No less original was the spiritual progenitor of the movement, Kanzo Uchimura (1861–1930). For nearly half a century this great prophet of God pommeled Japan and the Christian church with the Word of God. Born at the moment when Japan finally opened her doors to the West, his soul became the battleground on which the encounter of East with West was fought out in miniature. Even more important than this, Uchimura telescoped nineteen centuries of Christian development into his own spiritual experience with astounding profundity. For if the Protestant Reformation meant the Germanization of Christianity after centuries of Latin tutelage, in Kanzo Uchimura the “Japanization” of the faith occurred in the lifetime of a single “first-generation” Christian.

Twice Christianity has been introduced to Japan. On the first occasion Francis Xavier, the great sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary, planted the faith here. With great insight into the Japanese mind and culture, the dedicated successors to Xavier won half a million souls to Christ in less than half a century. Then the government, aroused to suspicion by various factors, crushed the movement in a persecution that ranks with the most ruthless in Christian history. For the next two and a half centuries Japan was closed to intercourse with the outside world.

The second influx of the faith came shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century when the doors of Japan were reopened—this time by a “Protestant” power—the United States. (This year, 1959, Japanese Protestants are celebrating their centennial.) When the first Protestant missionaries arrived, conversion was still a punishable crime and real liberty was decades in coming. Simultaneously Catholics were able to resume their work; and, astoundingly enough, remnants of the original Catholic communities came to the surface—after having existed underground without outside contact for more than two centuries.

But meanwhile the progress of the faith in Japan has been slow. The combined Catholic and Protestant faithful in Japan today number fewer than one percent of the population. Why this should be so remains to this day a favorite topic among missionaries and Japanese Christians alike. Though no ultimate answer to this question has been given, several important factors can be noted. One of these is Japan’s experience with foreign powers: down through the centuries Japan has always stood under the shadow of the superior power of China which put her on the defensive, both politically and psychologically. It was from the Chinese that Japan took over her higher religions and the arts of civilization, while yet always successfully maintaining her political independence. Japan thus combined an extraordinary capacity to assimilate foreign cultural influences with an equally extraordinary capacity to safeguard the integrity of her own genius.

A further factor was that Japanese folk society and folk religion were already overlaid and in part transformed by a higher civilization and a higher religion. Missionaries were thus confronted, not with the inadequacy of a “primitive” folk society with few resources of its own, but with a sophisticated culture in the light of which Westerners were even considered “barbarians.” A final factor we might note is the catastrophe with which the first incursion of Western culture in the sixteenth century ended. The Japanese had ample reason to fear that the interest of Westerners was not altruistic, especially during the century of Western empire building in the Orient.

And yet when Western gunboats hove into sight on their coasts, the Japanese were convinced in terror that they were technologically behind the times. Internal political upheaval combined with external pressure to open the gates of Japan to commerce with the West. True to her own genius, Japan cautiously appropriated the industrial revolution but resisted any encroachments upon her own “soul.” As she sent her envoys abroad, these sought to break down the civilization of the West into its component strands and then to appropriate only those elements which would bring their own up to date without destroying its core. In this process Christianity was excluded as an unnecessary and even dangerous element.

Protestant missionaries, therefore, began their work under circumstances which were hardly auspicious. Even apart from the government attitude, which was hostile enough, the first young converts were troubled psychologically with the feeling that somehow they were traitors of their own people. To accept a foreigner’s religion in place of one’s own value system is indeed always difficult. But where this event is bound up with suspicion of treason the obstacles become well-nigh insurmountable. To accept the foreigner’s faith inevitably entailed a kind of submission to a foreigner and to a foreign culture. For the missionary of necessity employed a cultural vehicle, namely his own, to convey the faith. Thus, the missionary brought not only Christ but a visible tradition of organization, sacraments, and creeds.

Fortunately, however, the heroic youths who accepted the faith, often the sons of recently dispossessed warriors (samurai), turned on Christianity the same critical faculties that enabled the Japanese to be selective about Western civilization in the first place—they distinguished between Christ and Christianity or Christendom. That is, as the missionary message filtered through the Japanese soul, it was Jesus Christ whom the Japanese believers could espouse, while they rejected the cultural forms in which the faith had expressed itself in the West. It was in Kanzo Uchimura that this process came most sharply into focus, and today it is his living influence that towers, perhaps above that of all other Christians, in Japan.

This filtering of Christianity through the Japanese soul was to have a further result. Not only did these new believers find the Western cultural garb of the faith inappropriate for Japan—and unacceptable in any case as foreign to their own genius, but also beyond this they discovered the inner inconsistencies of Western Christianity. And as they began to “speak back” to their Western tutors from the independent position before Christ and in Christ which they thereby gained; the reaction of missionaries often disclosed these inconsistencies more fully than before. It was the divided state of Christendom that constituted a major stumbling block.

Or is the approach of Uchimura and his “followers” not after all, a sounder one to seek for “essential Christianity” or as a recent Mukyokai writer stated, “the most essential element of the Christian faith, without which there can be no Christianity and beside which all other elements can be treated as secondary and nonessential”? That such an approach entails its own perils we must note presently, but before we hasten to note them, we must face the full force of the problem and of the Mukyokai reply to it.

We cannot here deal with Kanzo Uchimura biographically, but since he is the clearest expression of the Mukyokai genius, we must cite him as an example. Uchimura united with six other students who were baptized with him when he was seventeen years of age to form the Sapporo Independent Church. Receiving some sympathy from the missionary who baptized them, they were soon caught in a competition between Episcopalian and Methodist missionaries. In need of a meeting place, they made plans to erect a church. Their appeal for help to a Methodist missionary brought a loan of $400. To these young Christians this building operation was a step toward full spiritual autonomy. To the missionary making the loan, however, this gesture was viewed as an attempt to hold the group for Methodist affiliation. When the church was completed and the congregation happily declared its independence, the missionary wrote a letter demanding the money back. The young believers rose to the occasion and at great sacrifice were able to repay the debt in full within two years.

This experience proved to be of decisive significance not only for Uchimura personally but for the history of Christianity in Japan. Thoroughly alerted now to the evils of denominationalism and to the necessity of the financial independence of Japanese churches from foreign funds, he went to America soon afterward for a period of study—there to have his illusions about Christendom further shattered. In his spiritual autobiography How I Became a Christian he described his trip to America in terms as the following: