Japanese Saints: Mormons in the Land of the Rising Sun (review)

This is a unique book that will help to fill a scholarly void. Although The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormon Church has done missionary work among the Japanese for a century, this is the first scholarly book in English on the subject. There is a sizeable body of other academic literature on this topic, including theses, articles and edited collections, all duly cited by the present author, but his is the first monograph, and it is issued by a decent press known for many other scholarly works.

The book has nine chapters, an Appendix on data and research methods, a thorough bibliography and a brief index. After a short introductory chapter explaining the need for such a book, the next two chapters go to some length in creating a historical and then a theoretical context for understanding the Mormon experience in Japan. The social-psychological literature on the creation, maintenance and change of identity provides the theoretical framework for the book. Chapters 4 through 7 apply that framework to a discussion of the entire process by which the Japanese converts acquire, maintain and (in many cases) relinquish their Mormon identity. The constant tension between the Mormon and the traditional Japanese identity is a sub-theme of the book. Chapter 8 shows us how these processes are perceived by the missionaries, both American and Japanese, who do the "identity work" of proselytizing. Chapter 9 summarizes the work and then considers, among other things, the prospects for a "Japanized" Mormon identity and understanding of the religion.

I had been asked to review a draft of this manuscript in 2004, so naturally I was curious to see if my comments and suggestions then had made much difference. Apparently they had not. The published version is virtually identical to the earlier one (except for the short introductory and concluding chapters). Even the few misspellings of Japanese words that I warned about have been retained! Authors are entitled to ignore their critics, of course, and I will concede that my original criticisms seemed less serious to me as I saw how well the book turned out in spite of them. Yet I continue to believe that there was too much space spent on general history in Chapter 2, and that the review in Chapter 3 of identity theory was longer and more complicated than necessary.

In some ways, the book offers us both more and less than at first meets the eye – less, because the pool of informants from which the interviews come is both limited and selective, so that generalizing to the Mormon population of Japan is risky. On the other hand, the reader not well informed about religion in Japan will learn a lot from the author's review of the history of Japan and of Christianity there, and not just about Mormonism in Japan. Furthermore, the reader will learn much about conversion, retention, defection and identity struggles as generic processes in the exporting of any religion throughout the world. Indeed, the generic nature of these processes was not acknowledged consistently enough in this book, sometimes leaving the erroneous impression that they were unique to Mormonism in Japan.

Critics can point to two other weaknesses in this otherwise solid accomplishment: (1. Interview data came only from 22 active members of a Latter-day Saint congregation of about 120 in northern Japan, plus some 25 missionaries. As the Appendix makes clear, these interview subjects were not haphazardly selected, but neither could they be considered a systematic sample. (2. The excerpts from the interview data, and the conclusions drawn from them at the end of each chapter, tend to highlight the successful survivors of the struggle to reconcile the Japanese and the Mormon identities. Only rarely (pp.106-09, 191-93) does the author acknowledge the casualties in this struggle, which are obviously numerous with a retention rate of 25 percent or less. To be sure, defection is a painful topic...