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Mission Schools and Education for Women
... Drengir voru undirbúnir fyrir vísindi, lögfraeði og fleiri greinar sem myndu gera þá að virkum þátttakendum í atvinnulífinu en menntun kvenna eftir 1899 hafði það fyrst og fremst að markmiði að undirbúa japanskar stúlkur fyrir það framtíð arhlutverk að vera góðar eiginkonur og maeður. 32 Kristniboðshreyfingarnar sáu þannig þörf á því að efla menntun stúlkna og kvenna með þeim árangri að frá lokum 19. aldar og fram að seinni heimsstyrjöld buðu þessar hreyfing ar upp á bestu menntun fyrir stúlkur sem völ var á í landinu. ...
Snemma á 20. öld færðist líf í umræður meðal Íslendinga, bæði hér heima og vestanhafs, um mikilvægi þess að landsmenn legðu sitt af mörkum við að kristna hina ólánsömu heiðingja sem væri að finna víða um heim. Vestur-Íslendingar tefldu fram hinum unga Steingrími Octavíusi Thorlákssyni (1890–1977) til trúboðsstarfa, en hann var nýkvæntur, þegar hann hélt ásamt eiginkonu sinni til Japans árið 1916. Nokkrum árum síðar hófu Íslendingar að styrkja Ólaf Ólafsson (1895–1976) og konu hans til trúboðsstarfa í Kína, en Ólafur hafði dvalið í Kína síðan 1921 á vegum Lúterska kínatrúboðsfélagsins í Noregi. Störf Ólafs Kínafara, eins og hann var oft kallaður, vöktu mikla athygli hér á landi enda skrifaði hann ötullega um reynslu sína í íslensk blöð og tímarit, kvikmyndaði það sem fyrir augu bar í Kína, hélt erindi í útvarpi og auk þess sem hann gaf út bækur um dvöl sína í Kína, þ.á.m. Kristniboð í Kína (1928) og 14 ár í Kína (1938). Minna er hins vegar almennt vitað um trúboðsstörf Octavíusar, en hann starfaði í Japan í um aldarfjórðung og líf hans þar og reynsla um margt merkileg.
Greinin birtist í Andvara 2021, bls. 123-143
... Thenceforth leading ideologues of the 1890s argued that Christianity was a subversive element in Japan (Seat 2003). Imperial Professor Inoue Tetsujiro was one of the most influential of these. ...
This article uses the puzzle of Christian success in Korea to develop a model for understanding religious diffusion beyond national bor-ders. The authors argue that the microlevel network explanations that dominate the research on conversion cannot by themselves ac-count for the unusual success of Protestantism in Korea. Instead, events in East Asia in macrolevel, geopolitical networks provoked nationalist rituals that altered the stakes of conversion to either promote or retard conversion network growth. At the turn of the 20th century, unequal treaties both opened this region to missionaries and provoked nationalist rituals. In China and Japan, these rituals generated patriotic identities by attacking Christianity, and network growth slowed or reversed. In Korea, Christianity became compat-ible with these rituals, and conversion networks grew. This example highlights the greater explanatory power of nested networks for understanding international religious diffusion, relative to micro-level accounts alone.
In 1910, despite low membership and limited funds, the Icelandic Lutheran Synod of America began directly supporting mission work in Asia. It first sponsored a Danish missionary who was serving in India and later commissioned one of its own members, Steingrímur Octavius Thorlakson (1890–1977), to carry out missionary work in Japan, where he ended up serving for 25 years, from 1916 to 1941. Although the synod’s Asia initiative was well known within the Icelandic community, as was Octavius himself during his lifetime, the venture has not become a substantial chapter of the history of Icelanders in North America. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to shed light on the background and nature of the Icelandic Synod’s missionary enterprise in Asia, and second, to examine the initiative and Octavius’ career from the perspective of mobility and international influences in the early 20th century.
Keywords: The Icelandic Lutheran Synod of America, Christian missions, Japan, Icelanders in North America, Steingrímur Octavius Thorlakson
This study explores the relationship between Christian education and the construction of female gentility in East Asia around the turn of the twentieth century. Because American missionary schools played an important role in the region, notions of female gentility were greatly influenced by the cultural values of the American middle class and, more specifically, American liberal arts colleges. The notion of the “new gentlewoman” helps to illuminate modern Protestant womanhood’s ambiguous relationship with feminism and nationalism. Recognizing that the Protestant notion of “female gentility” was internally racialized, in this study, I also pay attention to the question of race. While the scope of my research spans East Asia, in this paper, I examine Christian education in China, focusing specifically on Yenching Women’s College. I compare the college’s educational goals and curricula to the pedagogy at the male college of Yenching, the governmental women’s college, and other female colleges in Japan and Korea. In this study, I approach East Asia as a whole for several reasons: first, because a broader view of the region helps put the Chinese case into perspective; second, because the region was often dealt with together in missionary work; and lastly, because national differences cannot be assumed to be more substantial than other differences, such as those based on gender, class, generation, period, and province.
Many scholars have analyzed the early modern history of Iberian Jesuit missionaries in Japan, but there has been virtually no study on the subject of the Jesuit mission in the twentieth century. Based on archival documents and inter- views, this essay argues that German Jesuits played a key historical role in the establishment and initial development of the modern Jesuit presence in Japan. Be- cause most Jesuits who arrived in the prewar period were of German background, personal connections and strong institutional and financial ties existed between the Jesuit communities in both countries until well into the 1960s. The most influ- ential activities of these German missionaries, especially in the early decades, were teaching German language and culture to a Japanese audience and disseminating knowledge about Japan to the Western world. This paper shows how the larger political and cultural relations between Germany and Japan during both peace and wartime limited, and at the same time enabled, the work of these German Jesuit missionaries.
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