CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS IN JAPAN
M. William STEELE
Beginning with Fukuzawa Tukichi in late nineteenth century Japan, there has
been a sustained, although often muted, call for responsible individualism.
Pre-1868 Japan was dominated by ideologies
of
sacrifice. In the pursuit
of
the
greater good, private initiative was discouraged. The individual was expected
to comply with the wishes
of
the family, the village, and the
state-with
no
questions asked. Fukuzawa rejected this Confucian legacy and, through edu-
cation, sought to create a citizenry that "would be a stimulus to the
government, and not its plaything" (Fukuzawa 1969, 26). Later, in the imme-
diate postwar period, thinkers such as Maruyama Masao and Otsuka Hisao
renewed attempts to re-structure Japanese society (Maruyama 1986). Their
watchword was "subjectivity" (shutaisei), a quality they felt essential in the
functioning
of
a democratic society (Koschmann 1996). At the outset
of
the
twenty-first century, the extent to which Japan has been able to transcend
groupism and values attached to subservience and dependence is open to
question.
Since post-Reformation Christianity has played a strong role in the devel-
opment
of
political democracy and responsible individualism in Europe and
the Americas, one might expect Christianity, once introduced into Japan, to
be similarly involved in modem Japanese political development. Indeed there
were thinkers such as Kozaki Hiromichi who sought to replace Confucianism
with Christianity as the foundation
of
Japanese culture (Kozaki 1892; 1889).
The case
of
Uchimura Kanzo is often held up as an example
of
Christian
resistance to the imperial ideology
of
the Meiji state. In 1891 he refused to
bow low before the Imperial Rescript on Education; later, during the Russo-
Japanese War, he was one
of
the few people who dared to speak against the
war.' Other Christians paved the way for the introduction
of
socialism and
communism in Japan (Scheiner 1970; Copeland 1954). However, Japanese
Christians who advocated individualism, pacifism, and humanism, and who
resisted the family state ideology and imperial mythmaking, were few and far
between. As Basil Hall Chamberlain noted in his 1912 essay "Shinto, the
