JOURNAL ARTICLE
Bunji and Toshi Kida and Friends Missions to the Japanese in California
Quaker History
Vol. 95, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 1-25 (25 pages)
Published By: Friends Historical Association
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41947574
Bunji and Toshi Kida and Friends Missions to the
Japanese in California
By Stephen W. Angel?
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Quaker missionary efforts with the Japanese began in 1885, when Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) sent Joseph and Sarah Ann Cosand to Tokyo to initiate a mission there. About the early stages of this mission, there is fair amount of literature, much of it by contemporary Quakers who were intimately involved in this mission work.' It is clear that influential Japanese, including Inazo Nitobe, soon to be a prominent educator and diplomat, were very active in helping to spark the interest of American Friends for such a mission.' Despite the well-known involvement of Nitobe and other Japanese in the beginning of this enterprise, however, most literature on Japanese missions follows the model of Christianity radiating out from the Anglo-American Christian Quaker homeland. One implicit theme running through much of this literature (and indeed literature on nineteenth-century missions as a whole) is a lack of reciprocity, built upon an inherently inegalitarian understanding that Christian Americans were rescuing darker-skinned peoples unacquainted with the more sublime forms of religious truth.'
There is, however, an alternative model for the understanding of Quaker missions, one of a reciprocal flow of missionaries and ideas across oceans, developed ably in Frederick Tolles' Quakers and the Atlantic Culture in a discussion of the relationships between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and American Friends. "The principal cement of the Atlantic Quaker community was the traveling ministry. . . . The Quaker ministers, constantly circulating through the vast Atlantic world, were not only messengers of the gospel of the Inward Light; they were cultural 'carriers' who helped to hold the larger Atlantic Community together." Tolles defined the Quakers' Atlantic Community as "a community held together by the intangible yet powerful bonds of love, fellowship, and a common faith."4 If his analysis is in any way transferable to the vaster and far more culturally diverse Pacific region (in other words, if we can meaningfully talk about "Quakers and Pacific Culture"), then we ought to be able to discern a similar reciprocity among the circulation of Quaker ministers in the twentieth century in that part of the world.
This essay will examine the lives of Bunji and Toshi Kida and other Quaker ministers who came from Japan in the early twentieth century, in
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* Stephen W. Angell is the Geraldine C. Leatherock Professor of Quaker Studies at the Eariham School of Religion. He would like to thank Brian Masaru Hayashi and Jacci Welling for their helpful comments on this essay.
