Two Questions Posed by Contemporary Japan

On a recent furlough journey from Tanzania to the United States I revisited Japan for the first time since 1935, which was two years before Japan invaded China and thereby helped set the stage for the Second World War. How conspicuously it has changed! In earlier days the nation moved on wooden clogs, whose deafening clatter in such places of concentrated hurry as the Tokyo Railway Station formed a kind of national salute to the rising sun. Now all of at least urban Japan moves quietly and resolutely forward in thoroughly modern footgear. For me this was an introductory symbol of the nation’s change.

I was already partly aware of Japan’s progress. In recent years its radios, cameras, cars, and trucks have invaded East Africa, town and bush. Two years ago in Lubumbashi I had come across the preliminary work of the Japanese in exploiting the fabulously rich Central African mineral area on the farther side of the great continent. And in magazines I had read of their unexampled capacity for building ships, notably supertankers, of their being now the third nation of the world in gross national product, and of their surpassing both the United States and Russia in the rate of production increase (Japan’s rate being 10–15 per cent per annum in recent years).

And this is the nation that Hiroshima put flat on its back. It has picked itself up and in a quarter of a century has thrust itself forward to the very first rank of nations. The purposeful, disciplined Japanese do enormous things in much less space than the rest of us. Poor in their own resources, they have become great by using the resources of others.

I am full of admiration for them. And I am led to ask two questions, the one as an American, the other as a missionary.

Looking upon Japan’s phenomenal rise, particularly as one of several impressive power changes on the international scene, I ask myself as an American, Is there rising fast about us the scaffold for taking us down from preeminence among the nations (if indeed we now hold that rank)? Is some nation, or combination of nations, with the eminently Japanese qualities of resolution, drive, and discipline about to remove us from supremacy?

I make no predictions. I merely urge that we soberly consider what it would be like to have someone else at the top. Losing preeminence among the nations means loss of the chief opportunity to give world service as a nation. In view of the role of nations in the purposes of God, this is serious. Nations, no less than individual people, are servants of the Master. His assignment of stewardship, in accordance with the teaching of his own parable, is with an eye to returns, and tenure as steward is based solely on performance; when the Master summons his nation servants for a redistribution of the talents, only a fool will think it a time of merriment.

Is there no honorable retirement from the chief rank among the nations? Conceivably a nation might want to relinquish leadership in mundane matters in order to concentrate on things of the spirit. But this is hardly our case, not with the clamor for higher wages and higher profits so strident that we have been driven to the first peacetime abandonment of a free market in an effort to save the value of the dollar. The overwhelming presumption is that our displacement at the top would be a judgment, a deprivation of opportunity in view of our performance. This is especially so in the light of the Scriptures, with their great attention to the rise and fall of nations and with their emphasis on the justice of God’s reorderings of national power and eminence.

Consider our record. Much in American history is noble, not least in our international relations. Early we required a reputation for justice and for sympathy with the oppressed. When I was growing up in China I was often called yang kwei tzu, “foreign devil.” But when I was asked my nationality and answered “American,” the reaction was, I think, consistently favorable. The rapid recovery of defeated Japan after World War II is in great part due to the victor’s magnanimous help to the vanquished.

But a measure of economic generosity is not enough, particularly from a nation where prosperity is so great that it has almost become a national liability. If, as my denominational headquarters recently reported, for every dollar Americans spend on world missions, they spend $35 on personal care, $42 on tobacco, $58 on alcoholic drinks, $124 on recreation, $208 on clothing, accessories, and jewelry, and $269 on cars and transportation, then we are radically selfish and devoid of the desire to fulfill God’s will in bringing the knowledge of the truth in Jesus Christ to all men.

Now it is probably true that most of our people are unconverted and unregenerate, and lack even the beginning of true fear and love of God. Therefore they cannot be expected to be concerned about fulfilling his will in world missions. On the other hand, God judges a nation to which he has entrusted much by his own expectations, and will not excuse it because most of its members remain ignorant of the source of their blessings and indifferent to the will of the one who gave them. Thus we are provoking judgment on ourselves as a nation. (I am not suggesting that only national sins provoke national judgment, any more than I would suggest that only sins against the body are punished in the body.)

Another somber implication of displacement as top nation is liability—for the first time—to foreign oppression. Between nations, affliction (as well as comfort and help) is reciprocal. But oppression is always from above downward, and therefore only the top is safe from it. The superior is of course not bound to act oppressively, but whether he so acts or not depends solely, under God, on himself.

America’s freedom from foreign oppression is perhaps unique in world history. The explanation is that from the time of our emergence from virtual isolation, in the First World War, we have been the most powerful nation on earth. We can scarcely conceive of being denied the right to dissent (if denied, we would just dissent!)—the right, for example, to caricature our political leaders in openly published cartoons. But many countries as civilized and as liberty-loving as ours have in our own time awakened to the placarding of Verboten! or some similar order straight across their political life. Foreign oppression is standard equipment in God’s work of bringing the nations to their senses; it was his chief instrument in bringing his chosen people to reason and to obedience.

