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Introduction This book investigates the life, work, and attitudes of British Protestant men and women missionaries in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan from 1865 until the end of the Pacific War. It studies the part played by British Protestants as both Christian missionaries and informal agents of their own country and civilization. Spanning 80 years, it examines the adjustments and responses of British missionaries to the changing conditions in the three regions which came to form the major constituents of the pre-1945 Japanese Empire.! This study contends that an understanding of the British missionary movement in the East is of considerable importance, not only in Anglo-Japanese relations, but also for our understanding of Korea's and Taiwan's colonial experiences. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were among the most distant of all places of missionary service for the British, but most missionaries found them pleasant and attractive places in which to work. Many of those in Japan developed strong feelings of affection and loyalty toward "the Great Britain of the East";2 a similar attitude toward Korea and Taiwan developed in the missionaries who served there. Many British missionaries felt that there was a special affinity between Britons and Japanese. Japan, after all, was Kunshi no koku, a country of gentlemen, and therefore attractive to gentlemanly British missionaries .3 Yet that Japan, after the turn of the twentieth century, under the pressures of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization , was all too quickly disappearing for those same missionaries. Likewise, in colonial Korea British missionaries criticized the modernizing politices of the Japanese Government-General in Seoul for destroying those traditional Korean values which they admired. Mter World War I, there was a tendency among many missionaries in both Japan and Korea to look back to the pre-1914 era as an almost golden age before modernization had permanently changed society and individuals for the worse. Yet distance and the exclusionary policies of Tokugawa Japan and Yi Korea4 meant that those two countries had been among the last places in the world to be opened to British missionary endeavour. The overseas missionary movement from Britain was part of the general extension of Western influence in the world beyond the confines of formal empires.5 In his short history of British imperialism, Bernard Porter has noted that "the British churches exploded into missionary activity abroad at about the same time as British industry exploded into the world market: on the same crest of the same wave of national Notes for the Introduction are on pp. 266-68. 1 2 THE CROSS AND THE RISING SUN dynamism and self-confident expansionism which came with the industrial revolution and the triumph of 'progress'."6 Although in some parts of the world, e.g., the Central Africa of Livingstone's day, missionary activity was in the vanguard of British commercial, military, and political interests,7 as Andrew Porter has noted, "missionary activity did not neatly parallel Britain's expansion as a commercial and industrial society."8 Certainly as far as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were concerned the cross followed the flag. Missionaries arrived in the wake of British merchants and diplomats .9 Even though they arrived last, they had been expected, as the provisions of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1858 concerning religious freedom would not have been included unless it was expected that missionaries would soon come. Gordon Martel has noted that "the manner in which the Great [imperial] Powers conduct themselves must be consistent with their claims to greatness."IO That manner included bringing the benefits of Christianity and commerce along with diplomatic recognition. Indeed, missionaries sometimes came with the Royal Navy, the support of whose officers was crucial to the founding of the English Church Mission in Korea in 1889. Forty-six years earlier, in the mid-1840s, Royal Navy personnel had also helped establish the shortlived Loochoo Naval Mission in the Ryukyu Islands, which marked the beginning of British missionary interest beyond the coast of China.I I Despite this early initiative, the first permanent offshore mission \\Tas not founded until 1865, when the English Presbyterians extended their work from Amoy and Swatow across the Taiwan Straits to southern Taiwan. Missions in Japan came even later. Not until 1869, some 10 years after American Protestant missionaries had begun work there, did the first British missionary take up permanent residence in Japan. Britain took second place to the United States in the opening ofJapan, and was willing to let the United States take the lead...

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