Category Archives: Japan

In the early years following the Pacific War … missionaries worked with confidence and optimism among a people bewildered and depressed. By 1970, the situation had reversed. The Japanese were confident and optimistic, and many missionaries were bewildered and depressed. The Protestant missionary force in Japan was declining sharply. Southern Baptists, barely holding their own, were not immune to stress and uncertainty. Upheavals in the Convention were unsettling, and the 1970 world Baptist congress, like the 1963 New Life Movement, was followed by a spiritual and psychic let-down.

In 1971 a charismatic evangelist from Canada, Les Pritchard, conducted a timely series of renewal conferences in Japan that attracted large numbers of missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant. Participants were led to pray for “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” and many spoke in tongues for the first time. About 12 Southern Baptists were caught up in the movement, somewhat as Edwin Dozier and Max Garrott had been caught up in the Oxford Group Movement that swept Japan in the 1930s. The new Southern Baptist charismatics, claiming that their deepest personal needs had been met, brought their spiritual exuberance to the July 1972 Mission meeting, only to be confronted by others who regarded glossolalia as weird and divisive if not heretical. Providentially, it seems, Bob Culpepper had been chosen to lead the customary time of prayer and sharing. Deeply interested in Pritchard’s ministry, Culpepper had attended charismatic prayer meetings in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Fukuoka, and he had begun a serious theological study that was later developed into the book Evaluating the Charismatic Movement. Himself not a tongues-speaker, Culpepper was able to play a mediating and healing role as testimonies were given from “both sides of the charismatic divide.”

Pritchard visited Japan occasionally over the next several years, conducting well-attended seminars in the major cities. His 1973 seminar in Kyoto, held in an Anglican church, drew about 300 people. “What a wonderful time it was,” exclaimed a Southern Baptist couple, “filled with the anointing of His Holy Spirit and the praises of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The couple joined with pastors andmissionaries of many denominations to form an Agape Kai (“love meeting”) that met monthly for fellowship and prayer. This couple later resigned from the Mission, and some other members ceased speaking in tongues. Southern Baptist participation in Japan’s charismatic movement gradually faded away.

Another 1972-73 visitor to Japan, Everett Barnard, a psychologist from the Sunday School Board, helped missionaries understand and deal with their personal problems from a different perspective. Barnard gave personality profile tests to members of the Mission and met with them privately to interpret the results. He traveled to several areas to render this service and to give counsel when appropriate.

In 1978 missionaries saw themselves through the eyes of Janice and Mahan Siler, counsellors from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where Mahan was director of the School of Pastoral Care at Baptist Hospital. The Silers spent six weeks in Japan conducting family life enrichment conferences in several areas and one in conjunction with Mission meeting. After returning to America they wrote a follow-up report that identified with professional precision the strengths and weaknesses of the Mission.

The Silers were impressed with the importance of the Mission as a family–an extended, functioning family that satisfied some of the deepest needs of its members. But some members, they noted, especially among the field evangelists, were still searching for their place within the Mission and its work in general. Second- and third-term missionaries seemed to be doing less well than first-termers. The older ones, while subject to “the general mid-life kind of stress,” were far enough into the Japanese language and ministry to experience the severity of their limitations in an alien culture. The Silers described this state as “delayed” or “deferred” shock. Their observations were supported by Foreign Mission Board findings that missionaries were vulnerable to the “middle age syndrome,” a significant factor in resignations.

The Silers called for “more mutuality and partnership” within marriage. Wives especially, they pointed out, wanted more interpersonal fulfillment in their marriage relationship, which often felt more like co-existence. Since there was little opportunity for missionaries to deal with anger and frustration directly with the Japanese, resentment often built up within the marriage and the family, a resentment potentially explosive. Though not mentioned in the Silers’ report, it should be noted that six of the couples who had resigned from the Mission during the previous two decades had also divorced after their return to America. At least three more of the couples divorced later on.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 253-254

My parents had earlier resigned in 1961, my father citing both burnout and a feeling “that the work in Japan was too heavily subsidized and too tainted with Southern Baptist and American ways” (p. 218). We spent two and a half years in Winchester, Va., where I had the opportunity to get to know my mother’s side of the family. But my parents were already experiencing marital problems, and those problems got much worse after their five children had left home. They resigned as missionaries at the end of 1975 and divorced a few years later. The divorce came as a surprise to my three youngest siblings, but not to the two eldest, who thought it was long overdue.