Again, I am making no predictions. I merely urge a sober look at the alternative to our staying at the top—and responsible behavior in accordance with such a look.

What should our course of action be? While we retain the leadership of nations, we are certainly not to flaunt our position in an orgy of self-indulgence. We are rather to exercise and cherish it in humble dependence on God and scrupulous observance of his revealed principles of national and personal conduct.

And what should we do if we lose that position, if the United States at long last is the victim of foreign oppression and finds its style of life dictated from a foreign capital? That would depend on the finality of the judgment. There are biblical examples of rebellion that have had God’s approval and blessing. There are also biblical examples of divine injunction to smart submissively under an alien yoke. There is God’s amazing requirement of Jeremiah—consider the infamy to which the prophet would be exposed!—that he direct his king and people to capitulate to the enemy and later that he counsel his exiled compatriots to seek to salvage what they could of national fortunes by avowed collaboration with the conqueror and solicitude for his welfare.

The second question I ask myself when I consider the phenomenal progress of contemporary Japan is, What does this say to us about Christian missions, particularly to Japan?

To my mind the most significant feature of contemporary Japan from the missionary point of view is its unprecedented combination of superior well-being with non-Christianity. Of all the great nations of the world, Japan has had the most rapid development, and of all the great nations of the world (excepting perhaps China, about whose Christian community we have little conclusive information), Japan appears to be the least Christianized. I don’t mean to belittle either the work of of the Christian missionaries or the social impact of the Christian Church in Japan; I merely put together the two facts that confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour is essential to Christian discipleship and that more than 99 per cent of the Japanese people make no avowal of Christianity.

Japan’s well-being does not consist only of material and technological advancement. It has also attained a kind of moral eminence. Ages ago the Japanese chose as their cultural mentors the Chinese, whose exposition of the proprieties made their own social order the most long-lived in history. Japan’s astonishing recovery is a prize exhibition of a whole cluster of virtues, notably resilience, quickness to see and seize opportunities, a remarkable loyalty to group enterprises and readiness to subject quick, private advantage to long-term community gain, and a wide-range dependability that is highly honored in the markets of the world. The visitor to Japan comes across surprising evidences of honesty among the people of the land. Then, too, there is the ethical concomitant of a liberal political system. Japan is one of the few non-western countries that can sustain multiparty politics. There is therefore in Japan at least some political group, that in free intercourse with like-minded elements in other lands, continuously presses in the highest governmental quarters for recognition of such enlightened principles as the dignity of the individual.

In attaining this superior ethical status Japan has certainly been moved in part—perhaps even profoundly—by Christian influences—but the significant point is that in it all the nation has rejected the Christian religion.

The Japanese have appropriated all that appealed to them in Western civilization while rejecting Christianity. In so doing they have sharply differentiated between civilization and Christianity, have virtually eliminated from their country the humanitarian work of the missionary, and have given great pertinence to the question, Is the Christianization of any country at all necessary?

In making this distinction between civilization and essential Christianization, the Japanese have shown a perspicacity and religious honesty not always found even in missionary circles, which have often confounded the two. The Japanese have appropriated only what they wanted and have made plain their belief that they did not need Christ.

Their extraordinary advance obviously puts them beyond the need of the humanitarian service of the Christian missionary. Nevertheless, to deplore the passing in Japan—and many other parts of the non-Christian world—of the need for this service is as unjustifiable as for the Good Samaritan to have wished for further muggings on the road to Jericho so that he could again show his Good Samaritanism. Being the Good Samaritan, he would inevitably have shown it in any new situation as well.

The situation in contemporary Japan is a striking throwback to the original missionary situation of the Christian Church.

The economic disparity that today makes it possible for fifty or more orphans in one country to be supported by the per-capita income of another country did not exist throughout most of church history. It dates from the Industrial Revolution, which in general made the West a “have” area and left the rest of the world largely an expanse of “have-nots.” Such a disparity certainly did not exist between Antioch, the first missionary-sending community, and Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth, representative of the first missionary-receiving communities. The only relief organized by the Apostle Paul of which the Scriptures make any mention was in the opposite direction of the general flow of modern international Christian relief: it was from ex-pagan Christians to the mother church of them all, Jerusalem.

Economic comparability between sending and receiving countries prevailed during the whole course of missionary expansion down to the times approximately of Schwarz and Carey. When St. Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549, he found Japan roughly comparable economically to Portugal, from which he had come.

When missionaries come to contemporary Japan, they are back in the situation of the Apostle Paul entering Ephesus and St. Francis entering Kagoshima, but with a difference. Paul met the Ephesians and St. Francis met the Kagoshimans on a level of economy and related factors that was virtually universal. Today the missionary finds the Japanese on a level similar to his own, but only because, though the missionary’s own (Western) level of well-being has soared in the last two centuries, by prodigious effort and in only decades the Japanese have risen to the same level and are, in fact, pushing that level still farther upward. Meanwhile the belated parts of the world are aching to join the club, and many of them are getting there fast.

