disciples, sisters or companions? japanese and finnish women’s mutual encounter in mission

© LFM. Social Sciences & Missions 16, July 2005 : 43-70

Disciples, Sisters or Companions? Japanese and Finnish Women’s Mutual Encounter in Mission Seija JALAGIN University of Oulu The past twenty years have witnessed an increasing interest in the role of gender in colonial history. But while the political and economic practices of colonialism have attracted scholarly attention, women as actors in colonial settings emerged rather late as research subjects. Instead, they were initially considered as mere bystanders. Mission history research followed the same path. Seeing women as active participants in colonial discourse has since resulted in a good deal of scholarly writing,1 much of it on British women because of the vast British colonial empire. Expanding colonial empire often smoothed the way for mission effort, which in turn emphasised the dominance of missions from colonialist countries.2

Although imperialist dominance helped open up new fields for Christian missions at an increasing speed, not all mission fields were colonies, nor were all missions from colonialist powers. Especially in Asia, there were many nations not colonised by European powers. Furthermore,

1 Much mission history has been written with an organisational emphasis that highlights the

leading men and, accordingly, the male-dominated upper levels of the mission hierarchy. Wo-men as grassroots actors waited for a long time to be written into and illustrated in the pages of mission history books, despite their majority number among foreign missionaries by the early 20th century. Colonialism and gender, in turn, gained academic attention when feminist researchers began applying the ideas of postcolonial theorising to research on women’s role in colonial discourse. See, for example, Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Bur-den. Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (New York, Routledge, 1995); Nu-pur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992).

2 Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986), pp.273–276, 414–415.

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Asia witnessed a substantial mission effort from North America, from both the United States and Canada. In Korea, for example, Christianity spread rapidly in the early 20th century, largely because of the work of American Protestant missions. Much of this growth can be explained by the fact that Christianity offered a countervailing force encouraging and strengthening Korean nationalism against the colonial power of Japan in Korea from 1910 to 1945. China, in turn, was humiliated by the Western powers from the mid-1800s and accordingly expressed hostility towards all foreign influence from the turn of the 20th century until finally, in 1949, the Communist regime expelled practically all foreign missionaries and suppressed much of Chinese Christianity.3

This article focuses on mission work in Japan to analyse the issues of gender, “race”, ethnicity and religion in a context where missions did not go hand in hand with formal colonial authority. In Japan, the difference in societal development and lifestyle between local people and missionaries was not as wide as in many other countries where missionaries encountered phenomena that could be interpreted as indicating low standards of civilisation, such as half-naked peoples, polygamy or illiteracy. This is not to say that the Western missionaries in Japan did not act as “civilising” agents, for they did, as was pointed out by some leaders of indigenous Christian movements in Japan already in the late 19th century. Rather, the missionaries’ civilising project was subtler than in countries and cultures where their impact stretched all the way from dressing the natives in European costume to social reforms that followed the importation of Western schooling and social institutions.4 In Japan, the Western outlook of Christianity, as well as its denominationalism, organisational structures and practices, have all, from the beginning, served as an explanation for why Christianity has not won more followers.5

In colonial discourse, gender and religion have been interpreted by some as a “fatal combination” in the encounter between colonising and colonised women, an obstacle to meaningful interaction between the two

3 Neill, History, pp.290–291, 429. 4 T.O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism. A Socio-Historical Study of an East African Mission at the

Grassroots (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982), pp.5–6, 25–29. 5 Mark Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1998), pp.36–

39.

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groups.6 Focusing on early 20th-century Japan — itself both a colonial power and a target of Western economic, political and religious expansion — and Finnish missionary women (members of a nation that gained its independence in 1917 after a more than a century under Russian rule as an autonomous principality,7 thus by no means a colonial power), I look into this “fatal combination” to demonstrate that the dichotomy between missionaries and the “missionised” was far from clear. Rather, the boundaries between subject positions were always blurred inside missions and churches operating across such a cultural divide.

