Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God by Emily Anderson (review)

Emily Anderson's Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God, though it highlights Japan in its title, sheds light on an understudied corner of Korea's modern religious history. The dramatic rise in the number of Christians on the peninsula over the course of the twentieth century has attracted much scholarly attention. Much of that attention has focused on the rise of Protestantism to prominence in South Korea's religious landscape, including studies of how Protestantism first took root on Korean soil. Most histories of the early decades of Protestant Christianity in Korea adopt one of two approaches. Some focus on Western missionaries: how they responded to Korean culture, how they introduced modern medicine and education to Korea, and how they managed to lay the foundations for a strong Protestant community in just a few short decades. Others focus on the first couple of generations of Korean Protestants: how they adapted this new religion from the West to fit Korean spiritual needs, how some of them struggled to become independent of perceived heavy-handed direction by Western missionaries, and how they defended their faith against the demands of Japan's colonial government. Anderson breaks out of these Korea-centric silos to provide a glimpse of a third feature of early Korean Protestant history that is usually overlooked. She examines the relationship between Korea and Korean Christians with Japanese Christians, both in Japan itself and on the Korean Peninsula.

Korea plays two roles in what is primarily a study of how Japanese Protestants related to the emergence of Japanese imperialism. She investigates differences within the Japanese Protestant community over whether it was God's will that Japan seize control of its neighbors, with Korea providing the hub of that debate. And she analyzes an attempt by Japanese Protestants to plant a Japanese Protestant denomination on Korean soil.

Two early Japanese converts to Protestantism, Ebina Danjō (1856–1937) and Kashiwagi Gien (1860–1938), are the main protagonists in the author's examination of how Japanese Protestants thought about empire-building. Ebina and Kashiwagi represent opposite poles of the Japanese Protestant response to Japan's seizure of Korea and other nearby territories. Ebina believed that God had chosen the Japanese people to civilize East Asia. To Ebina, "civilizing" meant converting East Asia to Christianity. Kashiwagi, on the other hand, believed that God wanted Japanese to leave their neighbors alone and instead focus on making Japan, especially rural Japan, a better place to live. This is more than just a dispute between two leading pastors of the same Japanese Protestant denomination (Nihon Kumiai Kirisuto Kyōkai—Congregational Church of Japan). It was a dispute about the proper relationship between church and state, and between Japan and Korea.

As Anderson explains in chapter five, "Making Koreans Japanese: A Gospel for Japan's New Colonial Subjects," Ebina was just one of many Japanese Christians who believed that God had given Japan control over Korea for a reason. They assumed that when God allowed Japan to become the first nation in Asia to modernize, He was signaling that the Japanese were His chosen people in East Asia and gave them the mission of bringing His word to their less civilized neighbors. In chapter two, Anderson reveals that many Japanese converts to Protestant Christianity, including Ebina, considered the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 to be a holy war, which, serving as a crucible in which Japanese discovered hidden strengths within themselves they had not previously known existed, would turn the Japanese into modern patriots as well as better Christians. They also welcomed victory over the Russians in this war, and the subsequent annexation of Korea in 1910, as providing a God-given opportunity for Japanese Christians to bring Koreans within the Japanese Protestant fold. These Japanese Protestant nationalists, drawing on the Christian message that all human beings are equally children of God, voiced strong support for the colonial policy of naisen-ittai, which they interpreted as...