Uchimura Kanzo and Modern Japan

The period in which Uchimura Kanzo lived was a time when modern Japan achieved national unity. He experienced a series of victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, and spent his life under the rapidly growing Japanese militarism that followed. Uchimura, who lived in such an era, constructed a new worldview through Christianity. For Uchimura, in particular, the question of how to reconcile Christianity as a Western religion with his homeland, Japan, was the ideological and practical challenge of his life. Uchimura, as he is well known for his refusal to bow deeply to the Imperial Rescript on Education in the formal ceremony held at the First Higher School, and his insistence on anti-war, seems to have been a prominent figure who clashed repeatedly with the nationalism of his time and was at odds with the state. However, Uchimura was also a Christian and a patriot who loved Japan all his life, as his famous love for the “two Js” (Jesus and Japan) shows. For Uchimura, the “two J's” are a powerful indicator of the inseparability of Christianity from nationalism, and the more strongly he concentrated on the “two J's,” the more contradictory this inevitably became. In this paper, I have considered Uchimura's thought and its meaning from the aspect of his perception of Japan and his so-called view of the nation, bearing in mind that Uchimura's thought was closely related to the situation of modern Japan in which he was situated. For Uchimura, the fact that Christian faith and love for Japan coexisted without any contradiction made it impossible or impractical to penetrate the problematic nature of the emperor state, which had a religious character, as a device to ensure the political legitimacy of modern Japan. In other words, Uchimura's fundamental problematic focus was on Christianity for Japan.