The Forward Mission Study Courses

EDITED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF

THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S MISSIONARY MOVEMENT

Introductory Note

IN the following pages Dr. De Forest has accomplished a work as delicate as it is important. To deal with a great subject in a simple way is a mark of power, especially when that subject is removed from the sphere of American experience "as far as the East is from the West." It may be said that much interest in Japan is felt throughout Christian circles in America.

But that interest
Beyond the notion

lacks depth and definition. that a spirit of progress prevails in modern Japan and that that progress consists in the assimilation of Western customs and ideas, there is much vagueness and no little misapprehension. And these occur from no lack of good and illuminating books, dealing with Japan from various points of view. There are such books and they are read with appreciation. Yet one whose privilege has been to come near to the soul of Japan, through intercourse with its leaders, realizes how difficult it is to make those aspirations fully understood by Western minds.

Some have

have written sympathetically of

Japan, yet without knowledge; and some, writing with much knowledge, have lacked sympathy. In either case, the subject has been presented with misleading limitations. The readers of this book will find in it firsthand knowledge of facts, tempered with sympathetic appreciation of their meanings and relations. The training of the author has been felicitous. For many years he has lived in a part of the Empire relatively far from direct Western influences; and so, emerging more slowly and with more normal self-expression from the old feudalism into the new régime of a constitutional monarchy.

Sendai, Dr. De Forest's home, is far removed from the cosmopolitanism of Yokohama and Tokyo. Yet it is a thought centre of immense importance to the civil and military life of the nation. It is a place where the traditions of ancient glory mix with the new thought of the awakened Empire, and where the bearing of the past on the present can be studied apart from the confusing intervention of European detail. At Sendai, the seat of influence for Northern Japan, has the author resided throughout a large part of the new era of Meiji-or Enlightenment. He has lived, it is true, during this period, the life of a missionary. He has been loyal and outspoken in his allegiance to the Divine Saviour; fruitful in