Difficult Conversations across Religions, Race and Empires: American Women Missionaries and Japanese Christian Women during the 1930s and 40s

This paper focuses on the difficult conversations made by the American and Japanese women of the foreign missionary enterprise to reconcile Shintoism and Japanese patriotic nationalism with their Christian faiths during the 1930s and 40s when the two empires of the United States and Japan were heading towards war.  Through a case study of two women, Charlotte B. DeForest, the last missionary president of Kobe College which pioneered as a missionary women’s college in Japan and Takeda Kiyoko, her student, who became one of the leading scholars on Japanese intellectual history and a Christian leader in the post-war ecumenical movement, for example, in Japan YWCA, this paper argues that these women managed to reimagine and formulate more egalitarian and ecumenical visions of Christian cosmopolitanism in their struggles to navigate political pressures both in Japan and U.S. They traveled across multiple national boundaries through imperial routes via their missionary networks, including various countries in Asia, Europe and racialized communities in the U.S.  This paper argues that the missionary experience in Japan across generations as well as the personal relations of the transnational missionary networks enabled these women to formulate such new visions of ecumenical cosmopolitanism. Accordingly, however, the strong coalition of American and Japanese missionary women, rooted in more than a half century history of missionary contribution to women’s education in Japan, reinscribed as well as challenged the two empires.