I have a lot of smell memories. One of the most nostalgic for me is the scent of sycamores, a scent I associate both with Japan, where I spent most of my youth, and Virginia, where my parents grew up and I spent several years of my youth. My mother was also sweet on sycamores, as I recall.

When I catch the scent of sycamores, I invariably stop and sniff—like a dog at a curbside tree or fire hydrant—matching the odor against my smell memories from Japan and Virginia. I discovered the same scent along a few sidewalks in Seoul during a visit there in 1995, and wondered whether the Japanese had first planted those hardy trees along those streets. I also caught the scent in the parking lot of the Cincinnati City Museum, during a visit to see my sister when she lived there later in the 1990s. My most recent favorite spot to stop and sniff the sycamores was in Ashikaga, Japan, during my time there last year, where a central city block was lined on both sides with the same trees. I wasn’t there during the heart of winter, but the trees caught my nose during the late summer and early fall (August-September), and then later when I came back in the spring (March-June).

It wasn’t until much later in life that I discovered that the sycamores of my smell memories were the plane trees of my literary memories, whose Latin genus name, Platanus, was borrowed into both Japanese and Korean. The native Japanese name for the tree is suzu-kake-no-ki ‘bell-hanger tree’. The Oriental plane, P. orientalis, is quite hardy, but the American sycamore (P. occidentalis)—also called buttonwood—is more susceptible to a fungus, so the hybrid London plane (Platanus × hispanica or Platanus × acerfolia) is the more likely species to adorn streets in Europe and North America.

The term sycamore has been applied to quite a range of trees, including the biblical fig tree (Ficus sycomorus) and sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus) as well as the plane trees.

UPDATE: The Japanese rendering of Platanus is プラタナス  puratanasu. The Korean name I elicited in Seoul in 1995 sounds very close to that, but I’ve never seen it spelled. The native Korean name for the genus seems to be 식물종 sik-mul-jong (pronounced something like shingmuljong).

The Mission was still reeling from the [missionary resignation] shock of 1925 when Sarah Frances Fulghum dropped a bombshell as unexpected as the resignation of the three couples. On May 29, 1927, her 37th birthday, Fulghum visited the Doziers with Uehara Nobuaki, a 23-year-old medical student. “We are engaged to be married,” she announced. The one-time fiancée of Norman Williamson was widely known and highly respected as principal of Maizuru Kindergarten, where she resided, and founder-director of Seinan Gakuin‘s celebrated glee club. Uehara was a member of an English Bible class that Fulghum taught in her home. He was not a Christian, and his family strongly opposed his marrying the middle-aged foreigner.

Shocked and dismayed, the Doziers thought it their duty to share so consequential a matter with the other members of the Mission. The news triggered a barrage of criticism on Fulghum. Grace Mills, herself a single missionary for 12 years, wrote Frances that her relationship with Uehara embarrassed all single women who taught Japanese men in their homes and that the scandal might lead to the closure of Maizuru Kindergarten (it did not). Florence Walne censured her behavior as “selfish and unworthy beyond words.” In rebuttal, Fulghum insisted that she was “not any longer a baby” and “it will all blow over if the Mission will only keep its head.” But missionaries and Japanese alike urged her to return home for talks with her distressed mother before entangling herself with a Japanese mother-in-law. The Board offered to pay her travel expenses back to the States and asked her to indicate by telegram whether she would come. Her telegram read: NO.

Fulghum resigned from the Board and took a teaching position in Fukuoka’s Kaho Middle School. She moved from her Mission residence to a small private house and made preparations for her marriage to Uehara. “They are acting in such a way,” Kelsey Dozier told his diary, ”as to disgust any sensible people.” The wedding took place on June 30, 1928, and the bride took the name Uehara Ranko. “Ran,” a component of the name Frances as pronounced in Japanese, was written with a Chinese character meaning Dutch or Western [蘭 also ‘orchid’]. The “ko,” meaning child [子], is the most common ending for a woman’s name.