This means in a very general way that in economics, education, politics, culture, and in a sense even ethics the contemporary Japanese are our peers in the same way that Ephesians, Philippians, and Corinthians were the peers of the Apostle Paul and his missionary colleagues; that, as a group, the hardhat Kobe shipwright and the marketwise matron in the Osaka department store, the girl in the white dress with matching hat and bag who is waiting for the commuter train and surprises us by speaking no English, only Japanese, and the bowing protagonist of the yen at the international monetary conference—all these persons are our peers in the same way that the Philippian jailor, and Lydia, the Thyatiran seller of purple, and the pitiable maid with a spirit of divination were all peers of Paul and Silas. Shorn of all preeminence in education, economic attainments, and educational, medical, and industrial skills, the missionary in contemporary Japan is reduced to the lowly place of Paul among the first-century Greeks! But—and this is the point—Paul engaged his world gloriously with stripped-down sheer evangelism. The great question contemporary Japan poses to the Christian Church is this: Have we the capacity to engage contemporary Japan and the rest of the fast homogenizing world with stripped-down sheer evangelism, or any evangelism?

What is to be our motive for evangelizing the Japanese? It certainly cannot come from any invitation on their part. Having arrived culturally and technologically, the Japanese make it very clear that they feel no need for the missionary. On the basis of a purely naturalistic assessment, we can hardly claim to offer them anything they cannot provide as well or better themselves. Japan’s increasing material prosperity meets most needs; if one’s view of man holds that he has religious and spiritual needs that also must be met, Japan has its own resources there as well. Soka Gakkai, for example, an indigenous Japanese religious movement only forty-two years old, has already gained more adherents in Japan than have all the varieties of Christianity combined in the 400 years since the inception of the missionary movement there. Soka Gakkai—along with many other non-Christian religious groups present in Japan—has both an ethical and religious dimension, demanding morality in daily living and inculcating a measure of religious awe and reverence for the supernatural. From a naturalistic perspective, we might conceivably argue that there is something to be gained by presenting Jesus Christ as a symbol of an untrammeled and authentic humanity that would be valid beyond the borders of Japan and thus hold a promise of bringing all the peoples of the world into some kind of unity. But all such considerations fall far short of supplying an adequate motive for real evangelization in the biblical sense.

The stripped-down sheer evangelism with which Paul engaged his Jewish and Gentile contemporaries was derived from divine commission:

I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me [Acts 26:15–18].

Without this commission, how could Paul have dared to confront his peers in civilization and culture with the charge that they were blind and caught in the power of Satan, alienated from the living God?

Without the same commission extended to us through the infallible Scriptures, how could we possibly dare to confront our contemporaries the Kobe hardhat, the Osaka matron, the white-dressed girl commuter, the bowing economist, with even the faintest suggestion that outside Christ they too are spiritually blind, dead in trespasses and sins, caught in the coils of Satan, and subject to the judgment of God, and that by believing in Christ they will be forgiven, resurrected, and handed a card to the glories of the ages to come? Without such a commission, how dare a missionary proceed to Japan? And with it, how can he keep away?

The contemporary missionary situation in Japan preserves intact the essence of the missionary situation gloriously exploited by the Apostle Paul and his companions, and the population of Japan alone is several times that of the whole classical world known to the first missionaries. Therefore the vista of evangelization possibilities that in Japan are spread before Bible-believing and Spirit-trusting missionaries is stupendous.

There are also in contemporary Japan, because of its advancement and strength, certain immunities for the Christian missionary. He cannot be charged with deculturization. Nor can he be accused of buying converts with the offer of hospital, schools, and orphanages. Nor, certainly, can he be said to be riding into contemporary Japan on the tails of imperialism. You don’t ride into wide-awake, up-and-coming Japan on the tails of anything.

In the evangelization of Japan, the astute Japanese have themselves set us an example by their virtuoso propagation of trade (Jesus himself commended to the children of light the superior wisdom of the children of this world in matters of their own generation). More than any other people, the Japanese seem unanimously committed to capturing every world market. Can Christians be less unanimous? The evangelization of Japan should be a matter of believing, obedient, prayerful, and means-providing concern for every Christian on earth. All of us must get behind the missionaries now in the field, and that unitedly, through the central office of the Holy Ghost.

Not only is Japan the least Christianized (or nearly so) of the great powers of the world; Japan is also in that condition of well-being to which all underdeveloped countries aspire, and which many of them will, unless the Lord hastens his coming, reach in time. Consider what an extraordinary entrée Japanese trade commissioners and tourists and exchange students serving as Christian missionaries would have to the other peoples of Asia and those of Africa—and perhaps to those of Europe and America as well!

H. Daniel Friberg is an ordained missionary of the Lutheran Church in America on furlough from Tanzania. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

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