Re-Orientalizing Christianity: Shimizu Yasuzō and Japanese Protestants’ North China Mission, 1919-1945

Japanese Protestant overseas missions were important parts of twentieth-century Protestant global missions. They have received little attention in the English-language scholarship on World Christianity because, in this scholarship, East Asian Protestants have been considered generally as converts, rather than missionaries. This dissertation attempts to rectify this distorted understanding through a close examination of the mission work that Japanese Protestants established in north China and their religious mindsets that had been transnationally formed, informed, and reformed within their mission field from 1919 to 1945. Centered on Shimizu Yasuzō, the first Japanese Congregational missionary settled in Beijing, and organizational cases related to him, this study shows that a small group of Japanese Protestants was influential in Sino-Japanese relations through upholding their Pan-Asian Protestantism in educational, intellectual, philanthropic, and commercial practices during the interwar and wartime period. Not only did they build and maintain cross-border religious networks and transnational humanitarian activism, but they also contribute to cross-cultural discourses about nation, religion, and gender in the Sino-Japanese public sphere.

This study first sketches the general development of the Japanese Protestant overseas missionary movement over the first half of the twentieth century and reviews the historiography in Japanese related to the movement. Within the framework of transnational history intersecting World Christianity and Sino-Japanese Studies, the following chapters focus on Shimizu Yasuzō through a comprehensive re-interpretation of his religious mindset in light of his missionary experience in China and his dual identity as both a Japanese national and a Protestant international. Self-motivated to be a Protestant missionary in China within the historical context of World War I, Shimizu cooperated with his wife, Yokota Miho and then Koizumi Ikuko, to establish, sustain, and expand the Sūtei Gakuen in Beijing for Chinese girls. Into the 1920s, he developed what he came to define as “Orientalized Christianity” in May-Fourth Beijing, interwar Oberlin, and early-Showa Kyoto. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, he came to be regarded as a Japanese Protestant savior of Chinese civilization, an image created by the interaction of war propaganda, the Japanese commercial press, and his autobiographical writings and trans-Pacific campaign tour. He also joined Japanese WCTU activists to establish the Airinkan settlement in Beijing, which became a symbol in Japanese circles of Japanese Christian motherly love toward the Chinese. As the final chapter shows, however, Shimizu and other Japanese Protestants occupied an ambivalent space in wartime Japan; they enjoyed prestige as civilizing agents of Japanese empire but were simultaneously suspected as friends and co-believers of American Christians. Their liminal flexibility in the context of wartime Beijing became politicalized eventually within one year after the Pearl Harbor Attacks.

Returning home after Japan’s defeat in World War II, Japanese Protestants of the pre-1945 north China mission were still proactive in making civilian communications between China and Japan. With a brief recount of their postwar paths, the Epilogue reflects on general issues about religionists’ role in war and peace and their transnational Pan-nationalism built on civilizational hierarchy, teleological history, and progressive modernity, which are still permeating today’s world in the creating of new variants of ethnic and gender bias.