Japan's Modern Prophet: Uchimura Kanzō, 1861–1930 (review)

Uchimura Kanzō looms larger than life in many historical accounts—in part because of the power of his thought, but in equal part because we know so little about him. As this biography by a lifelong student of Japanese Christianity shows, the two or three episodes that have defined Uchimura for most historians were neither as clearcut in meaning nor as representative of Uchimura's total life as they usually are taken to be. The Meiji Christian pioneer, in this telling, is brilliant yet often prejudiced and banal, courageous but self-serving, magnanimous yet capable of great cruelty toward both opponents and followers. Having read this work, I admire Uchimura less, but I have new understandings of the passions and perplexities that propelled Meiji thought.

The sources for studying Uchimura are voluminous—thousands of essays, books, and journals collected in several Complete Works, endless secondary analyses, numerous recollections by Uchimura's contemporaries—and Howes has used them extensively. One wishes he had spent more time with secondary accounts that have appeared in the twenty-five years since the Modern Prophet manuscript first was completed, so that we might have a picture of where Uchimura stands in today's interpretive context, but the rendition here is complex, honest, and provocative, rooted in impressive reading and careful thought. It tells us much about the personality clashes and intellectual disputes that invigorated Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The biographical contours of the Christian leader's life range from the ordinary to the amazing. After graduating in 1881 as valedictorian from William S. Clark's Sapporo Agricultural College, Uchimura went through a wilderness time of deep depression as he sought a career and failed to save a disastrous marriage. Then, following four years of study in the United States (1884-1888), he took up teaching, provoking a nationwide controversy at the First Higher School in 1891 when he "hesitated and bobbed his head slightly" (p. 74) rather than bowing before a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education. That episode fixed his image as a man of principle, even though his action was more halting than forceful; it also forced his resignation from the school and led to half a decade of frenetic writing that made him a celebrity. A second dramatic episode occurred in 1903, when he and two socialist colleagues resigned from the newspaper Yorozu chōhō rather than support the editor's advocacy of war with Russia. Uchimura then took a ninety-degree career turn, forsaking secular life in order to spend his remaining years preaching, nurturing disciples, and editing the journal Seisho no kenkyū (Biblical Studies). He took to public evangelization after 1917, attracting hundreds, sometimes even thousands, to his lectures on the second coming of Christ, but his base remained private—and individual. He rejected affiliation with other Christian groups and remained aloof from political life. Improvement of society, he maintained, depended on individual righteousness, not on political policies: "A state or society without a pure religion at its base might just as well not exist" (p. 160).

Uchimura's historical reputation as a man of influence rests largely on his misnamed "refusal" to bow in 1891 and his writings on pacifism and national life at Yorozu chōhō. As Howes shows, however, he continued to exert a strong hold on the public mind even during his postpublic years, partly because of the strength of his prose and partly because his friends and deshi (disciples) included many of Japan's most influential politicians, artists, and editors. That is why Howes's narrative often tells us as much about the era as it does about Uchimura.

Howes's explication of Uchimura's thought is helpful, since the Bible scholar himself never attempted to systematize his own ideas. Howes shows how he excelled in exposition rather than exegesis, valued experiential reading of scriptures over concern about the Bible's factual veracity, thought traditional Japanese...