Christian Churches in the Postwar Period

CHRISTIAN CHURCHES IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD Michael John SHERRILL Introduction Since 1945 Christian Churches have been operating in a context that is strik ingly different from any previous period in Japan's religious history. The surrender of the Japanese military and the Emperor's disavowal of his divine status constituted a rather shocking ideological collapse. This cleared the way for a wider range of beliefs and practices under the new postwar consti tution that declared complete religious freedom. At the end of World War II the shock of defeat and anxiety over the arrival of occupation forces perme ated Japanese society. In psychological, social, religious, and economic terms the nation as a whole had to start over. The general population was in desperate need of food, shelter, and medical care. The Occupation govern ment addressed many of these needs, but the church was deeply involved as well. The North American Interboard Committee for Christian Work in Japan (IBC) and the Kyodan Council of Cooperation (COC) worked cooper atively at rebuilding churches and distributing aid. This ecumenical cooperation was instrumental to the survival of the Nihon Kirisuto Kyodan (United Church of Christ in Japan) in the early postwar period. The repeal of the Religious Bodies Law, which had been used by the gov ernment in the formation of the Kyodan, left many members of this largest Protestant denomination with a serious identity crisis (something not experi enced by the Catholics or Orthodox). 1 Many member churches left the Protestant union to re-establish their former denominations, such as the Anglican Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church, and various Baptist, Evangelical and Holiness churches. In the case of the Presbyterians, churches of the southern Presbyterian tradition left the Kyodan and formed the Reformed Church in Japan, while a number of other churches with a Reformed-Presbyterian background separated and reorganized as the Japan Church of Christ. This represented a drastic redistribution of the Protestant 164 MICHAEL JOHN SHERRILL Christians in Japan. While almost all Protestant Christians were members of the Kyodan during the war, by 1947 only 67 percent of Protestants remained (that is, 133,057 of the 199,462 Protestants in Japan).2 Although over half of the Protestant churches still belonged to the Kyodan, it still faced the formidable challenge of defining a new identity and purpose. Missionaries had been cautious not to influence the decisions of churches. However, Muto Tomio once commented that "the preservation of the Kyodan's unity in the postwar period was made possible in part by the sup port of the mission boards and their missionaries" (Phillips 1981, 15). Once these decisions had been made, most missionaries who returned to Japan after the war resumed their relationships with the churches they had worked with before-regardless of whether they remained inside or outside the Kyodan. The reconstitution of the National Christian Council in Japan (NCCJ) in 1948 was also instrumental in facilitating a relationship with foreign mission agencies. It also provided an organizational structure through which the Kyodan could relate to those churches that had withdrawn from the union and re-established separate denominational identities. The NCCJ came to repre sent the "mainline" churches, such as the Kyodan, the Anglican Episcopal Church in Japan, the Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Japan Baptist Convention (Drummond 1971, 281 ). This fact along with the NCCJ ties to the World Council of Churches (WCC) put the NCCJ out of favor with the more conservative Protestant groups (Phillips 1981, 183). It is this back ground that explains why the missionaries with a prewar history formed the Fellowship of Christian Missionaries (FCM), while the postwar conservative missionaries-who soon outnumbered the "mainline" missionaries-formed Japan Evangelical Missionary Association (JEMA). 3 Also, the growth of the new "evangelical" churches quickly outpaced the "mainline" churches. From 1949 to 1953, for example, membership in the so-called "mainline" churches increased by about a 6.5 percent, while the membership in new evangelical churches increased by 92 .1. 4 Substantial cooperation between missionaries and church leaders fostered the recovery of the Japanese church. At the same time, their combined relief work encouraged many non-Christian Japanese to regard Christianity as a positive, pacifist, and liberal influence in the nation. As the church sought to address physical needs, many Japanese discovered spiritual fulfillment in the Christian community. The early postwar years-until the end of the Occupation-is often recognized as a Christian "boom" period. By 1948 the Roman Catholic membership was back to its 1941 figure of about 121,000, (in spite of their loss of 10,000 members as victims of the war) and by 1951 .

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