The English parliamentarian William Wilberforce (1759–1833) once proclaimed that Unitarianism, with its denial of what it deemed as archaic Christian dogma and with its espousal of “rationality” and “free inquiry,” was a “halfway house” between orthodoxy and infidelity. Despite the popularity of Unitarian belief among Christian intellectuals in certain parts of the nineteenth-century US-British transatlantic nexus, there has been relatively little research on the movement. One can cite at least two reasons as to why this may be so. First, the Unitarian movement (now the Unitarian Universality Association or UUA) is more often than not seen as a fly on the windscreen in contemporary North American Christianity. Second, academics working on this period have tended to turn their scholarly energy towards the Transcendentalists—betraying an understandable predilection for Emerson—and Spiritualism—betraying an understandable predilection for the odd. In light of this paucity of research concerning the Unitarians on their home grounds, it is not surprising that there has—until now—been no comprehensive study on the Japanese Unitarian Association (JUA) and its role in the formation and formulation of religious discourse in the Meiji and Taisho periods.

In his latest work, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality, Michel Mohr offers a much-needed corrective to this state of affairs by examining how and why Japanese academic and religious intellectuals from the 1880s up until the early 1920s were shaped by (and shaped) the Unitarian mission to Japan. And Mohr's findings are particularly noteworthy in that they show how the JUA's influence extended far beyond their Unitarian converts.

Mohr begins (Chapters 1–3: “Setting the Stage,” “The Advent of the Unitarians in Japan,” and “Wavering of Early Japanese Support”) by detailing the genesis of the Unitarian movement in Japan through introducing a great number of hitherto unknown correspondences unearthed in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. Although Japanese intellectuals like Hirai Kinza (1859–1917) were involved with the Unitarians prior to the establishment of the JUA, the Unitarian mission to Japan ostensibly began with the Keio University graduate, journalist, and politician Yano Fumiō's (Ryūkei; 1850–1931) exposure to the Church through none other than Tokugawa Yoshiakira (1863–1908) during a sojourn in England (and Europe) between 1884 and 1846. Through Yano's overtures, and with the backing of his former teacher Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), Arthur May Knapp (1841–1921), a Harvard theologian, was dispatched in 1887 on an exploratory trip to Japan to inquire into the possible prospects for establishing a future mission. In 1889, Knapp returned to Japan, bringing along with him the Unitarian minister Clay MacCauley (1843–1925)—who would become “the central pillar of the mission” until its disbandment in 1922—and Kanda Saichirō (1863–1944), a Unitarian and American-trained theology student. It was primarily MacCauley who would lay the movement's foundation, which began with the construction of the Church's Unity Hall (1894) in Shiba, Tokyo, and the introduction of direct mailing (“The Post Office Mission”) to potential converts as a method of proselytization. (It is of note, as Mohr points out, that some Japanese Buddhist schools [notably the Nichiren school], soon adopted this method.)

Chapter 4 (“Inspired Buddhist Intellectuals”) moves away from the early Unitarians in Japan and shifts focus on to two prominent Shin thinkers who were directly influenced by this movement: Furakawa Rōsen (1871–1899), one of the founders of the seminal periodical Shinbukkyō (“New Buddhism”), and Murakami Senshō (1851–1929), a leading Shin priest and eminent professor of Buddhology at Tokyo Imperial University. Furukawa—known today for founding Japan's first wide-scale temperance movement (the Hanseikai) and also the Young Men's Buddhist Association (YBCA; Bukkyō seinen kyōkai)—had been influenced by his friend and schoolmate Sugimura Sojinkan (1872–1945). Sugimura had studied at the Unitarian Free Theological School, served on occasion as personal translator to MacCauley, and would later also become one of the founders of Shinbukkyō. Although Furukawa was influenced by Christianity, his enthusiasm for Unitarianism harbored a decidedly counter-Unitarian agenda: he held that despite Unitarianism being the most advanced form of Christianity it would ultimately fail to satiate the religious needs of the masses and thus lead them to turn to Buddhism. (Furukawa, prefiguring the likes of D. T. Suzuki [1870–1966], predicted that this “craze” for Unitarianism would usher in a “craze” for the “Zen school.”) Murakami, particularly in the 1890s, was swift to apprehend the relevance of the budding Unitarian movement. One article penned by the Shin professor in the August 1894 edition of the Bukkyō shirin (“Forest of Buddhist History”) relates how he had recently been reading a number of Christian journals—notably, the Rikkugō Zasshi (“The Cosmos”), which disseminated a number of works written by prominent Unitarian-influenced writers—and had thus become aware of the urgency for delineating between Buddhist “philosophy” and Buddhist “religion.” Likewise, Murakami, through his readings of these Unitarian-influenced writings, became cognizant that Japanese Buddhist intellectuals must apply this newfound “rationality” to the history of East Asian Buddhism. Of particular concern for Murakami was the question as to whether or not the historical Buddha preached any or all of the Mahāyāna sūtras that were historically attributed to him. All of these issues, of course, would come to a head in Murakami's seminal Bukkyō tōitsuron (Treatise on the Unification of Buddhism; 1901–1905). If Mohr is correct, and I think he is, one may extrapolate that Murakami‘s attempt at formulating a “unified” vision of Buddhism was as much Unitarian as it was Mahāyāna.

