Uchimura Kanzo

Kanzo Uchimura around 1900

Uchimura Kanzō ( Japanese 内 村 鑑 三 ; born March 23, 1861 in Edo ; † March 28, 1930 ) was a Japanese Protestant Christian, columnist and pacifist. He was the founder of the Christian Mukyokai movement . As a columnist, he was a sharp critic of the first Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.

biography

Uchimura wrote an autobiography about his youth and early years as a Christian. His book The Diary of a Christian Convert (German edition: How I became a Christian ) was deliberately intended for a Western audience and was therefore written in English.

Youth and Conversion to Christianity

Uchimura was born on March 23, 1861 to a samurai family in Edo . After normal elementary school, he began studying English at the Foreign Language School when he was fourteen. In 1877, with the permission of his parents, Uchimura moved to the Sapporo Agricultural College , where the students had found their way to the Christian faith under the influence of an American lecturer. There he learned about Christianity and attended Sunday meetings about which he wrote:

“One Sunday morning a school-mate of mine asked me whether I would not go with him to 'a certain place in foreigners quarter, where we can hear pretty women sing, and a tall big man with long beard shout and howl upon an elevated place, flinging his arms and twisting his body in all fantastic manners, to all which admittance is entirely free. ' … Sight-seeing, and not truth-seeking, was the only view I had in my 'Sunday excursion to the settlement' as I called it. "

- Kanzo Uchimura, The Diary of a Japanese Convert . FH Revell, New York, 1895, p. 19.

Uchimura was baptized under the Methodist missionary MC Harris and he first attended his ward. However, he soon began to hold his own church services, prayer and Bible studies together with seven fellow students. Everything happened without any effort and simply. One of his Christian friends at that time was Nitobe Inazō .

After graduating, he initially continued to hold meetings with his friends. After the Methodist missionary left, another Reverend came along who did not support the idea of ​​their independent meetings. When they were considering building a building for their independent Japanese congregation, the Methodist Church offered money, which they gratefully accepted. But when the final breakout into independence occurred, the new missionary wanted the money back immediately, because he had hoped that the church would become Methodist. The young people lived in poor circumstances for months in order to settle this debt as quickly as possible. This experience and the rival denominations in the same city built his deep dislike for the institutionalized Western churches and missionaries. Uchimura notes:

“What is the use of having two separate Christian communities, when even one is not strong enough to stand upon its own feet. We felt for the first time in our Christian experience the evils of denominationalism. "

- Kanzo Uchimura, The Diary of a Japanese Convert . FH Revell, New York, 1895, p. 52.

In July 1881 Uchimura graduated from the top of his class. His thesis was entitled Fishery as Science . He worked for the Japanese government and initially stayed in Sapporo , but Uchimura soon moved to Tokyo . During this time he married Take Asada against the wishes of his parents and friends. The marriage lasted only a few months and he divorced again. Ashamed of this mistake, he decided to travel to the United States .

Experiences in America

Uchimura undertook the long and rigors of a journey to the Christian West to come to the land that brought Christianity to Japan . He exaggeratedly describes his view of the USA as follows:

“My idea of ​​the Christian America was lofty, religious, Puritanic. I dreamed of its templed hills, and rocks that rang with hymns and praises. Hebraisms, I thought to be the prevailing speech of the American commonality, and cherub and cherubim, hallelujahs and amens, the common language of its streets. ... Indeed, the image of America as pictured upon my mind was that of a Holy Land. "

- Kanzo Uchimura, The Diary of a Japanese Convert . FH Revell, New York, 1895, p. 101.

However, the Hebraisms turned out to be blasphemous curses, Uchimura and a friend were robbed and he discovered how unfairly and disparagingly Chinese guest workers were being exploited. Uchimura also lists other inconsistencies, such as: B. Gambling, alcohol abuse, animal fights, capitalist tyranny. Uchimura was ashamed of this Christian country, which he so venerated and which he had touted as morally superior in Japan. These experiences changed his thinking permanently and led him to the conviction that the Confucian- moral way of thinking and living in Asia exceeded the West.

Uchimura fell into a period of depression and began working in a home for mentally handicapped children. There he met the leader and Quaker Dr. Kerlin, whom Uchimura calls a philanthropist, know and appreciate. After he got better, he started studying at Amherst College. He knew Rector Julius H. Seelye from books and this took him to college. A dispensable period began: Uchimura lived in an attic with scrap-ripe inventory for the next two years of his studies in Amherst. At this school, too, he excelled in almost all subjects; he only had problems with Western philosophy . There he got to know Christ in a Reformation way, so that he writes the following fundamental knowledge in his diary:

“Very important day in my life. Never was the atoning power of Christ more clearly revealed to me than it is to-day. In the crucifixion of the Son of God lies the solution of all the difficulties that buffeted my mind thus far. Christ paying all my debts, can bring me back to the purity and innocence of the first man before the fall. Now I am God's child, and my duty is to believe Jesus. For His sake, God will give me all I want. He will use me for his glory, and will save me in Heaven at last. "

- Kanzo Uchimura, The Diary of a Japanese Convert . FH Revell, New York, 1895, p. 150.

With renewed vigor, he finished his studies in Amherst and began studying theology at Hartford Theological Seminary. At first he liked the course, but more and more he could no longer do anything with unpractical theology. He was also repulsed by the lack of seriousness among the students, which in his opinion was necessary, and the discussion about money for sermons. He soon interrupted his studies and for health reasons he decided to return to his beloved home.

Uchimura got to know the abysses of Western civilization in America and became for life a critic of America and American Christianity, subjective in many places. However, he also got to know people whom he remembered positively. One of the people was David Bell, whom he met at the first chance meeting for half an hour on one of his trips in his entire life and only twice later. Nevertheless, the pen pal lasted over 40 years.

