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“An Unbroken Chain Between Us”:  Thoughts on Missionary Encounters

by

Gavin James Campbell      

In 1869 Sophie Taylor became a widow. She and Horace had only celebrated

three years together. Her husband sailed the treacherous Cape Horn route from Boston to

the Pacific, a dangerous passage that had shattered families across New England, so she

knew the dangers of marrying a sailing man. But she hardly imagined he would die in

East Boston harbor. Yet one afternoon an ill-timed wave crushed him between the dock

and the ferry as he disembarked, leaving him only enough breath to whimper “Oh my

God, oh my God” before dying.  

All her life old Puritan gravestones and old Puritan ministers warned Sophie of

life’s impermanence, and a letter she received after Horace’s death sounded the old,

familiar theme. “Remember that there is a fatal point within one step,” a friend wrote.

“Will you be ready to flee from the wrath to come?” Frankly he thought not. Perhaps

Horace’s sudden death, then, would remind Sophie and the Taylors that God does not

always give His children leisure to repent. “Are you too proud to come?” he asked,

dropping into a preacher’s cadence, “He will make you humble. Are you too weak to

come? He will uphold you. Are you too busy to come? He will give you a precious hour

to spend.” “Friends!” he shouted, “let me say to you ‘Be Christian.’”1  

The condolence letter struck beloved themes in Puritan America, but what made

it remarkable was its author: a Japanese samurai and Amherst College senior named

                                                                                                               1 Niijima Jō to Horace Taylor’s family, December 21, 1869, Niijima Jō Zenshū, 10 vols. (Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1983-1996), vol.6:1-4. [emphasis in original. Niijima Jō Zenshū will hereafter be abbreviated as NJZ.]

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Joseph Neesima.2 In fact, the Taylors knew him well. Horace captained the clipper ship

Wild Rover that in 1865 brought him to the United States, and had even christened him

“Joe” when his stubborn tongue balked at Neesima’s Japanese name: Niijima Shimeta.

They spent nearly a year together on that voyage and by the end they admired each other

extravagantly. Even years later Horace insisted his Japanese “son” spend summer

vacations with the Taylors, and Niijima tacked the captain’s picture to his dorm room

wall. Knowing him so intimately, Niijima feared the Taylors would think him “very

impolite or unqualified” to harangue them about Jesus. After all, he had been baptized

only three years earlier and had never even owned a Bible until Horace gave him one.

Niijima used that contrast, however, to make a point. “You have heard of [Jesus] and

known of him as your Saviour from your childhood,” he chided the Taylors. “Why do

you hesitate still?” He offered to help. “If you have any doubt, fear, disinclination or

difficulty, drop me a line and tell me your case,” he concluded. “I will make especial

prayers for your conversion.”3 Just four years after landing in Boston, Niijima already

commanded the idioms of tent-revival Protestantism.  

A Japanese convert evangelizing a grieving American family reversed the

expected relationship between missionary and missionized. Nineteenth-century

Protestants assumed their foreign missions would transform the world. They did not

expect a former “heathen” to transform America. Thus, when Jesus exploded Niijima’s

life, none anticipated his conversion would reverberate back across the Pacific. Yet rather

than remain a distant, abstract convert tabulated in a missionary’s report, Niijima came to

                                                                                                               2 In America, where he wrote this letter, Niijima used the name Joseph Neesima (often spelled “Nee Sima”), though he retained his Japanese given name, Shimeta, when writing home. In 1875 after returning to Japan he changed his name to Niijima Jō. For more on his name changes see NJZ, 8:2-3. 3 Niijima Jō to Horace Taylor’s family, December 21, 1869, NJZ, 6:61-4.

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the United States. From 1865 to 1874 Americans heard his testimony, weighed his

character and judged his sincerity. And everyone agreed that, as one of his professors

concluded, “you cannot gild gold.”4 While Niijima’s flight to Christ inspired American

Protestants, his flight to the United States also stretched boundaries and raised questions.

What could hold foreign converts and American Protestants together across chasms of

language, race, history and culture? Would even the newest Christians have equal voice

shaping a global Protestant communion? Niijima’s presence made these questions

immediate. But so, too, did his enthusiasm. Niijima embraced his new home, his new

friends and his new Saviour, assuming a broad equality with all Christians and assuming

a shared goal. Niijima taught Americans that missionary encounters worked in two

directions.  

Historians have trouble interpreting the relationship between missionaries and

converts like Niijima, especially when the gunsmoke of conquest clouds choices.

