Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – Japan's Spiritual Change Over the Past Fifty-five Years

By Kenny Joseph
June 2006

Today there are many seminars and books on the “mysterious mystique of the peculiar Japanese people and their country.” I learned all about this during my fourteen days on the American President Line’s ship, the Wilson, while sailing from San Francisco, California, USA to Yokohama, Japan in April 1951. We could bring 350 pounds of baggage plus everything we could fit in our bedrooms aboard the ship. There were twelve passengers.

My Own Journey to Japan
In the fourteen days I was aboard the ship, my tutor, Kiyoshi Togasaki, a Christian businessman and publisher of The Japan Times of today, educated me on the state of Japan.

He also learned of my own history. My parents were from the city of Nineveh (now Mosul, in Iraq), where Jonah went to preach God’s judgment upon the Assyrians. After Jonah’s plea, the king of Nineveh repented and made every living thing, human and animal, fast and pray for forty days to avert God’s impending judgment. It worked. To this day, the Assyrians call themselves the “only Christian nation in the world.” Four million Assyrians worldwide have no country today.

Mr. Togasaki soon said in response to my history: “Persians, Assyrians, Nestorians? Your people brought over to us three priceless treasures: the Bible’s gospel, democracy and medicine.” After telling me some of Japan’s oral history, he said, “Japanese history is fairy tales, ‘his story’ (setsu) versus ‘my story.’ You must become a lifelong student of true history and a proponent of this magnificent unwritten Christian testimony. Yale University’s Kenneth Scott Latourette called Nestorians ‘the greatest missionary movement the world has ever seen.'” Dr. V. R. Edman, former president of Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois, USA), wrote the same thing.

In the course of eating and being aboard the ship with Mr. Togasaki for two weeks, I learned what it meant to be a true, upright Japanese individual. He told the gripping story of how he, as an important export businessman, or boeki, lost everything in the tragic San Francisco earthquake of 1928.

Because all records were burned, there was an amnesty that you did not have to pay anything you could not find the bill for. However, Mr. Togasaki said proudly, “I’m a Japanese Christian! I got in my horse drawn buggy and went to every single company or person I owed a dollar to. We wrote from memory all the bills and I paid every last penny. How could I do anything else before an all-seeing, all-knowing God?”

Then he showed me pictures of himself as an evangelist preaching to thousands of people before, during and after World War II. He hand-printed lengthy song sheets one by one.  After the singing at each event, he preached the gospel. His favorite message was from John 14:6: “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father in heaven except through me.'” Mr. Togasaki asked, “How could I preach God’s pure gospel with an impure heart?”

To understand the deep significance of my meeting with Mr. Togasaki is to understand the background from which I came. My Assyrian Christian father and mother escaped a holocaust in 1917 when more than 180,000 Christians were massacred by Kurdish Turkish Muslims. They were “boat people” who ended up in Chicago where I was born. I grew up hearing horror stories from cousins and family friends.

When I told my parents that God had called me to Japan, my father fumed, “You’re crazy! Those Japanese men walk around in kimonos with two swords, one big and one small. If they get mad, they’ll kill you. Don’t go near that place!” When I met this stately, godly gentleman, Mr. Togasaki, I was not fearful. I was overwhelmed.