November 10, 1998
Japan's four major islands, often called the "home islands," are Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido. Most of its major cities are on Honshu, including the capital, Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, and Kyoto. Other major cities are Fukuoka, on Kyushu, and Sapporo, on Hokkaido.
Japan has a population of 126 million, and is also one of the world's most densely populated countries. With an area of 145,856 square miles, it counts almost 860 people per square mile. Life expectancy for females is 83 years and for males 77.
The Japanese are a people closely related to the major groups of East Asia. About one million people of Korean ethnicity also live in Japan.
Its religions are Shinto and Buddhist, although there is a Christian population of about one percent. Shintoism is an indigenous religion based on myths, legends, and ritual practices of the early Japanese. Most Japanese observe both Buddhist and Shinto rituals--neither religion is exclusive. Confucianism, mainly an ethical system, has also significantly influenced Japanese thought. About 1.3 million people in Japan are Christians. Of those, 60 percent are Protestant and 40 percent are Roman Catholic. The Protestant Church in Japan is a nondenominational United Church.
Japanese is the national language, and Japan's literacy rate is one of the world's highest at 99 percent. Japan provides free public schooling for all children through junior high school. Thereafter, 94 percent of students go on to three-year senior high schools. Nearly 90 percent of students finish high school. Competition for entry into the best universities is notoriously rigorous.
Among its work force of 67 million people, 56 percent work in trade, manufacturing, mining, and construction; 23 percent in the service sector; 6 percent in agriculture, forestry and fisheries; and 3 percent in government. Forty percent of the labor force consists of women. Women have very limited opportunities for advancement and management positions in the Japanese society. Women do control the family finances and child rearing.
Trade has been critical to Japan's economy. Japan has few natural resources of its own. Trade has afforded Japan the foreign exchange it needs to buy raw materials its economy lacks. In 1997, its exports were about 12 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which was $2.85 trillion.
Japan exports motor vehicles, electronic and electrical products, machinery and equipment, metals and metal products. It imports fossil fuels, raw materials, foodstuffs, machinery and equipment. Of Japan's $411 billion in 1997 exports, 37 percent went to Southeast Asia; 27 percent to the U.S.; 15 percent to Western Europe; and 5 percent to China. In the same year,Japan's imports were 24 percent from Southeast Asia; 22 percent from the U.S.; 15 percent from Western Europe; and 12 percent from China.
Highly developed domestic and international transportation systems support Japan's economy. Important to air and sea traffic in the western Pacific region are the Tokyo and Osaka International Airports and the ports of Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. The rail system is efficient and reaches throughout the country. Japan's famous super express "bullet trains" can cover the 325 miles between Tokyo and Osaka in three hours.
In agriculture, Japan's economy is highly subsidized. Only 15 percent of Japan's land is suitable for cultivation. Its overall agricultural self-sufficiency rate is about 50 percent on about 14 million cultivated acres. Its agricultural products include rice, vegetables, fruits, milk, meat, and silk. Though it produces a slight rice surplus, it imports large amounts of wheat, sorghum, and soybeans, mainly from the U.S.
Japan is also heavily dependent on imports for energy and mineral needs. Prior to the world oil price shocks of the 1970s, Japan relied on petroleum for 75 percent of its energy. It has since cut that dependence to 57 percent. It also relies on coal, liquefied natural gas, nuclear power, and hydro power.
In minerals, Japan has sufficient deposits of magnesium and silver to supply its current
industrial needs. But it looks to
foreign sources for many other industrial minerals, including iron ore, coke, copper, and bauxite,
as well as many forest products.
Two key developments have exerted a profound influence on the course of Japan's history: the Japanese court's adoption of the Chinese writing system around 405 AD, and the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century. Both events set in motion a long period of Chinese cultural influence.
Japan's first fixed capital was set up at Nara in 710 under the Yamato dynasty. But Yamato power was only nominal; true power lay with court nobles, regents, and the military governors known as "shoguns."
First contact with the west came around 1542, when a Portuguese ship bound for China was blown off course and landed on Japanese shores. In the ensuing century, traders came to Japan from Portugal, the Netherlands, England, and Spain. Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan missionaries came, too.
During the 1600s, the shogunate grew suspicious that foreigners were clearing the way for a military conquest by European nations. Eventually, the shogunate forced all foreigners to leave and barred contact with the world outside, with one exception: tightly restricted commerce with Dutch and Chinese merchants at Nagasaki.
The isolation persisted for 200 years until Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy forced Japan to open contact with the west under the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854.
The consequences of Japan's renewal of contact with the West were to prove enormous. The shogunate was forced to resign. The Japanese emperor was returned to power. Major internal reforms followed under the "Meiji restoration" of 1868. The feudal system was scrapped. Many Western institutions were adopted, including a Western legal system and a constitutional government. Within a few decades the "controlled revolution" of the Emperor Meiji had transformed Japan from a feudal, isolated nation to a world power.
A newly modernized Japan was soon at war with two of its neighbors: China from 1894 to 1895 and Russia from 1904 to 1905. Its victories in both wars strengthened Japan's sway over Korea. From the war with China, Japan gained Formosa (now Taiwan) and the Pescadores Islands. In its victory over Russia, the Treaty of Portsmouth gave Japan specified rights in Manchuria and in southern Sakhalin. Russia had received Sakhalin in 1875 in exchange for the Kurile Islands. After these victories Japan had free reign over Korea and formally annexed it in 1910.