Postcolonial scholars have dissected the imperialist ideologies missionaries pushed “to

alter existing modes of production and reproduction, to recast the taken-for-granted

surfaces of everyday life, [and] to re-make consciousness.”5 Niijima’s prayer –“let me be

civilized with Bible [sic]” – suggests their handiwork.6 He seems a colonized man, both a

                                                                                                               4 Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1891), 72. 5 John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28. See also John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Two works following a similar line, though with less nuance, are Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Paul W. Harris, “Cultural Imperialism and American Protestant Missionaries: Collaboration and Dependency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China,” The Pacific Historical Review 60 (August 1991): 309-38. 6 Hardy, Life and Letters, 12.

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victim and a collaborator.7 Yet recent scholarship also chronicles missionaries who

abandoned old habits, mastered new tongues and sympathized with natives battling

subjugation.8 The majority, meanwhile were just isolated, befuddled and helpless.

“Missionaries of course went out with all sorts of motives, and some of them were clearly

unwholesome,” concludes Lamin Sanneh. “Yet if we were to try to separate good from

bad motives, I daresay we would not, after a mountain of labor, advance the subject much

beyond the molehill of stalemate.”9 A path forward sidesteps missionaries and focuses

instead on “natives.”10 “While we have often viewed the adoption of Christianity… as a

                                                                                                               7 The most suspicious of Niijima’s spiritual independence are John E. van Sant, Pacific Pioneers: Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 64-78; and Ōta Yūzō, Niijima Jō: ryōshin no zenshin ni jūmanshitaru jōbu (Kyoto: Mineruba shobō, 2005). 8 See, for example, Erskine Clarke, By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (NY: Basic Books, 2013); Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 9 Lamin Sanneh, “Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex,” The Christian Century, April 8, 1987, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=143 [accessed September 5, 2014]. “To judge a missionary as necessarily ‘hero’ and ‘martyr’ or to go to the other extreme and distrust most of them as ‘corrupt’ ‘useless’ or ‘less than useless,’” complained one American missionary in China, “is to follow a rule of judging not found in Holy Writ.” Caroline P. Keith to Mary Plumer, July 21, 1851, in William C. Tenney, The Conflict and Victory of Life: Memoir of Miss Caroline P. Keith (NY: D. Appleton and Co., 1864), 124. Succinct critiques of the “cultural imperialist” paradigm are Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780-1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997): 367-391; Ryan Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity,” History and Theory 41 (October 2002): 301-325; and Brian Stanley, “Conversion to Christianity: The Colonization of the Mind?” International Review of Mission 92 (July 2003): 315-31. For a more sustained monograph, see Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, UK: Apollos, 1990). Stanley also makes the point that from a Christian standpoint, “cultural imperialism” cannot explain conversion because “Christian theology cannot rest content with any understanding of conversion to Christ as purely a matter of human agency, whether on the part of the evangelist or the convert. The New Testament compels Christians to insist that conversion to Christ is an act in which the agency of the Spirit of God is primary, and that of the evangelist and the convert merely secondary.” Stanley, “Conversion to Christianity,” 320. This adds further complexity to the conversion debate, one that social scientists quite understandably shun. But simply bypassing it and assuming instead a social scientific explanation regrettably robs converts like Niijima of the primary explanation for their conversion. 10 Among prominent examples see, Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989); Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857-1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (NY: Oxford University Press, 2005); Rachel Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Edward E. Andrews, “Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered: A Black Evangelist in West Africa, 1766-1816,” Journal of Church and State 51 (2009): 663-91; Jessie G. Lutz, ed., Pioneer Chinese Christian Women: Gender Christianity and Social Mobility (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press,

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passive subjugation to imperial and colonial authority,” writes Edward Andrews, “native

preachers used their sermons, letters, writings and even identities as fulcrums against

colonization, dispossession, and racial slavery.”11 Western missionary motives aside,

“native” Christians like Niijima “indigenized” their new faith. In fact, Niijima embraced

Christianity before ever meeting a missionary. He did not consider himself colonized or

subordinated. On the contrary, he felt enlarged and emboldened. The evidence, then,

seems a riddle, confirming both his oppression and his liberation.12  

Perhaps our paradigms need revising. When a Japanese convert evangelizes an

American family, who is the “foreign” missionary and who the “native”? Who is the

“Christian” and who the “heathen,” and who has a stronger claim to “orthodoxy”?

