State and Religion: American Missionaries’ Struggle with the Shinto Shrine, 1936–39

On November 16, 1940, S.S. Mariposa, an American ocean liner, left the port of Busan, Korea, heading to San Francisco. On board were 219 Americans, 189 of whom were Protestant missionaries and their families. Alarmed about the impending hostility between Japan and America, missionaries grudgingly abandoned their enterprises, hoping they would return soon and resume their missions. Japan’s aggression against America surprised most missionaries, but many had already sensed that the political climate was changing since the mid-1930s. The colonial government in Korea, which had been cautious not to antagonize the mission community, began speaking in a new tone. Particularly, it professed that it would no longer tolerate American mission schools’ unwillingness to participate in quasi-religious rituals conducted at Shinto shrines. Facing this change in policy, American missionaries turned to their government for help.

My paper argues that missionaries’ struggle with the shrine issue in the mid-1930s brought America closer to political affairs in the Far East. A paradox characterized that link. On the one hand, American missionaries pleaded with the Japanese government for separation of state and church. On the other hand, however, they requested the U. S. government to intervene for religious freedom. My paper examines this paradox. Drawing on letters and reports exchanged between American officials, diplomats, and missionaries, it traces the ways in which missionaries’ endeavors to separate church and state ironically drew the latter closer to the former. Their efforts to keep one government out of religious affairs instead invited another into those affairs. In this process, my paper demonstrates, a number of American missionaries drew themselves close to the U. S. government, eventually working for federal agencies when the Pacific War broke out between Japan and America.