My vantage point here is mainly that of the missionaries, while Japanese views are analysed when the source material allows that.8 Because of this one-sidedness, I focus on the position and significance the missionaries gave to Japanese women as part of their own social sphere in Japan. This includes analysing what kind of aims the missionaries had in their work among women, whether they were “heathen”, converts, employees, fellow workers and even friends; and what kind of relations their mutual encounter produced. Spreading the gospel and converting “unbelievers” can be regarded as the first and foremost goal in mission work, but how did this overall agenda turn into (gendered) reality in actual human encounters and everyday life?

Background to the Mission Encounter in Japan

After over 200 years of seclusion, Japan was forced to open its borders to foreign influence from 1854 onwards. Commercial treaties with Western powers brought to the country not only traders and diplomats, but also 6 Meera Kosambi & Jane Haggis, Editorial, Special Issue on “Reconstructing Femininities: Colo-

nial Intersections of Gender, Race, Religion and Class”, Feminist Review, 65 (Summer 2000), p.2.

7 This is not to say that the Finnish missions in Japan, China, India, Tibet and southern Africa were free of colonial thinking and practices. Rather, it is to indicate that the Finnish mission in Japan did not go hand in hand with or under the protection of colonial administration.

8 This article is part of a larger study of women missionaries in the Japan mission of the Lu-theran Evangelical Association of Finland (previously known in English as Lutheran Gospel Association of Finland), in Finnish Suomen Luterilainen Evanekeliumiyhdistys. Between 1900 and 1940 there were seven unmarried female missionaries and ten married male missionaries in Ja-pan. In addition, dozens of Japanese evangelists, Bible women, pastors and kindergarten teachers worked in the mission and its congregations during these years. It has not been pos-sible to interview any of the missionaries or their Japanese colleagues and friends (or, in view of the time lag, their descendants), although trips have been made to Japan to seek out re-search materials.

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missionaries from 1859. After the collapse of the old military regime, the Tokugawa shogunate, in 1867 and the restoration of the power of the Meiji emperor,9 the nation underwent a rapid modernising project led by an oligarchy of former samurai. To resist the economic and potentially imperialist pressure of Western powers, the Meiji government strove to transform Japan into fukoku kyōhei, “a rich country with a strong military”. This was deemed best done by following the example of the already hegemonic Western powers.10 Some of the former Tokugawa allies turned to things Western in order to survive their defeat and loss of social as well as economic status. One of the Western lures was also Christianity that was served to the Japanese (as well as to other non-Western nations) as the basis of Western civilisation and the key to its success at both the individual and national levels.11

Christianity had been banned in Japan in 1639 and remained so until 1873.12 The first missionaries evangelised under the guise of teaching English and French, and taking care of the spiritual well being of their fellow Westerners. From 55 in 1873, the number of Protestant missionaries in Japan rose exponentially to 500 in 1900. From 1899 foreigners were no longer required to have a licence to travel inland, which consequently opened the whole country for mission effort, as well as for commercial and leisure travel. Forty years later, on the eve of the Pacific war, missionaries in Japan numbered a thousand. Two-thirds of the 45 Protestant mission organisations active in Japan in 1907 were from North America and Britain. Late-19th century Japan was known as a highly civilised country; as a mission field, it offered, and continues to do so, a unique challenge, while also making high demands on missionaries themselves in terms of, for example,

9 The Tokugawa family had ruled Japan since 1603. The shogunate never abolished the empe-

rorship but rather exercised actual political power whereas the court in Kyoto and the em-peror at its centre had a semi-divine authority. The Meiji Restoration in 1868 did not restore political power to the emperor in person but legitimised the government’s authority in the name of the emperor.

10 G.B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan. A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cul-tures (Tokyo, Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1987), pp.339–350, 441; Janet E. Hunter, The Emer-gence of Modern Japan. An Introductory History since 1853 (London, Longman, 1989), pp.19–21.