Scholars have mostly sidestepped these questions. Busy seeking the inspirations he carted

home, historians of Niijima’s American years assume influence flowed in one direction:

from the United States to Japan.13 Scholars of missions have assumed a similarly one-

sided exchange, though recently we have chronicled new converts building an

autonomous faith. Yet few examine the mutual impact of “native” conversion. Embracing

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         2010); Tracy Neale Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Native Conversion in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Lindford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (NY: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jay Riley Case, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920 (NY: Oxford University Press, 2012); Edward E. Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). For a perspective focused on Asia, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kip, “Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim,” in Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 127-48; Richard Fox Young and Jonathan A. Seitz, Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity, 1600s to the Present (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Felix Wilfred, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia (NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). 11 Andrews, Native Apostles, 6-7. 12 For the sake of brevity I am of course glossing over the vexing definition and timing of Niijima’s conversion. For more detailed analyses see Kitano Hiroyuki, “Niijima Jō ni okeru kaishin no mondai,” Soai Daigaku kenkyū ronshū 7 (1991): 43-58; Myōraku Makoto, “Niijima Jō no daiichi no kaishin to futatsu no jiden,” Niijima kenkyū 101 (February 2010): 156-69. 13 See, for example, Kitagaki Munehara, Niijima Jō to Amosuto Daigaku (Kyoto: Yamaguchi Shoten, 1993); Abe Masatoshi, Niijima Jō to Amerika (Okayama-shi: Daigaku Kyōiku shuppan, 2001); Itō Yahiko, “Niijima Jō no Amerika,” Doshisha dansō 30 (March 2010): 1-40.

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Christianity changed both missionary and convert, because, as Henrietta Harrison

observes, “people come to see themselves as members of a community that stretches far

beyond the nation-state.”14 Conversion is not simply a local matter, and Western

missionaries were not the only ones who traveled. “Ye are all one in Christ Jesus,”

American Protestants preached around the world, and by destabilizing boundaries

between domestic and foreign – between “us” and “them” – Niijima widened the

communion from “ye” to “we.” American condescension and confusion were perhaps

inevitable, but some sincerely revised their faith.15 That fellowship jointly built

challenges us to develop additional tools for thinking about religious conversion and

exchange. When Niijima wrote a letter to a grieving American family, he and the Taylors

built a bridge where as children they had known only water.  

LET ME BE CIVILIZED WITH BIBLE  

Until he was ten, Niijima lived the typical life of a samurai boy. He practiced

calligraphy, memorized Confucian texts, learned proper manners, hefted his two swords

and worshipped the great god of warriors, Hachiman. In 1854, however, Commodore

Perry sent Niijima’s life shooting off in a very different direction. The Convention of

Amity opening two Japanese ports to American trade sparked an intense internal debate

about how Japan should meet Western pressures. Niijima’s family came from a relatively

isolated domain in the Kōzuke region of northern Japan, but because Niijima lived mostly

                                                                                                               14 Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse, and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 9. A similar perspective is brilliantly developed in Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 15 Mark Y. Hanley, “Revolution at Home and Abroad: Radical Implications of the Protestant Call to Missions, 1825-1870,” in Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker, eds., The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 44-59.

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at his lord’s Edo estate, he could not escape the whirlwind of bickering engulfing the

capital. “Whenever two men meet, one is for opening trade,” he groaned, “and the other

is against it.”16 Neither side would back down and as opinions proliferated, so, too, did

cracks the Westerners could exploit. In the end, Niijima feared his own countrymen

would dismember Japan more efficiently than any Western army. He initially joined

those opposing foreign trade and practicing swordsmanship until he saw firsthand the

overpowering might of Western military hardware. He gave up weapons for books. He

read voraciously, trading texts with like-minded friends exploring Western science,

engineering, mathematics, navigation, warfare and anything they could find about the

outside world. Amidst this circulating stack of books he discovered Christianity.  

Niijima always explained meeting Jesus as Providence, but knowing Chinese

helped. While antebellum American teenagers struggled through Latin and Greek,

Niijima and his friends learned classical Chinese. Quite by accident, then, he could read

the missionary tracts written to convert Chinese but which were also smuggled across

Japan’s locked threshold. Their rosy portraits of Western societies and their skillful

blending of Christian and Confucian precepts made Christianity enormously intriguing.

Moreover their connection between Christianity and Western power seemed worth

pondering. But it was a condensed Bible -- and particularly the Genesis story -- Niijima

credited for turning his heart. He was a very frustrated young man when he read that

book: frustrated by his government’s ineptitude, frustrated by his timid parents pleading

he keep his head down while his nation collapsed, and frustrated attending his drunken,

                                                                                                               16 Quoted in Susumu Kawanishi, “Teachers and Friends of Niijima Jō During His Early Years,” in Kitagaki Munehara, ed., Niijima Jō no sekai: Eimin hyakunen no jiten kara (Kyoto: Kōyō shobō, 1990), 312.

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whoring feudal lord who seemed oblivious to learning, patriotism or even his own

dignity.  

As a samurai Niijima knew only obedience. Genesis exploded all his lesser

obligations without overturning society entirely. God taught him obedient rebellion. And

yet the dangers of studying Christianity in Japan remained so great Niijima despaired.