In Japan as a writer

Uchimura wrote his motto for life in his Bible and added the note To be Inscribed upon my Tomb .

In the following years, in which he worked as a teacher and journalist, there was, by and large, a deepened emancipation from the Western churches and missionaries in Japan. But the pastors and missionaries also increasingly distanced themselves from Uchimura. Uchimura was initially a stranger in his homeland after he returned from America, but settled back in Japan . He soon found his second wife. He was hired at several schools that either had to close again or he couldn't get used to the direction of the school.

A particularly drastic experience was his refusal to bow to the imperial edict of education in 1891 when he was teaching at a school in Tokyo . Out of Christian conviction, he was unable to bow his head to the Tennō . It practically became a traitor to the nation and was ostracized by the Japanese press. Although Uchimura supported the content of the writing, which basically laid Confucian moral foundations for pedagogy, he was unable to rehabilitate himself. He was banned from the school and fell ill with pneumonia for several months, so that he could not defend himself publicly. His wife was also struck down by the disease and passed away.

In 1892 he moved to Osaka to work as a teacher, where he married for the third time. This marriage with Shizuko Okada resulted in a daughter named Ruth, who also died in childhood, and a son named Yuji. After a short stay in Kumamoto , he moved to Kyoto in order to make a living from there writing, interrupted by a brief teaching activity in Nagoya .

From 1895 he worked for five years as an English-language columnist for a major Japanese daily newspaper, the Yorodzu Choho . During this time, conditions in Japan were overshadowed by the first Sino-Japanese War in Korea from 1894–1895 . At first Uchimura justified the military incursion in Korea with the fact that Japan basically wanted to protect and save Korea from China. After the war, however, he noticed that this war was by no means fought for idealistic reasons, which he admitted with shame. A few years later he turned into an uncompromising pacifist, so that he resigned as editor of an initially more liberal newspaper together with two other writers after the newspaper supported the Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 .

He began the magazine Tokyo Dokuritsu Zasshi (Eng. "Independent Tokyo Magazine") to publish for two years, then the magazine Seisho no Kenkyu ( Eng . "Bible Study") , which was published until his death . The title was in English on the cover: The Bible Study with the subtitle Pro Christo et patria (Eng. "For Christ and Fatherland"). For a short time he also brought out a magazine called Mukyokai . The English-language magazine The Japan Christian Intelligencer was also published by him.

Later years

In the last years of his life he came to a special eschatological conviction about the parousia of Jesus Christ, on which he lectured all over Japan for several years.

During this time he mainly took care of his community, which he gathered around himself in Tokyo . Together with the YMCA he held evangelism. Although this period of his life spanned many years, the times of upheaval were over.

Uchimura died peacefully at home in Tokyo on March 28, 1930, shortly after his sixty-ninth birthday, of heart failure.

Publications

• Kanzo Uchimura: The Complete Works of Kanzo Uchimura . 7 volumes. Kyobunkan, Tokyo 1971-1973.
• Kanzo Uchimura: The Diary of a Japanese Convert . FH Revell, New York 1895 (available online at archive.org or Wikisource ).
• Kanso Utschimura: Japanese character heads . D. Gundert, Stuttgart 1908.
• Kanso Utschimura: How I became a Christian: Confessions of a Japanese . D. Gundert, Stuttgart 1905.
• Kanzo Uchimaru: "Representative Men of Japan" Essays; Japanese / German, new English translation: Kazuo Inamori ; Kodansha, Tokyo 2002, ISBN 978-4-7700-2928-7

literature

• Scott W. Sunquist (Ed.): A Dictionary of Asian Christianity . Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 2001, ISBN 080283776X .
• Emil Brunner: The Christian non-church movement in Japan . In: Evangelical Theology . 4, 1959, pp. 147-155.
• Carlo Caldarola: Christianity: The Japanese Way . Brill, Leiden 1979, ISBN 9004058427 .
• Carlo Caldarola: Pacifism among Japanese Non-church Christians . In: Journal of The American Academy of Religion . 41, 1973, pp. 506-519.
• Richard H. Drummond: A History of Christianity in Japan . Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1971.
• Mitsuo Hori: Kanzo Uchimura. Builder of the unbuilt church (Mukyokai) . Young Congregation, Stuttgart 1963.
• John F. Howes: Japan's Modern Prophet. Uchimura Kanzo, 1861-1930 . UBC Press, Vancouver 2005, ISBN 0774811463 .
• Raymond P. Jennings: Jesus, Japan and Kanzo Uchimura. A Study of the View of the Church of Kanzo Uchimura and its Significance for the Japanese Christianity . Kyobunkwan, Tokyo 1958.
• Hana Kimura-Andres: Christian and (not) a church. Leteroj-Verlag, Nagoya 2011, ISBN 978-49905646-0-5 .
• Hannelore Kimura-Andres: Mukyokai. Continuation of the gospel story . Verlag der Ev.-Luth. Mission, Erlangen 1984, ISBN 3872143018 .
• Hiroshi Miura: The Life and Thought of Kanzo Uchimura 1861-1930 . Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1996, ISBN 0802842054 .
• Paul Gerhard Aring:  Uchimura Kanzō. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 12, Bautz, Herzberg 1997, ISBN 3-88309-068-9 , Sp. 995-998.
• Takeo Doi: Uchimura Kanzo: Japanese Christianity in Comparative Perspective, In: Albert M. Craig (Ed.): Japan. A Comparative View. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2015, ISBN 9781400867929 , pp. 182-213.

Web links

Commons : Uchimura Kanzō  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Uchimura is the family name, Kanzō the first name.