11 Charles W. Iglehart, A Century of Protestant Christianity in Japan (Rutland, Charles E. Tuttle Com-pany, 1960), pp.76–78.

12 Catholic orders had begun a successful Christianising campaign in Japan in 1549. The suc-ceeding decades were later labelled “the Christian century of Japan”. Mullins, Christianity, p.12.


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education.13 In Tokyo, missionaries met suburban housewives as well as poor people, even discriminated-against Koreans, but also highly educated officers and professionals. Correspondingly, in inland towns, the Christian parishes attracted all kinds of seekers, from factory owners to factory girls, from well-to-do professionals to local farmers.

The number of baptised Protestant Christians rose from 36,000 in 1900 to over 200,000 in 1936.14 In Japan, Christianity had a middle-class and elite urban outlook. From early on, it appealed to supporters of the modernisation of Japan into a Western-style economic and political power. During the 1880s, missionaries and Christian circles were so optimistic that there was a general expectation that Japan would convert to Christianity within one generation. Increasingly nationalistic thinking from the 1890s onwards, however, introduced a counterforce to Western influences, diluting the popularity and progress of the Christian movement, too. By the 1920s, the number of baptisms was no longer increasing annually, while in the ultra-nationalist and militaristic atmosphere of the 1930s, Christianity and foreign missions were in serious difficulty. The majority of missionaries left the country before the autumn of 1941, after the congregations, mission institutions and church bodies were handed over to Japanese leadership.

After the war, as Japan was slowly recovering from wartime devastation and the Allied occupation that followed it, the country witnessed a Christian boom. Nevertheless, the nation has since turned out to be hard soil for Christianity. Despite continuous human and economic investment, only some 1.5 million of the 127 million Japanese today are Christians, which makes only one per cent of the total population. Prior to World War II, though, the influence of Christians did not fully correspond with — but, rather, exceeded — their demographic proportions.15 Especially in the field of female education, the mission schools showed considerable

13 Seija Jalagin, “Sivistyneitä naisia sivistyneeseen Japaniin – Suomalaisen naislähetin profiili

1900-luvun alussa” (With an English abstract: Educated women to civilised Japan – The pro-file of Finnish missionary woman in the beginning of the twentieth century) in Faravid. Pohjois-Suomen Historiallisen Yhdistyksen vuosikirja, 26 (Rovaniemi, Pohjois-Suomen Historiallinen Yh-distys, 2002), pp.107–136.

14 In addition to Protestants, Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches and missions also worked in Japan. In 1900 these churches had a membership of 30,000 and 60,000 respectively. In 1940 the number of Catholic members was 120,000. Tomonobu Yanagita, A Short History of Christianity in Japan (Sendai, Seisho tosho kakokai, Bible Library Publishers, 1957), pp.48, 67, 84.

15 Mullins, Christianity, p.23.

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achievements, because the state was reluctant to invest in girls’ higher education prior to 1899. In addition, women were allowed to enrol in universities only after the Second World War. Christian schools offered their students access to Western knowledge and ways of thinking that encouraged many young students, men and women alike, to pursue leading positions in the creation of the new Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.16

The LEAF Mission in Japan

Among the over 40 Protestant missions active in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, the Finnish mission was one of the smallest in human and financial resources. Furthermore, it did not represent the Evangelical Lutheran state church of Finland17 but one of the evangelical revivalist groups. Before 1895, Suomen Luterilainen Evankeliumiyhdistys, the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland (LEAF),18 had supported the foreign missions of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission19 (in Finnish Suomen Lähetysseura) in Ovamboland, German South West Africa, but after some doctrinal disputes, it found itself “offside” within the state church. One of the outcomes was a foreign mission of its own. The first two missionaries arrived in Japan in 1900. The early years were marked by organisational and personal controversies alongside political turmoil caused by the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05,20 and only in 1905 did the mission establish its first independent mission station in Shimosuwa town in the Nagano mountain area in Central Japan.21

16 Elise Tipton, Modern Japan. A Social and Political History (London, Routledge, 2002), p.48. 17 For more information on the state church institution in the Nordic countries, see Pirjo Mark-

kola (ed.), Gender and Vocation. Women, Religion and Social Change in the Nordic Countries, 1830–1940 (Helsinki, Finnish Literature Society, 2000), “Introduction”, pp.11–16.