Ignoring his lord’s blustering, his father’s fists and the Shogun’s law, Niijima finally fled

in 1864 aboard an American merchant ship bound for Shanghai. Japan “is in trouble

because we have not been introduced to God’s teaching,” he told a friend as he sailed

away. “If all our people learn the teaching of the one and only God, we could defeat even

the mightiest European military, and our nation would thrive.”17 His heartbroken father

considered this all nonsense. “Think of me as dead for several years” was all his son

could say.18  

In truth, however, as he disappeared across the waves he had never felt more

alive. For the first time he could study Christianity without fear. Captain Horace Taylor

presented him an English Bible and despite stumbling through its antiquated words, it

brought Niijima “happiness beyond description.”19 In Hong Kong he bought a New

                                                                                                               17 Niijima Jō to Nikolai Kasatkin, May 24, 1864, NJZ, 3:16. 18 Niijima Jō to Niijima Tamiharu, February 21, 1866, NJZ, 3:28. Those interested in Niijima’s background in the years before he fled Japan in 1864 should begin with his two autobiographies: “Why I Departed From Japan” [1865] and “My Younger Days” [1882], both in NJZ, 7:3-31. Additional and valuable details are contained in numerous secondary works including Hardy, Life and Letters; Watanabe Minoru, Niijima Jō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1959); Wada Yōichi, Niijima Jō (Tokyo: Nihon kuristokyōdan shuppankyoku, 1973); Yoshida Hiroshi, Niijima Jō: jiyū e no senryaku (Tokyo: Shinkyō shuppansha, 1988); Inoue Katsuya, Niijima Jō: hito to shisō (Kyoto: Kōyō shobō, 1990); Kitagaki Munehara, ed., Niijima Jō no sekai: eimin hyakunen no jiten kara (Kyoto: Kōyō shobō, 1990); Miyazawa Masanori, Niijima Jō: kindai Nihon no senkakusha (Kyoto: Kōyō shobō, 1993); Ōta Yūzō, Niijima Jō: ryōshin no zenshin ni jūmanshitaru jōbu (Kyoto: Mineruva shobō, 2005), Yasuhiro Motoi, Ganso reberarisuto (Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 2008); Yuhiko Itō, Naruhodo Niijima Jō (Nara: Kizasushobō, 2012). Numerous valuable studies are also included in Niijima kenkyū (1954~) 19 Niijima Jō, “Kōkai Nikki,” NJZ, 5:40. For more on Niijima’s life at sea: Gavin James Campbell, “‘We Must Learn Foreign Knowledge’: The Transpacific Education of a Samurai Sailor,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 25 (2014): 5-24.

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Testament in Chinese translation, and with Scriptures in two languages he settled in for

study, often writing “Sunday” in his diary even when he left the remaining week blank.

He learned to pray as well, and when he safely reached Boston in 1865 after nearly a year

at sea his gratitude overflowed. “O Lord, Thou picked out me from darkness … and

bringeth me here, passing boundless ocean very safely,” he wrote. “O Lord, wash away

my sins, take up my evil heart and give me right spirit to understand and remember thy

holy word.” And then he recalled those back home. “O God,” he concluded, “wilt Thou

help me to destroy many gods and idols? Please destroy them with thy power and let me

be comforted.”20 In the meantime he hoped God would also help him find a school.  

News about Niijima’s unexpected arrival spread quickly. A New York paper told

readers about a young Japanese man calling himself Joseph and his eagerness “to learn

more of the true God and eternal life.”21 The young man’s fortitude and piety also

impressed Alpheus Hardy, a wealthy Boston merchant who sensed Providential intent.

After all, he owned the ship on which Niijima arrived, and a New England-trained

Protestant Japanese convert seemed God’s instrument to open that hostile land. Over the

next nine years Hardy paid all Niijima’s expenses, and pulled strings to get him into elite

Massachusetts schools, beginning with Phillips Academy, then Amherst College and

finally Andover Seminary, where in 1874 Niijima received ordination. American

Protestants took enormous pride in their part of Niijima’s drama. But in fact they only

obliquely steered Niijima’s faith. Niijima never met a Protestant before leaving Japan in

1864, and the only Christian he had known was an Orthodox priest serving the Russian

consulate in Hakodate. Niijima had managed his own conversion.                                                                                                                  20 Hardy, Life and Letters, 49-50. 21 New York Observer and Chronicle, November 9, 1865; this was picked up later by another religious paper: “The Japanese and the Bible,” Bible Society Record 11 (February 1866): 20.

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From beginning to end, no one expected Niijima would stay in America. He was

supposed to return home slaying many gods and idols. Shortly after Niijima arrived a

senior official in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions anointed

him a “messenger of salvation, through the blood of the Lamb, to his benighted

countrymen.”22 Eight years later at Niijima’s ordination a Boston minister reminded him

“you believe -- we believe -- that the divine intent … was preparation to preach the

Gospel in Japan. Otherwise your life at Phillips Academy, at Amherst College, at

Andover Theological Seminary, was comparatively meaningless; and this ordaining

Council is altogether meaningless.”23 American Protestants embraced and admired

Niijima, but his education’s utilitarian focus isolated him from his American peers. Few

Andover classmates, after all, imagined Niijima a future colleague. While his friends

conceived of their own work globally, they assumed Niijima would confine his to Japan.

