society. In contrast, by the early twentieth century, Christianity was already an old, familiar idea and its applications for social problems were extremely limited. In Korea as in Japan the cultural tradition also proved to be a barrier to Christianity. However, there were elements in Korean shamanism which may have assisted the understanding of Christian concepts. Moreover, Buddhism had no great influence under the Yi dynasty, and Korea's general educational and literacy levels were lower than those of Japan, which made it more receptive to missionary work. Likewise, by 1895 Japan, not the West, constituted the most powerful cultural threat to Korean...

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