During World War I, Japan was on the side of the Allies. In the years after the war, Japan entered upon unprecedented prosperity and new international prestige as one of the world's great military and industrial powers. At the peace conference in Versailles in 1919, Japan was accorded official recognition as one of the "Big Five" in the new international order. Japan joined the League of Nations and was given a mandate over Pacific islands north of the equator formerly held by Germany.
During the 1920s, Japan's government moved further in the direction of democracy. But the 1930s brought economic and political pressures that Japan's parliamentary government could not withstand. Military leaders gained greater influence during this period, and Japanese policy grew increasingly militaristic.
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established the state of Manchukuo. Japan quit the League of Nations in 1933. In 1936, Japan signed the "anti-Comintern pact" with Nazi Germany. Japan invaded China in 1937, a year in which Japanese troops pursued the infamous "Rape of Nanking."
Through its alliance with Germany, Japan was well along the course that culminated in its attack on United States installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, and its broad offensive of Pacific conquest. Four years later, the U.S. detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945.
Japan lost all overseas possessions, its territory reduced to the home islands alone. Manchukuo was dissolved and Manchuria was returned to China. Japan gave up all claims to Formosa. Korea became independent. The Kuriles and southern Sakhalin were occupied by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The U.S. held administrative authority over the Ryukyu, Bonin, and Volcano Islands.
The Allies put Japan under the control of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Douglas MacArthur. Economic, social, and political reforms were made. These included a freely elected legislature, the Japanese Diet. Japan's new constitution took effect May 3, 1947.
The U.S. ended its occupation of Japan in 1952. Japan eventually was given control of the Ryukyu, Bonin, and Volcano Islands, a process completed in 1972 when Okinawa reverted to Japanese sovereignty.
In the decades after World War II, Japan achieved monumental economic growth, a process that continued until Japan emerged finally as the world's second-largest economy after the U.S.
Despite the sharp economic setbacks to Japan's economy that were part of the region-wide
Asian financial crisis that began
in 1997, Japan, along with North America and Western Europe, remains one of the world's three
major industrial giants
among market economies. Indeed, in the case of Japan and the U.S., their combined economic
and technological impact in
the world amounts to a little more than 30 percent of world GDP and 60 percent of the GDP of
the Western industrialized nations.
Methodists came to Japan in June 1873 when a missionary from China, Robert S. Maclay, arrived in Yokohama with his wife. They were commissioned by the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) to establish a Methodist mission in Japan. Later that month, they were joined by missionaries from the Canadian Methodist Church. These were followed by the Evangelical Association, the Methodist Protestant Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1885, the Church of the United Brethren in Christ joined the work, thus completing the ring of predecessor bodies of the current United Methodist Church (the Canadian Methodist Church later became part of the United Church of Canada).
Within a year of being set up, the MEC mission stationed missionary couples in Yokohama, Tokyo, Hakodate, and Nagasaki, and in 1874 sent a couple to Hirosaki, thereby establishing what were to be its main centers. Dora Schoonmaker, the first missionary sent by the MEC Women's Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS), arrived in 1874 to begin educational work for women and girls. In each center, preaching was begun, converts were made, and the groundwork laid for educational work.
At the end of four years, Superintendent Maclay was able to report significant gains in the mission's work of evangelization; the beginnings of a Christian community; the founding of Christian schools for both boys and girls; the introduction of Christian instruction into other schools, public and private; an array of translations and original writings in the Japanese language, including a Japanese hymnal; and the start of itinerant ministry to outstations.
Eleven years from the founding of the mission, the Japan Conference was organized. By 1895, 22 years after the mission's founding, the conference comprised nine districts. Within those were 80 pastoral charges with 3,371 full members and 668 probationers. Of 69 ministerial members within the conference, 18 were American missionaries and 51 were Japanese. The conference also had 44 local preachers; 123 Sunday schools with 6,144 pupils; 42 church buildings; and 14 parsonages.
From its founding, the Japan Mission had been notable for its readiness to admit native ministers to ordination and positions of responsibility within the church. When the conference formed 11 years later, 19 of its 32 charter members were Japanese--five elders, three deacons, and 11 probationers.
Today, The United Methodist Church (UMC) is active in Japan through the Japan North America Commission on Cooperative Mission (JNAC). Through JNAC, the UMC is linked to two partner churches in Japan. One, the United Church of Christ in Japan, is known as the Kyodan, short for the Nihon Kirisuto Kyodan. The other partner church is the Korean Christian Church in Japan (KCCJ).
The UMC cooperates with the Kyodan across a broad spectrum of activities that include, among others, joint projects in radio evangelism and communications, evangelism efforts in local churches and regional centers, and various advocacy programs for women, minorities, the disabled, and others who face discrimination.
The Kyodan has 1,704 churches, a membership of 202,154, and 2,140 pastors (including 310 women). There are 171 missionary personnel from JNAC boards in North America and 13 from Germany, England, Korea, and Taiwan. In addition, the Kyodan sends 27 missionaries outside Japan.
The KCCJ has 67 churches and mission points, 3,900 members, and 60 pastors, including two women. Its ministry focuses on the one million ethnic Koreans in Japan. Five missionary personnel from KCCJ are from North America and 25 from Korea.
Among areas in which the UMC cooperates with the KCCJ are mission interns, program grants, advocacy for the rights of Koreans as a minority in Japan, and help with community center capital projects.
Public Domain Map from the Perry-Casta
ñed a Library Map Collection
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