Leaven of Love Beyond Empires: Visions of Egalitarianism and Cultural Pluralism in the American Women’s Missionary Enterprise, Japan, 1930s–40s

This paper will explore how the transnational women’s missionary enterprise of American women missionaries and Japanese women challenged and persisted through the wartime crisis when they were caught between the two empires of U.S. and Japan in the late 1930s and 1940s. American women in mission have long pioneered in creating transnational women’s networks across the boundaries of nation-state, race and religion.  When they encountered rapidly modernizing Japan in the late nineteenth century, they founded the first women’s colleges in Japan because the gender-based mission theory did not allow women to preach the gospel and women’s colleges benefited both American and Japanese women and forged strong coalitions.  Thus, when tensions between the two empires rose and eventually culminated in WWII, they struggled to reconfigure new egalitarian visions of Christian internationalism to seek possibilities for future peace yet had difficulty in reconciling differences.  This paper will discuss what core ideas developed and prevailed beyond wartime crisis by focusing on the relationship between Charlotte B. DeForest, the last missionary president of Kobe College, a women’s college founded and developed by American Protestant missionary women of ABCFM and Takeda (Cho) Kiyoko, her student who became a leading Christian scholar on Japanese intellectual history and professor at International Christian University in Japan. Takeda’s works include serving for both student and Japan YWCA, translations of Reinhold Niebuhr’s works, works on conflicting images of Japanese emperor and founding of the first research institute of Asian cultures in Japan. Drawing on interviews of Takeda and writings by DeForest and Takeda, this paper argues that new egalitarian visions of cultural pluralism were created even as diplomatic relationships between Japan and the United States broke down.