British Missionaries and Japanese Studies in Pre-war Japan

INTRODUCTION ALONG WITH COMMERCE and diplomatic recognition, the British set out to bring the benefits of Christianity to the Japanese in the mid-nineteenth century. For the ordinary Japanese, who had little chance to travel, the British missionary was a microcosm of British society. The missionary, on the other hand, was engaged in personalized diplomacy, conducting Anglo-Japanese relations at a different level from the government-to-government variety practiced by Foreign Office diplomats. The Christian presses and missionary society journals and magazines in Britain ensured that missionary views reached a large audience. One of the results of this activity is the accumulated records of the work of British missionary societies in Japan and the papers of individual missionaries held in British archives, university libraries and church organizations as well as the enormous canon of published literature about Japan by missionaries. This represents a major source of information held in Britain about Japan perhaps only third to formal government Foreign Office and Admiralty-War Office materials. While American Protestant missionaries challenged Japanese culture, British Anglicans were different and sought to affirm Japanese society. Cyril Powles (1918–2013), a former Canadian Anglican missionary turned academic, has argued that Anglicans ‘preferred to serve Japan as the Established Church of England served its own society, by engaging in a wide variety of social and cultural pursuits’. Powles also has stressed that missionaries led by the Americans James Curtis Hepburn (1815–1911), the American Presbyterian lay doctor, and William Elliot Griffis (1843–1928), the Congregationalist pastor, but including the Britons John Batchelor (1854–1944), Walter Dening (1846–1913), and Arthur Lloyd (1852–1911), should be ranked as a second group alongside diplomats like Ernest Mason Satow (1843–1929), William George Aston (1841–1911) and Algernon Mitford (1837–1916) or scholars and journalists like Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) and Frank Brinkley (1841–1912), who were trailblazers responsible for the first competent works on the language, history and literature of Japan. This paper focuses on Batchelor, Dening and Lloyd not only because of their pioneering importance to the development of Japanese Studies but also because their writings embody characteristics and interests also found in the works of other British missionaries or their contemporary secular Japanologists in the culture, history and religions of Japan.

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