His Andover credentials strengthened his claim to speak for American Protestants, but

not necessarily to them.  

In some ways Niijima accepted these boundaries. He loved his adopted home,

but he never contemplated settling. Global missions inspired him, but he never wondered

where he would labor. “I will go back to Japan,” he vowed, “and persevere to turn the

people to Jesus from [the] Devil.”24 Rather than declaring independence as his wisdom

and experience increased, Niijima promised Hardy he would “try with my utmost power

to conform my whole future to your chief object, that is to say, that I should preach the

                                                                                                               22 “The Bible for the Unevangelized,” Bible Society Record 11 (November 1866): 162. 23 “Rev. Joseph Neesima,” The Missionary Herald 20 (December 1874): 383. 24 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, October 27, 1866, NJZ 6:12. See also Niijima Jō to Mary E. Hidden, August 13, 1869, NJZ 6:56.

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crucified Saviour.”25 And living in America cemented his certainty that God had

demonstrated His favor raising the United States above Japan. He warned a friend back

home that history and his own experience showed “countries that worship God inevitably

prosper but a people that do not will inevitably perish.”26 Hence Niijima could with

neither irony nor sarcasm beg God to “let me be civilized with [the] Bible.”27 Imperialist

vanity and Protestant conceit blighted his relationship with Jesus, his American

colleagues and the unconverted in his own country.  

 

HOW TRULY WE ARE ONE IN CHRIST  

It is startling, then, that sometimes Niijima still broke through. His presence and

sincerity made many Americans concede that this runaway samurai made them, in their

own estimation, better Christians.  

He certainly made a vivid impression. Few small-town New Englanders had ever

seen anyone from Asia, let alone Japan. “I was a kind of novelty,” he wrote one summer

while hiking rural Massachusetts. “I was invited out to ... dinners and tea, and was asked

... so many questions.”28 Normally he did not mind. After all, he was equally curious

about Americans. So one autumn afternoon he wore his samurai clothes to entertain his

Amherst roommate and a visiting missionary. Another day he spent hours crafting a letter

to a Minnesota minister who asked about life and faith among everyday Japanese. “It is

my great pleasure and privilege to inform any person about my country,” Niijima wrote,

“if he desires to know of her not merely for a curiosity but for advancing Christ’s

                                                                                                               25 Niijima Jō to Alpheus and Susan Hardy, September 3, 1872, NJZ 6:120. 26 Niijima Jō to Iida Itsunosuke, February 25, 1871, NJZ 3:89. 27 Hardy, Life and Letters, 12. 28 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, August 18, 1871, NJZ 6:86.

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kingdom.”29 Interest was not always so benign. He once passed cautiously through North

Adams, knowing the town still simmered from tensions ignited the year before when the

town’s biggest employer brought west coast Chinese laborers to break a strike. “I felt

somewhat afraid to go to the place so early in the morning lest I might be taken for a

‘heathen Chinee’,” Niijima confessed.30 Sometimes people in unfamiliar towns locked

their doors.  

Suspicion and naked curiosity did not surprise him. What did amaze him was

how often Christians welcomed him. As evening approached during a Vermont hike in

1868, for example, he saw an inviting barn and asked the owner if he could spend the

night there. The owner’s mother came out onto the porch, heard Niijima’s story, and said

she recognized him from the religious papers. “I would not let [a] Christian man sleep in

our barn,” she insisted and led Niijima to a bedroom in the house, made sure he was

comfortable and the following morning gave him breakfast, some tracts and a small

pocket hymn-book. Her son then drove Niijima to the village more than a mile away.

“Some people are so liberal and good to such a stranger,” Niijima marveled.31 But it was

not the first time. A year earlier, lost and penniless in New Bedford, Niijima approached

a minister for help. At first Reverend Craig directed him to the sailor’s home, but after

hearing Niijima’s Christian testimony he changed his mind, took him to the city’s most

elegant hotel and paid for his room and meals. Embarrassed, Niijima begged for

                                                                                                               29 Niijima Jō to Henry Albert Stimson, February 6, 1870, NJZ 6:65-70. For a similar letter see Niijima Jō to John Gardiner Smart, March 17, 1869, NJZ 6:47-50. 30 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, August 18, 1871, NJZ 6:88. 31 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, August 22, 1868, NJZ 6:40-41.

