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CHAPTER SEVEN Democracy and Imperialism The rapid rate of political and social change in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries greatly affected the educational and evangelistic work of British missionaries . Missionary attitudes to these changes are important to a full understanding of missionary reactions to Japanese development. While their views of political and social affairs were closely related to their hopes for Christianity, this was not the only factor which coloured their judgments. In their analysis of secular changes, missionaries showed the values and prejudices of their social backgrounds in Britain. Despite their long years of residence in Japan, they still saw events through British eyes. MISSIONARIES AND THE EARLY MEIJI STATE The modernization of Japan in the years after the Meiji Restoration was seen by missionaries as breaking down the traditional barriers to Christianity. However, Cyril Powles has noted a fundamental weakness in British Anglican understanding of Japan's modernization during the late nineteenth century; their failure to distinguish between modernization and Westernization. l Powles quoted Bishop Edward Bickersteth 's comment, made in 1886, shortly after he arrived in Japan, that "our civilization and customs with startling rapidity," had been adopted by Japan, which had already assimilated "very much of our most advanced learning and knowledge, and herself is being admitted to a recognized position among the nations of the world."2 His view reflected the success of the deliberate effort made by the Japanese government to convince Westerners that Japan was, indeed, becoming \Vesternized as part of its strategy to bring about treaty revision with the Great Powers. Treaty revision was one of the rare issues over which British missionaries broke ranks with their diplomatic counterparts. Archdeacon A. C. Shaw, who during the early 1870s had deliberately worked outside treaty port confines in Tokyo, wrote letters to editors and gave public addresses during the early 1890s in which he advocated treaty revision between Britain and Japan.3 For missionaries, unconcerned with problems of trade, treaty revision held out the possibility of greater access to the mass ofJapanese who lived outside of the treaty concessions. Shaw's Notes for Chapter 7 are on pp. 292-94. 185 186 THE CROSS AND THE RISING SUN close identification with the cause of treaty revision, as well as the first steps toward treaty revision taken by the British Government towards the cOlnmercial agreements of 1894, might be one of the reasons why the Nippon Seikokai continued to grow during the early 1890s, which was for most other Protestant missions a time of retarded growth. Despite this, it was unusual at this time for British missionaries to express openly their political opinions. It is clear that Anglican missionaries in Japan and their colleagues in the ECM in Korea held the theologically respectable view that political activism was not a necessary part of a missionary's work. As Cyril Powles noted about Imai Toshimichi , the leading Japanese clergyman within the SPG wing of the Nippon Seikokai, "as an Anglican, he did not feel obliged to take an active part in political agitation. His social responsibility as a priest lay in the peformance of his sacerdotal and educational duties."4 Certainly, later on, at the time of the March First Independence Movement in Korea ,vhich began in 1919, the ECM suffered because it made no public statement in support of Korean nationalists. Yet in late nineteenth-century Japan, this policy served the Anglicans well. Japan was, after all, changing in a direction that missionaries approved of. The Meiji Constitution of 1899 was welcomed by Edward Bickersteth and other British missionaries because it supposedly guaranteed liberty of religious worship.5 While optimism about the future of Christianity in Japan played a great part in missionary affirmation of the political direction of Japan following the promulgation of the Constitution, there was also a genuine admiration for leading members of the Meiji oligarchy. Rather surprisingly, given his private life, Ito Hirobumi was particularly admired. At the end of the SinoJapanese War, Lionel Cholmondeley stuck in his diary commemorative stamps of the victorious Japanese military commanders.6 The defeat of the Chinese was his victory as well as theirs. Cholmondeley had the opportunity to meet many of the leading figures in Japanese political life and was proud of the Japanese political elite because he believed that they were cut from the same cloth as his own uncles.7 Once the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the crowning achievement of the Japanese political elite in British...

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