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The Whitings of Uchimuba Kamzo with Special THE WHITINGS OF UCHIMUBA KAMZO WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO HIS CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM Thesis presented for degree of Master of Tl^csic-rJH at London University. SOAS May 1966. Leoe P. Hugh m.s.Oe ProQuest Number: 10731254 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10731254 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 ABSTRACT Uchimura Kanzo (1861-1930), a Japanese Christian writer, trained in Eastern traditions and Western culture, worked as a social critic and Christian evangelist and produced more than twenty volumes of books and articles. (Chapter I - Biography). His love for Christ, based on a deep personal faith in God and the soul, did not waver despite the atheism and materialism of a nation rich in tradition coming into contact with modern technology and new learning, (Chapter II - Christ - The Samuraifs Lord) and was clearly distinguished from identification with the West, so that his devotion to Christ developed along­ side his love for Japan. (Chapter III - Indigenisation). Uchimura^ love for Japan, rooted in tradition and fost­ ered by education, was a sensitive patriotism manifest in pride and grief (Chapter IV - Patriotism) but restrained by Christianity, so that it neither overwhelmed his love for God nor his concern for men of other nations (Chapter V - Religious Cosmopolitanism). These five chapters indicate the physical and mental stage upon which, in the next four chapters,the drama of Uchimura^ two­ fold love is enacted. Love for Jesus and love for Japan were theoretically compatible but in practice there was conflict. (Chapter VI - Psychological and Social Conflict). His way of harmonizing one with the other was to show love for his nation in attempting to make her great in herself by freeing her people from the trammels of Confucian conformity through the preaching of Christ-taught indiv­ idualism (Chapter VI - I for Japan), and to make her great in the comity of nations by advocating faithful fulfilment of her God-given mission in the world (Chapter VIII - Japan for the World). To limit the faith and love that he preached to accepted ecclesiastical organizations of the West he held to be against the best interests of the rest of the world and to confine them to a specific­ ally Japanese organization he considered to be untrue to Christ, so he taught No-Church (Chapter IX - The World for Christ). The synthesis of Christian faith and patriotic ideals which he endeavoured to achieve gives a relevance to his life and writings that extends wider than the country about which he wrote and the age in which he lived. (Chapter X - All for God). m m ' H |I " J ' * • Sf l i * •, ;•» ^ . < u ^ ' - ^ s & E a a l PREFACE Uchimura Kanzo has been called the most -significant •i modern Japanese, His writings, covering a period of forty* years (1890-1930), are of interest to the student of political, cultural and religious movements in Japan during the crucial years of her emergence as a modern 2 nation. Scholars call attention to the two great loves of Uchimura's life, love for Jesus and love for Japan, which, like intertwining threads, run through all his books and articles. This study attempts for the first time to trace more fully the conflict, reconcil­ iation and working together of patriotism and Christianity as revealed in Uchimura's writings. Paul Fujishima, one-time Mayor of Maruoka and later chairman of the Fukui Educational Committee, introduced the writer of this study to Uchimura's works during discussions of Japanese literature and history when the question of Japan's reaction to the propagation of foreign religions was considered. Tl See S.Ienaga in M. B. Jansen, Changing Japanese Attitudes Towards Modernization, (1965), p. 446. It is difficult to imagine a widespread acceptance of Ienaga*s opinion by non-Christian Japanese. 2. Xanaibara speaks of renewed interest as the 'Uchimura Kanzo boom*. T. Xanaibara, Together with Uchimura Kanzo, (1964), ii. Experienced missionaries are convinced that in Japan Christianity as an organized religion has failed. There are scarcely more than half a million converts in a population of close to one hundred million. The small membership of Christian churches, the slow rate of conver­ sion and the high proportion of those who give up the practice of the faith, become more significant when compared with the considerable efforts of men and money that have been expended by the churches in propagating Christianity during the last hundred years. At the same time Christian teachers believe that despite the failure of the churches, in a certain sense i Christianity can and has been able to succeed. The Japanese, who as a people are intelligent, highly literate and religious, are anxious to discover ideals that can inspire and guide them in their personal and social life, and so are willing and interested to hear Christian teaching when this is presented sympathetically and freed from those accidentals that needlessly Irritate. Moreover Japanese moral standards in both private and public life differ but little from those accepted as 1. The writer, after thirteen years of teaching Christianity to the Japanese, is able to concur in this belief. 7 * i normal amongst Christians, being based upon a recog­ nition of the Christian-taught dignity and rights of the individual. Finally the majority of Japanese who have neither the time nor the occasion to make a fuller study of their religious beliefs do in fact accept doctrines very similar to basic Christian teaching when these are presented as modified concepts of old estab­ lished religions or as novel ideas of the new religions. The patent failure of organized Christianity but hidden success of Christian ideals and spirit, summed up in a reply often given in answer to questions on the state of Christianity in Japan, fthe numbers are small but the influence is great,’ become intelligible through the life and writings of the Christian and patriot Uchimura. Uchimura’s Christian life and the success of his writings are proof that Christianity could be and had been accepted by intelligent and sincere Japanese. At the same time Uchimura’s writings give satisfying reasons for the stunted growth of Christian churches so evident in Japan. The Japanese, he showed, were perhaps willing to accept Christianity but they objected to the Importation of the unadapted Christian institutions of the West. U Reischauer says: ’What ethics the Japanese have is a composite of what has survived piecemeal from the past and elements of the Christian based ethics of the Occident with the latter somewhat in the preponderance’. The United States and Japan. (1965), p.310. 8. The interaction of his two great loves and the part failure, part success of Christianity are both clearly portrayed in Uchimura's writings* Yet this conflict of loyalties and portrayal of the Japanese Christian scene by no means exhaust the significance of his works, which lies also in the insight they contain about the meeting of two civilizations, pagan-Eastern and Christian-Western. This study of Uchimura's writings, made to highlight one noteworthy facet of the political, cultural and religious complex present in the intermingling of East and West, throws light on the phenomenon of the coming together of two civilizations, of which Uchimura's loves were an individual reflection and the problem of Christianity in the East a product* In the first chapter I have outlined how Uchimura became a Christian and remained faithful to his beliefs during fifty years of teaching, writing and lecturing. The next four chapters are an analysis of his Christ­ ianity and patriotism in which it is shown that in the years of strong and often confused thinking by contem­ porary intellectuals his Christianity did not destroy his patriotism nor did his love for his country go counter to his religious principles. The sixth chapter discusses the conflict of loyalties resulting not from any inability to harmonize theoretically one with the other but from the inevitable clash of the psychological complexes and social media through which these loyalties were expressed. The last four chapters, Including the conclusion, present a critical exposition of the four ideals expressed In Uchimura's epitaph, which, written by himself at the beginning of his Christian life, indicated the manner he wished to show his two-fold love, for Christ and for Japan. In a changing modern world patriotism in its various forms has not lost Its power to inspire nor has the missionary zeal of Christianity lost its keenness. It is difficult to find any modern writer who from his own deep personal experience can help towards a better understanding of the problem involved in the harmonizing of Christianity and patriotism than Uchimura Kanzo. And since this problem points to the wider one of harmonizing differing cultures and loyalties, for religion is love and patriotism, in a certain sense, can be a religion, the significance of Uchimura is by no means limited to the question of Christian missions and patriotic converts. It reaches out into the whole field of the exchange of those ideas that are capable of and meant to excite loyalties.
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