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something more modest, but Craig disappeared into the night saying, “when I go to your

country and am a stranger, then please show me your kindness.”32  

From the time he arrived in Boston strangers opened their wallets, homes and

hearts. Classmates volunteered to tutor him, his favorite Amherst professor insisted he

join the family dinner every week, and when Niijima walked around the Phillips

Academy campus “even the president of the school … shakes my hand … and politely

asks how I’m doing.”33 None, however, could surpass Alpheus and Susan Hardy, the

Boston couple who took him in, paid for everything from haircuts to tuition and never

questioned God’s decision to choose Niijima as His divine instrument. In short, Niijima’s

American friends strengthened his faith. Their generosity redeemed promises made in

those Chinese tracts he had risked his life to read. “Their way of life is so admirable,” he

told his father of students at Andover Seminary, “that I wish I could show them to other

Japanese youths.”34 They confirmed his trust in divine providence, for Niijima could find

no other explanation why the Hardys freely gave their “parental care and unceasing love

to this poor and helpless runaway boy.”35  

Yet the spiritual influence was mutual. The sheer audacity of Niijima’s faith --

his breathtaking leap across the Pacific -- inspired those who felt they had never risked

much for Jesus. While attending Phillips Academy, for example, he lodged with a

spinster named Mary Hidden. At first she felt awkward around the young Japanese

stranger still learning English, but his character and sincerity impressed her. By the time

he graduated two years later, she confessed Niijima had made her a better Christian.

                                                                                                               32 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, August 8, 1867, NJZ 6:16-17. 33 Niijima Jō to Niijima Tamiharu, March 29, 1867, NJZ 3:35. 34 Niijima Jō to Niijima Tamiharu, March 29, 1867, NJZ 3:33. 35 Niijima Jō to Alpheus and Susan Hardy, April 30, 1872, NJZ 6:110-11.

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“From the first I have felt that it was a privilege to have his influence thrown in my way.

[He] has been a talisman oftentimes to check my forgetful heart, and for this reason even

I am very sorry to have him leave us,” she confessed. “In him we are brought to see how

truly we are one in Christ, -- the whole family of man.”36 At Amherst College, too,

Niijima’s example inspired his classmates. William Holland hardly knew what to make

of his peculiar new roommate but decided that in living together “I will be doing him a

real kindness.” Holland’s condescension quickly evaporated. Watching Niijima’s private

devotions convinced Holland that he “is a thorough Christian, and a perfect gentleman.

He knows much more of the amenities and proprieties of life than many who have whiter

faces and greater means of knowing what is proper.”37 Another classmate remembered

that “there was in him an uplifting influence which made one wish to be on the heights

where he lived and walked.”38 Initially assuming Niijima required spiritual guidance, his

American friends swiftly realized he had much to teach.  

Nor was Niijima meek in his Lord’s service. Although preparing himself for

Japan, he evangelized anyone whose soul he deemed in peril. In the autumn of 1866, for

example, even before he was baptized, he sat with Abigail Chandler as her illness

worsened. “Mrs. Chandler,” he told her, “I pray to god for your blessing and I believe He

will answer my prayer. Won’t you pray to Him?” She sobbed and loudly called upon the

Lord. The commotion roused the house and Chandler’s niece gasped hearing her aunt

invoke Jesus for the first time. “But from my single question in that Sabbath evening,”

Niijima told the Hardys, “she turned her heart unto Him who takes sins away from the

                                                                                                               36 Mary Hidden to Susan Hardy, July 11, 1867, in Hardy, Life and Letters, 67. See also Ephraim Flint to Julius H. Seelye, August 31, 1867, in Hardy, Life and Letters, 68-70. 37 Quoted in Kitagaki Munehara, “Niijima Jō to Horando,” in Kitagaki, ed., Niijima Jō no sekai, 134, n.5 and n.7. 38 Hardy, Life and Letters, 74.

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world.” Chandler died the following month, but Niijima believed his prayer helped

reserve her a seat on God’s right hand.39 On other occasions he addressed wide-eyed

Sunday school youngsters, pleaded with an American friend to “give up his heart to his

Saviour,” and at Niagara Falls scrapped with a German atheist.40 In a North Adams shoe

factory he tried converting its Chinese workers, and he was overjoyed when some

Japanese students at nearby Monson Academy asked him for spiritual guidance.41 Invited

to discuss the Japan mission with a Maine congregation, Niijima looked out over the

pews and abandoned his theme. “I turned my subject to directly speaking to them,” he

said. “I spoke to them about the grace of our Saviour and the freeness of his Salvation

offered to sinners.” For thirty minutes fishermen, farmers, merchants and mothers

listened while a Christian samurai told them about Jesus.42  

 

READY TO WELCOME ALL  

Like a good Puritan, Niijima encouraged and scolded, and nothing frustrated him

more than complacency amidst spiritual abundance. He could not understand the

grumbling he heard after a preacher urged more energetic support for domestic missions.

