After I wrote an article last year warning Americans not to embrace Christian nationalism based on the lessons Japanese Christians learned in the years leading up to and during World War II, I received several emails and social media messages from Japanese and American Christians (some of whom I have never even met) critiquing my take.
One person claimed that because I had written about the negative history of Japan and Christianity, I had bought into the leftist agenda and was han-nichi, or anti-Japan. Others said I was a global voice co-opted by CT for its “woke” agenda.
It feels as if we live in an era where we are pressed toward either baptizing our countries’ political order or disparaging their histories and legacies. The first calls itself patriotism, the second calls itself prophetic witness, and each calls the other idolatry.
It begs the question “How can we love our country while also refusing the nationalist agenda offered in its name?” Can you love your country but still critique it?
This was the question Uchimura Kanzō, a Japanese Christian author, evangelist, and church leader (1861–1930), wrestled with throughout his life.
Uchimura occupies a space in between the two stifling binaries as a Christian who is both a nationalist and a prophetic critic of Japan. Japanese historian Yagyu Kunichika named this middle ground prophetic nationalism. Uchimura was passionate enough about his country to be called a nationalist by his contemporaries, and disobedient enough toward the state’s nationalist agenda to be called a traitor.
Both were true at the same time, and both came from his Christian convictions. In an era when we are increasingly pushed toward either the Christian nationalist or progressive camp, we have a lot to learn from Uchimura’s prophetic voice.
“I love two Js and no third; one is Jesus, and the other is Japan,” Uchimura wrote. “I do not know which I love more, Jesus or Japan. I am hated by my countrymen for Jesus’ sake as Yaso [a derogatory word for a Christian], and I am disliked by foreign missionaries for Japan’s sake as national and narrow. No matter; I may lose all my friends, but I cannot lose Jesus and Japan.”
Uchimura was born in 1861 into a samurai family, seven years before the Meiji Restoration overturned centuries of feudal rule. (Unless otherwise noted, the quotes and historic references are from John F. Howes’s biography of Uchimura, Japan’s Modern Prophet, and Living for Jesus and Japan, edited by Shibuya Hiroshi.) He grew up in the atmosphere of keishin aikoku (“worship the gods, love the nation”) as the government wove Shinto into the moral fabric of Japan, considering the emperor a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Patriotism was in the air he breathed.
At age 16, he met Jesus at Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University), where upperclassmen, converted under the influence of the school’s first vice president, William S. Clark, had formed a small Christian fellowship. When these students first shared the gospel with Uchimura, he refused to convert, as he considered it a betrayal to both Japan and its gods. Yet later he decided to accept Jesus, more due to peer pressure than authentic belief.
After graduating from college, Uchimura married his first wife, which ended in a painful divorce. Tormented by guilt and wishing to reconstruct his identity, Uchimura moved to the United States, where he took a job at an institute for children with disabilities in Elwyn, Pennsylvania. While there, he read the prophetic books in the Bible and was especially moved by Jeremiah, leading him to conclude that Christians could love both Christ and their nation.
“Patriotism that was quenched somewhat by accepting a faith that was exotic in origin, now returned to me with hundredfold more vigor and impression,” he wrote about that time.
In the summer of 1886, while studying at Amherst College, he said he had a direct encounter with Christ, where he realized Christianity was about looking at Christ rather than at his own sins. He returned home to Japan in 1888 as a born-again Christian.
His twin identity (Christian and Japanese) was not a contradiction to manage but a vocation and a calling. “I learnt from Christ and His Apostles how to save my soul, but from the Prophets, how to save my country,” he wrote in How I Became a Christian. Initially, Uchimura was optimistic about Japan and its God-given role in the world.
Yet a major trial came in January 1891, when he experienced firsthand the clash between his two loves. Uchimura, then a young teacher at the elite First Higher Middle School in Tokyo, attended a ceremony unveiling the school’s copy of the new Imperial Rescript on Education, which the emperor had signed himself. The official edict called on its citizens to be loyal to the imperial throne and “offer [themselves] courageously to the State.” The vice principal asked each faculty member to advance in turn and perform a deep bow before the imperial signature.
Uchimura went to the table and bowed only slightly, refusing to give ultimate loyalty to the emperor. This sign of disrespect caused a stir across the nation as the press accused him of blasphemy against the emperor and called him a traitor.
In a letter to his friend David Bell in Minneapolis, he wrote that he had been commanded to “bow to the imperial signature in the manner as we used to bow before our ancestral relics as prescribed in Buddhist and Shintô ceremonies. … I took my stand and did not bow!”
While many scholars consider Uchimura’s act a more spontaneous rather than a deliberate act of protest, it was certainly prophetic, considering how deification of the emperor and strict religious control had only begun to take hold at the time. Decades later, in 1924, a follower of Uchimura recalled him saying that among the main reasons Japan was going astray was “the deification of [a] human being that is directed by the government.”