18 LEAF was established in 1873 as the central organisation of the evangelical revivalist move-ment.

19 Formerly called the Finnish Mission Society. In 1902 this organisation began a mission in Hu-nan, China.

20 For a more detailed study on the early years, see Seija Jalagin, “Negotiating for Space and Autonomy: Strategies of Finnish Missionary Women in Japan, 1900–1941”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 28, 2 (2003), pp.89–92.

21 In 1905 the population of Shimosuwa was approximately 6,000, and the nearby towns of Kamisuwa and Okaya added some 10,000 to the number of potential converts. In Shimosuwa there were no other Christian missionaries either competing with or smoothing the path of the Finns as the first Christianising foreigners in the area.


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Between 1900 and 1941 the LEAF mission in Japan employed a total of 17 foreign missionaries: ten married laymen and pastors and seven unmarried female missionaries. The small size resulted from the Lutheran Evangelical Association being more than just a mission society. As the central organisation of the evangelical revivalist movement, its concerns included home mission, youth associations, student homes, folk high schools and local associations with parish-like organisations. LEAF’s varied publishing activities encompassed everything from Lutheran classics to smaller tracts, as well as journals for children, others aimed at foreign mission supporters and a more general journal reflecting the overall evangelical agenda. In addition, there were hymnbooks and seasonal magazines. Everything was published in two languages, Finnish and Swedish, until the association split into two in 1922, according to the language groups.22

Lutheranism formed the basis of their interpretation of the Christian faith and LEAF as a whole stayed within the Lutheran state church. The LEAF manifesto from the very beginning leaned on “God offering salvation brought by Jesus when he died on the cross, gratuitously for everyone”.23 In Japan the missionaries emphasised salvation and grace in Christ, with a purity of doctrine which, in the early decades, translated into unwillingness to co-operate with other Protestant missions beyond proselytising to “pagans”. Within mission parishes and the evolving church structure, the mission relied on the model of the Finnish Lutheran state church and the evangelical revivalist interpretation of the Lutheran faith. They did nourish “brotherly” relations with the American Lutheran missions in southern Japan and later in Tokyo, but never really pursued deeper co-operation.24

22 The division of LEAF is just one outcome of many similar cases in the 1920s, when the young

independent nation tried to deal with its distinct cultural and political heritage, emanating from the long period of Swedish rule in Finland from the 12th century to 1809. The foreign mission remained under the auspices of the Finnish-speaking association.

23 Lutheran Evangelical Association in Finland (LEAF), www.sley.fi/sley/indexeng.shtml (cited February 21, 2003).

24 Only after World War II did these missions unite their activities under the auspices of the Ni-hon Fukuin Rūteru Kyōkai (Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church), which originated from the work of the American Lutherans and was handed over to indigenous leadership because of the ultra-nationalist edicts of the 1940s. LEAF mission work still continues in Japan today, the association sending missionaries to be formally employed by some 140 congregations of this Japan Evangelical Lutheran church.