“I felt so sorry for their coldness in their heart and disinterest for the Church of Christ and

for the welfare of their own country,” he wrote. Perhaps they did not understand the harm

they caused. “All heathens look at America as the centre of the Christian light,” he

explained. “If the centre of the light has not much intenseness, how could it enlight[en]

                                                                                                               39 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, September 10, 1866, NJZ 6:10; Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, October 27, 1866, NJZ 6:11. 40 Niijima Jō to Andover Friends, October 13, 1874, NJZ 6:144. For the German “infidel and spiritualist” at Niagara Falls see Niijima Jō to Mary E. Hidden, August 21, 1871, NJZ, 6:90-1. 41 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, August 18, 1871, NJZ, 6:88. 42 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, August 17, 1874, NJZ 6:141.

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those who are lying in the remote dark corners?” He could only “pray earnestly for those

Christians who live for themselves and not for Christ.”43 Niijima frankly told another

minister that Americans clung to comfort. “I think some people in this country [are]

interest[ed] to hear something about the heathens, [and] give money for the mission

cause, but do not give themselves up to that work, because they must separate themselves

from parents, sisters, brothers and all friends.” Having abandoned home and ignored his

father’s increasingly desperate pleas to return, Niijima could offer his own life as

testimony. Instead he suggested the minister remind his congregation of Scripture: He

that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.44  

Niijima thought it strange so many Americans prayed for the “heathen” and yet

lived in self-willed darkness. So when another minister sympathized about Japan’s lost

souls, Niijima thanked him but gently requested they not distract his work at home.

“Would you also ask some persons, who still cho[o]se their own way and folly and do not

care for their spiritual happiness, to distinguish themselves from those children of

darkness [i.e. the Japanese] and become the humble followers of the Lord Jesus

Christ[?]”45 Niijima intended no hostility nor did he gloat spotting hypocrisy. But

Americans worried him. They seemed strangely apathetic to their divine privilege and the

demands it required. With his country and his family on the fiery precipice, Niijima had

no patience. “I [feel] so sad for the miserable condition of my country men and also for

the want of true consecrated labor,” he wrote barely keeping pen to paper as tears

                                                                                                               43 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, October 24, 1869, NJZ 6:59. 44 Matthew 10:37. He also advised the minister to point to 2 Corinthians 1:5-7 and Matthew 10:39. Niijima Jō to John Gardiner Smith, March 17, 1869, NJZ 6:49. 45 “May the Lord bless your effort and influences among your people,” he continued, “and bring them all to the knowledge of His Saving grace.” Niijima Jō to Henry Albert Stimson, February 6, 1870, NJZ 6:69. [emphasis in original]

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overflowed.46 Thus Niijima encouraged Americans to remember they formed but one part

of a global communion united through Christ’s sacrifice.  

In 1874 Niijima received ordination and returned home. After nine years he had

convinced many Americans to accept him as a spiritual brother. “God has taken you

specially in hand,” a minister told him. “You are … less a native of Japan than a son of

the Most High.”47 Many watched closely as he gradually built a Christian school in

Kyoto. However, in a sense he never left America. Across the country Protestant

preachers and Sunday school teachers kept him before their congregations as both

encouragement and example. In 1891, for example, a Methodist minister in Brooklyn

recounted Niijima’s life and told his congregation “while our opportunities were so much

greater than those of Joseph Neesima much more would be demanded of us.”48 Young

Missouri Presbyterians likewise heard Niijima’s story, and Salt Lake City

Congregationalists listened as their preacher compared Niijima to the Apostle Paul.

Protestants in Philadelphia and Germantown, Pennsylvania established “Neesima guilds”

to support his Kyoto school, and he appeared in Protestant devotional literature as a tale

of exemplary faith. In short, Niijima’s influence did not dissipate after leaving America,

but continued even after his death in 1890.  

In part Niijima’s personality and remarkable story helped keep him before

American Protestants. But so, too, did the complex power of his message: that all

Christians belonged to a divine fellowship. “In the plans of God all branches of the

human family stand connected,” one of Niijima’s favorite professors once wrote, and so

Christianity was “a system for all times and not for any one period; for every people and

                                                                                                               46 Niijima Jō to John Gardiner Smith, March 17, 1869, NJZ 6:49. [emphasis in original] 47 “Rev. Joseph Neesima,” The Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad 70 (December 1874): 338. 48 Brooklyn Eagle, October 12, 1891.

