Preface and Acknowledgments

Very few books take half a century to gestate, but this one did.During these years, I have received great help from numerous organizations and individuals, some young and excited by the mechanics of research, others with great wisdom born of long experience and various specialties.To them all, as well as those who brought me up, I owe thanks.My upbringing, beginning with earliest memories, predisposed me to the topic.The study of Uchimura developed in reaction to this upbringing and education, my further experience as a graduate student, and developments since then as I taught at the University of British Columbia.My family considered the development of Christianity in Asia important.On my mother's side of the family, three generations had spent much of their lives and careers as missionaries in India.My maternal great-grandfather had founded a college in Lahore.His son, my grandfather, had been born there, and his wife, my grandmother, had lived there more than three decades.My mother had been born there.These women in our suburban Chicago home spoke Hindustani among themselves.Missionary friends visited our home.When they travelled from coast to coast on their year-long sabbaticals, they changed trains in Chicago and visited us.Their conversations made conditions in various Asian countries come to life.To become a missionary seemed a good and necessary career and a natural choice for me.When the Second World War swept me into service, I studied Japanese at the Naval School of Oriental Languages.This led to work in the Allied Occupation of Japan in Tokyo.There I found myself relieved to be in Asia but not as a missionary.This sense increased as a missionary friend, Egon Hessel, relayed to me a request from a Japanese pastor.He sought a choirmaster for his church.I had spent many years in choirs and played the pipe organ, so the request pleased me.It seemed a good way to escape from the military milieu of my work and meet Japanese as individuals.It also seemed better to be asked to participate in Christian work by Japanese Christians than to

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