Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mormonism in Modern Japan

1996; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/45226176

1554-9631

Jiro Numano,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

Jiro Numano"Since Japan as a nation has made such remarkable economic and technological progress, why is the church in Japan not also making comparable progress, but in fact is stagnant?"For some years now such a question has arisen among LDS members in the U.S., and particularly among church leaders.1 Interestingly enough, a similar question periodically arises among Japanese Christians more generally: even 135 years after the opening of the first Protestant mission in Japan (and the Roman Catholic presence goes back much farther), the total number of mainstream Christians amounts to less than 1 percent of the population.2This essay analyzes the current state of the LDS church in Japan, and its prospects for the twenty-first century, from the viewpoint of an active Japanese member. A Numerical OverviewMormonism appeared in Japan almost a century ago, when Apostle Heber J. Grant arrived with three other brethren to open the mission in 1901.Since this was barely a decade after the official abandonment of polygamy, both the Japanese population and the mass media were understandably wary.3The mission stumbled along with negligible results until it was finally closed in 1924, at which time there were 166 mem-1.For example, this question was raised at a training meeting for Japanese regional representatives in Salt Lake City in April 1990.2. The Christian Yearbook 1994, published in Japan by the Kirisuto Shimbunsha (Christian News Press), reports that there are 1,050,938 Catholic and Protestant Christians in Japan, representing 0.8 percent of the total population.However, if the LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, and certain fundamentalist sects are added in, the figure nearly doubles.3. The cautionary tone of newspaper editorials and letters to the editor about the polygamy issue in Mormonism is understandable at this early time, when Japan had just emerged as a modern nation and was anxious to appear fully "civilized" to the West.(See my "Transition in the Reception of the Mormon Church in Japan," a paper presented at the annual meet-