After the disrespect incident, Uchimura fell ill, lost his job, and even lost his second wife, who became gravely sick while caring for him. As he recovered, he started his career as a prolific writer.
In the summer of 1894, Japan went to war with China over influence in Korea. Uchimura, swept up in his own view that Japan had a special place in God’s plan in Asia, wrote an English-language article defending Japan’s conduct to skeptical foreigners. Modern nations doubted righteous wars existed, he argued, but Japan would prove that a heathen nation could fight one. Japan was the small progressive power fighting against China to liberate Korea in a just cause.
Within months it became clear that Japan was fighting the war for territory rather than the stated goal to liberate Korea. (Japan would later colonize Korea in 1910.) Far from being elevated by victory, the Japanese public had become hardened by it. He watched countrymen celebrate the killing of Chinese soldiers as if it were a wild boar hunt.
Uchimura recanted in print. In a series of essays, most famously “The Farmer Amos” and “Observations on the Trend of the Day,” he turned the prophets on his own people. The Jews of Amos’s day, he wrote, “looked upon others as inferior, and they said, ‘We are men of God’s country; though other nations may be ruined, there is no fear that our nation will fall into danger.’” The analogy to Japan was unmistakable: Japan’s pride, just like the pride of the Israelites during Amos’s time, would lead to its downfall.
By the eve of the Russo-Japanese War a decade later, he had become a pacifist and denounced the war from the beginning. War is the killing of human beings, and “no man or state could gain long lasting profit by committing such a great sin,” he wrote. It was the spirit of the New Testament as a whole, he insisted, that made warfare unjustifiable “so long as the Gospel and the Cross exist.” Uchimura noted that he had come to this conclusion through his study of the Bible.
Repenting of his support of Japan’s militant nationalism forced him to articulate a better path forward. What would it mean for Japan to be great in light of the gospel?
His most clear answer is a slender 1911 booklet The Story of the Danish Nation, written a year after Japan’s colonization of Korea. Denmark had lost a war in 1864 and surrendered Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia and Austria. The conventional path back to greatness was closed, so Denmark chose another path. Under the leadership of the Huguenot-descended engineer Enrico Dalgas, it reforested the barren heath of Jutland, built up its agriculture, and recovered itself through the patient labor of farmers and the unspectacular work of faith. “The Danes saved their nation,” Uchimura wrote, “without using military forces, without invading anywhere, but only by the afforestation of the land and faith.”
This was a prophetic counterimage to a Japan that was boasting of its new navy while its tenant farmers starved, a Japan whose elites measured prosperity by warships and colonies. In essays scattered across these years, he argued that the real Japan was not a nation of warriors but a land of “industrious and honest common people” and that “the boost of national prestige is not necessarily a sign of the happiness of the people.”
In the early 1920s, in a rented hall across the street from the Imperial Palace, hundreds of young Japanese paid to hear an aging Uchimura lecture verse by verse through Romans, Job, and the four Gospels. He had founded not a new denomination but the Mukyokai (non-church) movement, a fellowship of Bible-reading Christians who refused imported denominational forms, institutionalization of Christianity, and fusion of Christianity with the imperial cult. While it shares similarities with the Anabaptists, Mukyokai is among the very few indigenous Protestant groups in Japan (though Uchimura himself disavowed any organizational continuation of his tradition).
His followers, including the influential political theorist Nanbara Shigeru and the economist Yanaihara Tadao, would later refuse to bow to the militarism of the 1930s because they refused to stop being Japanese and Christian.
The binary now on offer in the US and around the world—Christian nationalism on one side, contempt for country on the other—would have made no sense to Uchimura. To love Jesus and to love one’s nation, for Uchimura, meant seeing the nation in the light of the gospel and recognizing that its true prosperity would never come from self-promotion or military might.
Uchimura loved Japan the way the prophets loved Israel: enough to want her to be true; enough to tell her when she was not; enough to imagine, in the worst seasons, a better picture of what she could be.
Even while becoming more critical toward the actions of the government, he never lost his genuine love for Japan and its people. He encapsulated this in his preface to a 1908 English book Representative Men of Japan: “With all the cooling of my youthful love for my country, I cannot yet be blind to many fine qualities of her people; and she is still the land, the only land, to whom I give ‘my prayers, my hopes, my service free.’”
Uchimura puts a question to each camp. To nationalists, he asks, Do you love Jesus more than your nation, or have you quietly reversed the order? To progressives: Does your critique rise from love of your country and its people, or only from contempt? He answered both at once. He loved Jesus more, and that freed him to love Japan honestly. In an age of competing idolatries, the truest patriots may be the ones willing to disappoint their nation, precisely because of their love for it.
Kazusa Okaya is a PhD candidate at Durham University and a steering committee member of Lausanne Younger Leaders Generation Japan.
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