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Therefore, it was important for the Finnish mission to raise not only indigenous male preachers and pastors, but also female workers, such as Bible women and kindergarten teachers. From early on, the mission employed Japanese helpers: in 1905, the first year of independent mission, one Bible woman (who also acted as a language teacher) and one male evangelist (who later became the first Japanese pastor to the mission congregations) worked together with two Finnish female missionaries and their male colleague. Bible women were never high in the LEAF mission hierarchy and agenda, for it preferred to use its meagre resources to educate male evangelists and pastors for the emerging mission congregations. This priority is evident from the figures: between 1904 and 1941, eight Japanese Bible women altogether and 23 male evangelists and pastors worked in the LEAF mission and its congregations.25

Central to LEAF mission work in early 20th-century Japan was direct evangelising. Financial resources did not favour initiatives in more institution-based evangelism, such as educational and social gospel or medical mission work. In addition, Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) Japan26 had an effective elementary education system, which was making the younger generation literate by the early 1900s. The health care system was likewise efficient, though some Protestant missions earned a good reputation with their leper hospitals particularly.27 Bigger and wealthier missions established girls’ schools, which in time made female higher education the success story of Christian missions in Japan. Their lack of social and educational institutions meant that the LEAF mission faced problems in finding a proper forum for foreign women to evangelise the Japanese. Preaching to crowds consisting of both men and women was out of the question; English classes worked only for the first two or three years; and the Japanese system of separating the life spheres of men and women worked against the foreign missionary practice of working and living together. Accusations by local townspeople about missionary women being concubines of their male colleagues made the men very cautious and 25 LEAF Archives, Helsinki. LEAF annual reports 1900–1941; minutes of the LEAF mission

board 1900–1941; minutes of the meetings of LEAF missionaries in Japan 1906–07, 1912–41; minutes of the annual meetings of Finnish and Japanese workers in Japan 1913–38.

26 The Japanese name time-periods after the reigns of emperors. Thus the reign of Emperor Mutsuhito is called the Meiji period, and that of Emperor Yoshihito is called Taishō period. Likewise, the emperors are posthumously always called by the name of their reigning periods.

27 See, for example, Julia Boyd, Hannah Riddell: an Englishwoman in Japan, with a foreword by HRH the Princess of Wales (Rutland, Charles E. Tuttle, 1996).


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restrictive about the activities of their female counterparts. In the early 1910s, this led to a bitter controversy within the LEAF mission, with the missionary women consequently adopting a strategy of seclusion. They established kindergartens that formed an autonomous and suitable female line of work, which in turn emphasised the status of foreign missionary women above the Japanese female kindergarten teachers, trainees and Bible women in parish work.28

Thus issues of “race”, ethnicity and gender, echoing the wider colonial array, surfaced within the Finnish mission in Japan too. They are, of course, visible in the mission publications of the time. The LEAF mission magazine, Autuus pakanoille (“Salvation to the Pagans” is a direct translation), and Suomen Lähetyssanomat (Finnish Mission Magazine) of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission working in Ovamboland and China, reiterate the global tone of mission propaganda of the time in depicting the “miserable life” of the “heathen sisters and brothers living in the darkness”. According to Margaret Beetham, in late 19th-century British discourse, Westerners depicted the black (women) of Africa as “natives” and “children”, or mere natural objects like “the flora and fauna”. This refers to the power invested also in the Western women’s gaze,29 based on an objectification of non-Western peoples and cultures. But such objectification was also an understandable outcome, given that the presence of the Westerner among non-Western peoples seldom produced closer and more long-lasting encounter.30

In the missionary discourse, however, one can detect a more nuanced encounter between Westerners and those who were the target of their mission effort. The published missionary sources, such as journals, memoirs and pamphlets, do echo the surprisingly global image of the “wretched pagans”, but careful reading of private and published sources together reveals that the issues of “race”, ethnicity and gender were a much more complex phenomenon. Not only were the Western missionary women

28 Jalagin, “Negotiating”, pp.97–98. 29 Margaret Beetham, “The Reinvention of the English Domestic Woman: Class and ‘Race’ in

the 1890s’ Woman’s Magazine”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 21, 3 (1998), p.230. 30 My analysis of Western women’s writings about Japanese women in the Victorian era reflects

the same phenomenon. See Seija Jalagin, “Gendered Images – Western Women on Japanese Women”, in Kari Alenius, Olavi K. Fält and Seija Jalagin (eds), Looking at the Other: Historical Study of Images in Theory and Practise (Oulu, Acta Universitatis Ouluensis. Humaniora B42, Uni-versity of Oulu, 2002), pp.13–34. Also available at: http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514266331/

