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I. Christianity Versus Science a Conflict of Ideas in Meiji Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Robert S. Schwantes
Robert S. Schwantes
Affiliation:
Council on Foreign Relations
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Extract

The opening of Japanese ports to Western trade and thought at the end of the Tokugawa period necessarily involved a readjustment of the official policy toward Christianity. Since the early seventeenth century Christian beliefs and observances had been rigidly proscribed. Now the country was assailed by bands of missionaries, principally American Protestants, persistently evangelistic in purpose. Beyond that, the legal system, literature, and whole culture of the West were so permeated tjy religious elements that many thinking Japanese reluctantly concluded that it was impossible to become modern without becoming Christian. Escape from this dilemma was to be provided, by Western thought itself, through new materialistic philosophies based upon science, and through the historical relativism of the higher Biblical criticism. The battle between science and theology, evolution and revelation, then raging in England and America was fought again in the Japanese press and lecture hall. This controversy involved intimately only a small minority of the Japanese people, principally students and intellectuals, and was definitely secondary to the broader conflict between conservative nationalism and all foreign religion. It was, however, a significant aspect of Japan's response to the West, of her process of acculturation.

Type
Religion and Modernization in the Far East: A Symposium
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , February 1953 , pp. 123 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1953

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References

* The author received his doctorate from Harvard and is now making a study of cultural relations between the United States and Japan on a Carnegie Research Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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4 4 Letter from the Rev. J. T. Gulick, in Cary, 2:143; Proceedings of the General Conference of Protestant Missionaries in Japan, held in Tokyo, October 24–31. 1900 (Tokyo: Methodist Publishing House, 1901), 92–93.Google Scholar

5 Proceedings of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of Japan, held at Osaka, Japan, April, 1883 (Yokohama: R. Meiklejohn, 1883), 120Google Scholar; Tokio times. Mar. 31, 1877.

6 Wayman, Dorothy G., Edward Sylvester Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Ibid., 247–257; Morse, Edward S., Japan day by day: 1877, 1878–79. 1882–83 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 1:339–340, 2:394Google Scholar; Meiji bunka zenshu (Collection on Meiji culture) (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1928–1930), 24Google Scholar: Introduction—21–22, 323, 353–362; Yatsu Naohide “Tōkyō Teikoku Daigatcu Rigakubu dōbutsugalcu. kyōshitsu no rekishi,” (History of the Department of Zoology, College of Science, Tokyo Imperial University), Kagaku (Science), 8 (1938), 343–344.

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9 Tokio times, Feb. 1, 1879. Fenollosa's lectures were later published in Geijutsu sōshi (The arts).

10 The works of Robert C. Ingersoll (New York; C. P. Fartell, 1900), 6:27Google Scholar; the Japanese title was Yasokyō haigekiron (1882). Ingersoil's famous lecture on “The gods” was also well known in Japan.

11 JWM, Mar. 19, 1898; Chrysanthemum, 1 (Oct. 1881), 394–396, 404–406.

12 Cary, 2:156–158; Chrysanthemum, 1:392–394.

13 Tokio times, Apr. 27, 1878.

14 Ibid., Apr. 27, 1878, Mar. 20, 1880; JWM, Apr. 9, 1898; Wayman, 248. In 1882 a rebuttal by Dr. Faulds entitled Hensenron was published in tract form by the American Board mission.

15 Chiyomatsu, Ishikawa, “Professor Edward Sylvester Morse,” Omori kaizuka kembi kinen bunshŭ (Essays commemorating the erection of a monument at Omori shell-mound) (Tokyo: Shizen Gakkai, 1929), 1.Google Scholar

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18 DeForest, Charlotte B., The evolution of a missionary: a biography of John Hyde DeForest, for thirty-seven years missionary of the American Board in Japan (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914), 76–77.Google Scholar

19 “Hiyane, 155–156; Cary, 2:174, 203; JWM. Apr. 9, 1898.

20 Zoku Fukuzawa zenshŭ (Collected works of Fukuzawa, second series) (Tokyo, 1933), 1:742–749.Google Scholar

21 JWM, Mar. 3, 1888.

22 MacCauley, Clay, Memories and memorials: gatherings from an eventful life (Tokyo: Fukuin Printing Co., 1914), 504–505Google Scholar; “Unitarianism in Japan; views of Mr. Kentaro Kaneko, Secretary of the Privy Council,” Christian register, 68 (Sept. 5, 1889), 570–571. Kaneko distributed among his friends books by James Freeman Clarke and John Fiske.

23 MacCauley, Memories and memorials. 455; Christian register. 67 (1888), 41, 325, 405–406; Mikiald, Ishikawa, Fukuzawa Yukichi den (Biography of Fukuzawa Yukichi) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932), 4:62.Google Scholar

24 JWM, Apr. 6, 1889.

25 Knapp, Arthur M., “The Japanese mission,” Christian register 68 (1889), 361–362Google Scholar; “Unicarianism in Japan; views of Mr. Kentato Kaneko,” ibid., 569–571.

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29 JWM, Oct. 24, 31, 1891; The Unitarian (Chicago), 5 (May 1890), 239. MacCauley also made a detailed reply to Bishop Bickersteth on historical and theological grounds in a pamphlet entitled Christianity in history: a reply (Tokyo, 1891).Google Scholar

30 JWM. June 27, July 11, 18, 25, 1891.

31 A group of young men dramatically converted to Christianity by Cape L. L. Janes, an American who taught science at Kumamoto during the early seventies. After education at the Dōshisha the “Band” became leaders in the native churches.

32 Epitome of Yokoi's article in JWM, July 19, 1890, and in L. Busse, “Excursions through the Japanese ethical literature of the present time,” Japan evangelist, 2 (Dec. 1894), 96; Uchimura Kanzō zenshŭ, 16:125–126. Another landmark in the “New Theology” was Jiyŭ sbingaku (1892), a translation by Kanamori Tsŭrin of Otto Pfleiderer's Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher grundlage.

33 JWM, Sept. 8, 1900.

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37 The Christian movement in Japan, 1913, 640. About 65,000 of die 160,000 were Roman Catholics. The Catholic Church concentrated upon work among die lower and middle classes, particularly in Kyushu, and made no great impact upon the intellectual life of die time.

38 MSS. Unitarian Historical Library, Boston: Account of mission dictated by Clay MacCauley in 1919–1920; John B. W. Day, The Unitarian mission in Japan, 1890–1920; Louis C. Cornish to Clay MacCauley, May 6, 1922. MacCauley's address on The Unitarian Mission to Japan (Tokyo, 1909)Google Scholar attempted to recall the church to its original religious purpose.