Uehara Nobuaki finished medical school at Kyushu University in 1929. Later he ran a small hospital in Wakayama, specializing in internal medicine and skin diseases. Though the hospital bore a Christian name, Immanuel, Uehara remained aloof from the church and was never baptized. During the Pacific War, Ranko suffered hardship and discrimination as a spy suspect. After the war , when the [Southern Baptist] Convention opened work in Wakayama, she helped with the Sunday school and worship services as organist, pianist, and soloist, until she was too feeble to attend. Upon her death in 1973 at the age of 82, funeral services were held in the Wakayama church. Ranko was survived by her husband and by two daughters and three grandchildren who were living in California and New Jersey.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 121-122　

In their approach to evangelism, Baptist missionaries gave priority to Bible translation and literature distribution…. The chief reason for the preoccupation with Scripture translation was the conviction that the Greek word for baptism should be rendered by a term clearly denoting immersion. The time and resources devoted to this effort could have been more fruitfully invested in churches or schools, for Japanese Baptists eventually adopted the interdenominational translation of the Bible in preference to the immersionist version….

Unlike the other denominations, Baptists were reluctant to utilize Christian education as a means of evangelism, for they sought more immediate results through direct means. True, most Baptist missionaries taught pupils informally, and by 1888 four schools had been started for girls. But no school was established for boys until 1895, when Duncan Academy opened in Tokyo. The delay was costly, for Christian schools–34 were reported in 1882 and 72 in 1888–produced the majority of converts in the 1880s. At a time when churches bore the onus of foreign colonies, the schools, being compatible with the traditional value system, served as a spearhead for the gospel and the “birthplace of the church.” It has even been argued that “the Christian school was the only field of Christian evangelism that could be called successful.”

Lacking a boys’ school, Baptists failed to attract and develop strong Japanese leaders–with two exceptions. One was Kawakatsu, a proselyte from Ballagh’s group of converts. The other was Chiba Yugoro, who was sent to America for college and seminary training. Baptists had no seedbed of leadership like the Yokohama schools conducted by Hepburn, Ballagh, and Robbins Brown [Presbyterians who founded Meiji Gakuin University]. There was no Baptist equivalent of the Kumamoto Band, converts of Leroy Janes in Kyushu [many of whom went on to Doshisha University in Kyoto], nor of the Sapporo Band, followers of William Clark [“Boys Be Ambitious”] in Hokkaido. From such dynamic teachers came the early giants of Protestantism in Japan.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 18-19

From what I understand, the Southern Baptist International Mission Board is once again concentrating almost all its foreign mission efforts on “church-planting” rather than schools. It no longer pays salaries for the foreign professors at the Southern Baptist Seinan Gakuin University seminary, as it used to from its earliest days.

UPDATE: In googling references for this, I discovered that a true giant among missionary educators—of both Japanese and Americans—died in April this year (while I was in Japan). He was a man of my father’s generation, whose kids were classmates and schoolmates and worthy successors—third generation MKs. My heart goes out to them. Elaine Woo of the Los Angeles Times wrote an obituary worth reading in full. Here’s how it starts.

When Otis Cary interrogated Japanese prisoners during World War II, he softened them with gifts of magazines, cigarettes and chocolates. He broke through their reserve with humor. And he spoke to them in flawless Japanese — shocking from a blond-haired American.

Cary spoke like a native because he was one — the son and grandson of New England missionaries in Japan. With missionarylike ardor, he proselytized for the Allied cause, convincing many of the prisoners to cooperate in efforts to end the war and help rebuild Japan as a democracy.

“Prolonged contact with Americans in the prison camps clearly had an impact on many prisoners, and for none more than those influenced by Otis Cary,” wrote Ulrich Straus, a former diplomat whose study of Japanese prisoners of war, “The Anguish of Surrender,” was published in 2003.

