Ushigome Methodist Church, Ushigome, Tokyo, c. 1905.

Ushigome Methodist Church, Ushigome, Tokyo, c. 1905. The original church (right), founded by Dr. George Kirkland, was completed in 1881 in a neighborhood of what is now Shinjuku Ward.

Ushigome Methodist Church was established in 1881 in the Ushigome district of Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, during the period when Christianity was regaining a foothold in Japan following the lifting in 1873 of the Bateren Edict, the ban of Christianity first put in place by daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1580s and continued during the succeeding Tokugawa shogunate.

Christianity had been banned not because it was a religion per se but because of a prevailing belief that the true mission of the Christian missionaries was to convert the Japanese population, overthrow the government, and transform Japan into a colony; that Japan would suffer the same fate as China or India and was to be picked apart by the nascent Western imperialists.

Ushigome Methodist Church was one of several congregations founded under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada who became actively involved in missionary work in Japan soon after the Meiji government allowed its return.

Pre-1940 Catholic and mainstream Protestant missionaries sought more to establish educational and social institutions to spread Christian teachings and values than in proselytizing for converts; as a means to assist (and, yes, sometimes take advantage of) the government’s modernization efforts, especially with regard to women and children.

Establishing congregations and training Japanese clergy to be the ministers were part of those efforts. One of several Methodist churches established in Tokyo, Ushigome Methodist Church likely played a role in promoting literacy, education, and Western learning in the northwestern wards of Tokyo City from Shinjuku Ward through the 1930s.

Churches actively supported or were directly linked to schools that taught Western subjects alongside Christian doctrine. Two schools of higher learning founded by missionaries or Christian converts would become leading private universities in pre-war Japan: Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, founded in 1874 by the American Episcopal Church,, and Doshisha University, founded by convert and Amherst College graduate Joseph Hardy Neesima (Niijima Jō) in 1875.