Foreign News: Convert?

Emperor Hirohito, the living god and archpriest of Shinto, will soon embrace Christianity. This startling prediction was made last week by staid Professor Shigeru Nambara, president of Tokyo’s Imperial University. Ever since their defeat, the Emperor and all his imperial household have been seriously studying Christian theology.

There are now, after a century of intense missionary effort, 350,000 Christians in Japan. There were 400,000 at the end of the 16th Century, when Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries were active in the islands. Before a savage persecution almost exterminated them, the great center of Japan’s Christians was Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb fell.