Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890-1930. By Jon Thares Davidann. (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1998. 207 pp. $37.50, isbn 0-934223-43-2.)

In the 1880s, American evangelical missionaries under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) traveled to Japan with the intention of bringing Christianity to young Japanese men. Japan was considered to be fertile ground for evangelization and a gateway to the rest of Asia. Contrary to the usual construction of foreign missionary work as cultural imperialism, however, Jon Thares Davidann's study demonstrates how individual Japanese Christians forged a nationalistic form of Christianity that ultimately challenged and marginalized the American Protestant enterprise. 1

American missionaries arrived with the belief that progress flowed from west to east, compounded by attitudes of Japanese racial inferiority and Western superiority. On the Japanese side, during the early years of the Meiji Restoration (1868-1890), Japanese of the former samurai class felt that the traditional religions had lost their moral authority and adopted Christianity as an international religion that would bring Japan into the twentieth century. . . .

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