Cary, 84, who died of pneumonia April 14 in Oakland, Calif., played a unique role in U.S.-Japan relations during and after World War II. He was one of the 1,100 Japanese linguists trained by the Navy to serve as interrogators, translators and interpreters after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. For more than four decades after the war, he bridged cultures as a professor of American studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

In 1967 the [Japan Baptist] Mission had voted to encourage couples whose children were grown to consider work opportunities in outlying areas. But no pressures were ever applied, and the clustering of missionaries in central areas continued to bother [Japan Baptist] Convention strategists. Sizing up the problem, one Mission wit compared missionaries to manure. “When spread out,” he said, “they do good; when piled up, they raise a stink.”

Unlike the ’50s, when several couples in outlying areas taught their own children with Calvert School materials and in a few cases sent them to Japanese schools, in the ’60s most parents insisted on living near an English school, and a few demanded a particular school. A major reason for this trend was the growing emphasis on quality education in America, especially as it affected Baptist colleges and universities. A number of Baptist schools that formerly accepted any high school graduate had grown selective, some of them highly selective. To be assured of acceptance, MKs [= missionary kids] now had to submit good SAT or ACT scores.

American military schools were still available in several places, including Fukuoka, but their number was decreasing. To fill a void or meet new needs, international schools had been established in Kyoto (1957), Sapporo (1958), Hiroshima (1962), and Nagoya (1963). Some years would elapse before these schools could offer the higher grades. Most children of high school age, and some of middle school age, attended one of the older schools in Tokyo, Yokohama, or Kobe. Dormitory facilities were available at Christian Academy in Tokyo and Canadian Academy in Kobe, as noted earlier, but not at Tokyo’s American School in Japan, the choice of many parents. So in 1962 the Mission opened its own dormitory in Mitaka near ASIJ.

Baptist Dormitory, as it was called, looked like a dream come true. Built by Homat Homes, the neat and spacious two-story building accommodated a dozen or more students of both sexes in middle or high school. Sadly, the operation was soon plagued with troubles, dashing the dream of a Christian home environment for MKs. The supervisors were changed rather often, and some of them were quite the opposite in discipline and manner. Some were considered too strict and some too permissive. The parents and the trustees sometimes clashed on how the dormitory should be run or how a controversial rule should be worded. It was agreed, for example, that smoking should be strictly prohibited in the dormitory and on the premises. But should a student be retained who smoked off the premises, in violation of the Japanese law forbidding the use of tobacco by minors? The trustees said no, which caused a family to move to Tokyo against their wishes. So divisive and irresolvable were various issues that twice during the decade the trustees voted to close the facility. Each time they then yielded to parents’ demands that it be kept open. To complicate matters, sometimes a parent with a child in the dormitory served as a trustee, contrary to what some considered a sound administrative principle. At any rate, the dormitory was sadly disruptive of the Mission’s fellowship.

The MK problem came to the fore in a shocking manner at the 1969 Mission meeting. The meeting was held July 29 to August 1, not at Amagi Sanso, but at the Kokusai Takamatsu Hotel on Shikoku. On the closing night some of the young people held a “drinking party” in the hotel annex where they were staying. Descriptions of what took place ranged from “drinking only a tiny amount of whisky in a coke” to heavy drinking that left the imbibers “dead drunk” and “staggering.” Some children who witnessed the scene “spent the night sitting in the hall, afraid to return to their room.” The incident caused grave concern throughout the Mission for its effect on the smaller children and on the Christian witness in Takamatsu.

That autumn the dormitory supervisors sent five boys home for one week because of improper conduct. Subsequently the trustees expelled three of the boys for the remainder of the school year. The charges included smoking, theft of several items (even an airplane propeller from a nearby airfield), wrongful possession of dormitory keys that provided access to the girls’ section, obscene writing and speech, damage to property, and intimidation of younger boys with threats of bodily harm. Some parents expressed regret that they had opposed the closing of the dormitory years before. At the end of the 1969-70 school year, in which 12 students had been accommodated, the dorm was closed “for lack of applicants.” The facility was turned into a guest house and later sold.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 232-233

A couple of the decades covered in this book intersect a lot with my own biography. I was part of the inaugural class at Kyoto International School, which began as Kyoto Christian Day School, using Calvert School curriculum materials. Although I didn’t attend ASIJ, I later caused my share of trouble at another school’s dormitory during the Sixties.