In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God by Emily Anderson
  • Jon Davidann (bio)

Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God. By Emily Anderson. Bloomsbury, London, 2014. xiv, 314 pages. $112.00, cloth; $39.95, paper; $31.99, E-book.

John K. Fairbank’s address to the American Historical Association in 1969 encouraged more research on missionaries and religion, but it wasn’t to be. For decades after the 1960s, the field of religious studies lay fallow, with only an occasional book or article bursting through the topsoil. A more radicalized historical profession had more pressing concerns. Labor and social history began to dominate, and religion, including American missionaries, seemed to be connected to The Man, as it were. They were stormtroopers for Western imperialism and they espoused conventional and even nationalist creeds. In a rapidly secularizing age, religion seemed not to matter.

Some scholars who had interests in religion abandoned the field because of this peripheral status. I wrote my first book on Japanese Christians and YMCA missionaries but left the field thereafter for the same reason. It was going nowhere. And then something strange happened. I had left Christians and missionaries behind but they had not left me. No matter how hard I tried, I kept returning to them in my writing. Why? As long as my interests were international in scope and involved human interactions, Christians and missionaries were very important historical actors. As I studied cultural diplomacy, then global encounters, and now the rise of modernity, religious people moved back from the periphery to the center of my vision, not because of their religion, but because of where their religion took them on the globe and how it made them think about the world. I also realized religious people were activists and prolific writers, two crucial components in creating their place in history. In recent years, I have reviewed several manuscripts and books focusing on Japanese Christians, American missionaries, or a combination of them. Is this finally a reckoning of John Fairbank’s call? Almost certainly not. Religion is not taking center stage. But with [End Page 417] the internationalization of U.S. history and the emergence of global and transnational history as viable subfields, religious people should once again become important historical subjects for study. Emily Anderson’s Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan recognizes their significance, and she does religion justice by placing it within Japan’s growing empire, a very important but little studied subject of religion and imperialism.

Emily Anderson’s work starts with ground that has been trod before. Chapter 1 studies accusations against Japanese Christians in the 1890s that they were disloyal to Japan because they could not possibly consider the emperor a god when Christianity prescribed only one god, its own. Inoue Tetsujirō, the great Japanese ideologist who helped to build modern Japanese nationalism, played the role of inquisitor. Anderson smartly includes this material because questions of disloyalty and lèse-majesté dog Japanese Christians thereafter, and their very strong, sustained rebuttal reveals their interest in defining themselves within the Japanese national narrative. My own work has shown Japanese Christians attempting to build an argument that a Japanized and modern and progressive Christianity could replace the old and decrepit native religions Shintō and Buddhism and become the moral center of the nation. Other work has shown Japanese Christians grasping to stay at the center of debates precisely because their choice of a foreign religion could leave them sidelined in the building of modern Japan.1 Even though Japanese Christians were unable to make Christianity the moral focus of Japan (less than 1 per cent of Japanese converted to Christianity), they used this argument to continue to carve a place for themselves in Japan’s moral universe and in its empire.

But Japanese Christians fought an uphill battle to legitimate their religion. In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War and a peace settlement that was considered meager for all of the sacrifices of the Japanese people, anti-treaty rioting broke out in the Hibiya district of Tokyo. In addition, Christian churches were targeted and 12 were destroyed. Anderson’s chapter 2 on Japanese Christian...

pdf