Buddhist intellectuals and scholars were not the only ones who would come under the sway of Unitarian advances. Chapter 5 (“Japanese Students at Harvard and the Waseda Connection”) focuses on Kishimoto Nobuta (1866–1928), who spent some four years studying religion at Harvard Divinity—here, again, the salience of the Harvard/New England connection with both Unitarianism and Japan is unmistakable—and is today best known for his collaborations with Anesaki Masaharu (1873–1949) and as the father of Kishimoto Hideō (1903–1964)—one of the founding fathers of the study of religion at Tokyo Imperial and later an adviser on religious matters to the General Headquarters. Kishimoto [Nobuta] first encountered Unitarianism as a student under Niijima Jō at Doshisha University. Mohr argues that it was this early introduction to Unitarian thought that led Kishimoto to coin the neologism “universal religion (uchū teki shūkyō),” a term which would gain almost unquestioned currency among Japanese intellectuals and become a standard piece of contemporary Japanese academic argot. (Today, as Mohr correctly points out, this gloss is now “fuhen teki shūkyō.”). Here, Mohr also shows how Kishimoto's Unitarian bent and that of others who would go on to teach at Waseda (Uchigasaki Sabusaburō [1877–1947], for example) helped to form a markedly liberal educational agenda at the school.

Unitarian ideas, however, resonated well beyond the intellectual and academic world. Chapter 6 (“Involvement in the Labor Movement”) illustrates how the Unitarian mission formed the socially engaged Yūaikai (“Friendly Society”), which—to the alarm of the Japanese government—was involved in the inter-war (WWI) pacifist movement, fought for universal human rights and gender equality, and also supported the Taisho labor movements. The Japanese Unitarian foray into broader civil society, however, appears to have been a precursor to the beginning of the end of the movement as an organized religious denomination.

Chapter 7 (ominously entitled, “Dispatching the Hatchet Man”) in Part III (“Fracture and Rebuttals) describes the role that MacCauley's successor, the apparently anti-Socialist John B. W. Day (n.d.), played at a time in which much of the world was recovering from the physical, mental, and financial ravages of WWI: facing the purported threat of the emergent Bolshevik movement and, at least in Japan and the US, grappling with the effects of the Immigration Act of 1917. These tensions would in turn have a palpably negative effect on JUA–AUA relations. The Boston-based AUA soon expressed concern over the possible socialist bent of the Yūaikai; and, perhaps due to such misgivings, questioned as to whether there was still adequate financial support to maintain the Japanese mission; and also struggled with the problem of the growing divide between the Japanese Unitarian's newfound sense of autonomy and the entrenched sense of “Western” patriarchy on the part of the AUA. In 1922, the AUA would bring to a close their twenty-five-year project.

In his concluding chapters (Chapter 8, “Discordant Voices”; Chapter 9, “The Counterexample of Shaku Sōen”), Mohr turns to the personal lives of Katō Satoru (n.d.), a Unitarian minister who would fall out of favor with Knapp; Saji Jitsunen (1856–1920), a former member of the Shin clergy, possible religious opportunist, and one-time president of the JUA; Hiroi Tatsutarō (n.d.), a Unitarian minister; and Shaku Sōen (1860–1919), the renowned Rinzai priest. All of these men were connected with or influenced by the Unitarians and yet, ultimately, parted ways.

Upon closing Mohr's work, the reader is struck by how the transplantation of the well-intended Unitarian message—a message espousing “rationality,” “free inquiry,” and “equality”—took on a life of its own when it reached Japanese shores. Buddhist intellectuals like Furukawa and Murakami evinced little concern, unless one counts alarm, for the ultimate Christian message of Unitarianism. Instead, it was the intellectual implications and supposed sense of ecumenicalism that retained its appeal: these ideas offered possibilities for a future formulation of Japanese Buddhism. For more socially minded thinkers, the Unitarian message of equality dovetailed into the socialist and labor movements of the Taisho period. And for those Japanese who became full-fledged Unitarians, the need for dependence on the AUA dissipated over the life of the mission. As Wilberforce once remarked, the Unitarian project of Universalism was indeed a halfway house for many that encountered it. By 1922, however, the halfway house in Japan had closed. To what degree Unitarian ideas of religious universality remained is the subject of another book.

Although one does not want to overstate the Unitarian case in Japan, Mohr's assiduous research has shown that Unitarian ideas had currency with Japanese thinkers. Future research will no doubt have to address how Meiji and Taisho Unitarianism coalesced with transcendentalism, theosophy, spiritualism, and other burgeoning religious movements in what was a period of marked religious and intellectual change.