SOAS Research Online

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 Samurai's Lord) and was clearly distinguished from identification with the West, so that his devotion to Christ developed alongside his love for Japan. (Chapter III - Indigenisation). Uchimura's love for Japan, rooted in tradition and fostered 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's 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 individualism (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 specifically 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).