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not for a single nation.”49 Niijima seized this frequent claim as Christianity’s most

powerful appeal. “In [his] free invitation Christ does not limit it to any individuals or any

nations,” Niijima told an American congregation. “He offers it to all men and is ready to

welcome all.”50 Jesus was not American and God did not need local adaptation. Best

known for building a Christian school in Japan, perhaps Niijima’s more remarkable

achievement was convincing many Americans to engage seriously their Sunday rhetoric

about universal Christian communion.  

 

Niijima’s American adventure confirms many assumptions about missionary

encounters. It reveals the barbed wire binding imperial power and Christian missionaries,

and also how “native” converts adapted their faith around local needs. But Niijima’s case

also suggests nuances. He reminds us, for example, that “native” converts found their

own ways into Christianity. “It is my happiest choice,” he once told a friend.51 Moreover,

though imperialism brought Niijima the Gospel, and though he believed accepting Christ

was Japan’s best national defense, he warned against a functional faith. “There is truth in

the Christian religion,” he told a Japanese colleague. “We ought to take truth because it is

truth, and not as a mere instrumentality.”52 Niijima’s Christianity, then, deserves a wider

frame. In Christ, Niijima claimed a fellowship beyond family, clan, lord and country. Not

many Americans could reciprocate, but a surprising number did join him exploring the

frontiers of a global Christianity.  

                                                                                                               49 Julius Hawley Seelye, “Our Place in History,” [ms sermon], Julius Hawley Seelye Papers, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. 50 Niijima Jō, “God’s Love,” [1874] NJZ 7:124. 51 Niijima Jō to Susan Hardy, December 16, 1872, NJZ 6:124. 52 Niijima Jō to Alpheus and Susan Hardy, March 19, 1872, NJZ 6:103.

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Of course few nineteenth-century “native” Christians could follow Niijima and

so literally overcome geographic boundaries.53 But even at home their conversions

stretched Christianity. In 1865, just weeks before Christmas and only a short time after

receiving baptism, Yano Mototaka lay dying. “I must say my last ‘goodbye’ to you,” he

told Margaret Ballagh, a missionary who sat by his bed. “I am going to see Jesus, and

when I see him I will tell him all you and your good husband have done for me.” Startled

and moved, Margaret confessed that “until his death, I had not realized Japan was as near

heaven as America.” Far from family, Margaret always assumed she must flee foreign

shores and meet death at home, but Yano’s words “opened the gate,” she wrote. “I feel

that it stands ajar for me even here.” Yano’s promise also filled Margaret’s husband with

awe. “Can you conceive of a higher reward, or a greater blessing, than ‘to be mentioned

to Jesus’?” he marveled.54 Neither Margaret nor James mocked Yano’s belief that he

could bring their names to Jesus. Yano, moreover, felt sure Jesus would listen. In short,

the missionary encounter often stretched both convert and missionary.  

A scholarly paradigm emphasizing conflict and resistance can miss these quieter

exchanges. We risk rushing past flawed and perplexed people struggling to reimagine the

boundaries of Christian fellowship. They did not always succeed. Too often they

retreated into ideologies that from hindsight seem petty, destructive and demeaning. No

wonder one infuriated American in Japan suggested putting every missionary on a ship

                                                                                                               53 For case studies of some nineteenth-century converts who traveled to the US see John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (NY: Knopf, 2014); Jeffrey K. Lyons, “Memoirs of Henry Obookiah: A Rhetorical History,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 38 (2004): 35-57; Connie A. Shemo, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872-1937 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2011); Amy Bangerter, “The New Englandization of Yung Wing,” in Monica Chiu, ed., Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 42-65. 54 Quoted in Anne C. Kwantes, She Has Done a Beautiful Thing for Me: Portraits of Christian Women in Asia (Manila: OMF Literature Inc., 2005), 94.

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and scuttling it “one thousand miles from shore.”55 Missionaries were human and those

who heard them preach suffered the consequences. Yet Niijima, Yano and countless

others encountered Christ on their own terms, crafting a faith that felt fresh and startling

and revealing to themselves and to the missionaries. “There must be messengers from the

Orient,” one missionary in China concluded, men and women who could “not only give

us an understanding of religion as the Oriental sees it, but … who will enlarge and enrich

our conceptions of Christianity.”56 At their best, Niijima, Yano and other “native”

converts did precisely that. “I trust our mutual sympathy and prayers will ever be an

unbroken chain between us,” Niijima once wrote American friends, “although space and

sea will separate us quite far off.”57 More than distance and water separated Japan from

America, but Niijima and his American admirers at least sketched out a bridge, one

allowing two-way traffic.  

                                                                                                               55 Lafcadio Hearn to Basil Hall Chamberlain, October 31, 1893, in Elizabeth Bisland, ed., The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910), 190. 56 Edward Hicks Hume, quoted in Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries, 55. 57 Niijima Jō to Andover Friends, October 13, 1874, NJZ 6:144.