Christianity's most serious crisis since Commodore Perry in 1853 opened Japan to missionaries and traders this week faced the Church in Japan—a crisis so serious that U. S. missionaries may soon be driven from Japan, and Japanese churches slump for want of foreign funds. The Church found itself at odds with Caesar. Like many an unmilitant democracy, Japanese Christians of late years had followed the easy course of appeasement, tried at once to conciliate Japan's rulers and still preserve the spiritual and temporal gains they had made in three generations of missionary work. Japan's New Order, like many another autocracy, found its appetite merely whetted by concession, and asked for more.
Far-reaching were last week's demands: 1) withdrawal of all foreign financial support and missionaries from Japan; 2) replacement of all foreign missionary executives by Japanese Christians (whose ears the Government can pin back without causing an international rumpus); 3) an amalgamation of all the Protestant sects in Japan. Significant was the proposed title for this new national body: the Genuine Japan Christian Church. Equally significant was the date which the Government set for the union: Oct. 17, the day on which Emperor Hirohito, himself considered a god by his subjects, dispatches a messenger to Ise to offer prayers at the shrine of his ancestress, Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess and founder of the Japanese Empire.
U. S. missionaries flocked to Japan almost as fast as U. S. businessmen after Commodore Perry opened the islands in 1853. Devout Americans have since sent more than $100,000,000 for missions to Japan, sent some $2,500,000 to Japan and
Korea in 1939. The Japanese Constitution guarantees religious freedom, but the Diet last year passed a Religious Bodies Law.
This placed Japan's 350,000 Christians on an equal footing with its 41,000,000 Buddhists and 16,000,000 Shintoists, put all religions under the supervision of the Education Department, provided for the suppression of any sect which deviated from Japanese national policy. The Government, full of bland promises as usual, assured anxious Christians that no "Japanifying" of Christianity was intended. But Tokyo's July spy sensation, when seven Japanese Salvation Army chiefs were among those arrested, gave the Government an excuse to change its mind, declare that Christian activities, like every other phase of Japanese life, "must conform to the new national structure" in order to contribute to Japan's "cooperative Asia." Shrine v. Cross. No U. S. churchman objects to the principle that Japanese converts should control Japanese Christianity.
Local authority—and local self-support—is the aim of all sound missionary endeavor. At the International Missionary Council at Madras in 1938, churchmen of all nations hailed the coming-of-age of native Christian leadership in Asia. But once a missionary district becomes independent, it is exposed to enemies from without and within. In Japan that independence came gradually after World War I, was paralleled by a growing hostility to Christianity in Japanese officialdom. Since churchmen and mission boards outside Japan made no conspicuous effort to stiffen Japanese Christians' backbone, concessions to nationalism became inevitable.