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themselves “others” in many mission fields, both because of their unmarried status and sex, and also because they were often isolated subjects in surroundings that offered neither familial nor familiar social contexts to lean on. Having no immediate family responsibilities other than probably bearing their share of the financial burden of elderly parents at home, unmarried female missionaries were free to create a new kind of existence for themselves in the foreign country. It is not my intention to romanticise their life in the mission field, since no doubt the strains of mission community, with its organisational conflicts and gendered practices, more often than not subjugated the female missionaries. What is clear, however, is that foreign missions also freed women from many of the pressures and constraints their unmarried sisters faced at home.

Once a female missionary arrived in the field, she had to start weaving a net of social relations not only with her own nationals inside the mission but also with local people. Considering the need to act so as not to jeopardize her moral standards and chastity, this meant socialising mainly with local women, especially in cultures where the life-spheres of men and women were traditionally separate, such as China, Japan, India and the Muslim countries.31 In some cases foreign missionaries and local women developed lifelong friendships; in others their relations duplicated the power positions of the coloniser and the colonised. What we need to do, however, is to take a closer look at the social web of missionary women, and specify the different layers of their relationships with local women.

The Spiritual Older Sisters

In Christian rhetoric, words like “brother” and “sister” have been used to symbolise religious affection and the mutual understanding that the individuals in question are members of a family-like community.32 Letters 31 Leslie A. Flemming, “A New Humanity. American Missionaries’ Ideals for Women in North

India, 1870–1930”, in Chaudhuri and Strobel (eds), Western Women, pp.193–194; Judith Row-botham, “‘Hear an Indian Sister’s Plea’: Reporting the Work of 19th-Century British Female Missionaries”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 21, 3 (1998), p.251.

32 For example, the deaconess homes were regularly arranged according to the idea that the ma-tron was the mother and the male leader was the father of the sisters, whereas the deaconesses and trainees were obedient daughters who sent their annual reports to and sought for spiritual guidance from their “parents”. Ulla-Maija Kauppinen-Perttula, Kutsumus, Palvelustyö, Jaksaminen. Sisaret Oriveden leprasairaalassa (1904–1953) [English Summary: Calling, Serving, Coping. Sisters at the Orivesi Leprosy Hospital (1904–1953)] (PhD thesis, University of Tampere, 2004, Acta Electronica Universitatis Tamperensis 355), pp.32–33, 58–62.


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between missionaries generally start with “Dear Sister/Brother”, whereas the board members and chairmen were addressed as “Dear Uncle”, thus acknowledging their seniority and authority. As Jon Miller has pointed out in his study of the Swiss Basel mission, the board employed divine power inside the “mission family” where missionaries were regarded as children.33 This organisational hierarchy was often backed up by the lower social status of the missionaries as compared with the board members, many of whom were also ordained clergymen. The rhetoric of brotherhood and sisterhood was transplanted into foreign missions, where converts became brothers and sisters in faith, both with each other and with their foreign guides. But in most cases, too, a sibling hierarchy acknowledged foreigners as the older sisters and brothers of local converts, parish members, co-workers and even clergy.34 The foreign missionary’s position of seniority came to an end, or was transformed into a more equal status, only after the maturing independence of the local church freed it from the financial and doctrinal control of the mission.

Just as seniority among missionaries was not dependent upon biological age but on actual years spent in mission service, so their position of seniority within the circle of local women was likewise also dependent on factors other than age alone. Studying their relationships, I would argue that every Japanese woman, whether a co-worker or a parish member, a seeker or a “pagan” in need, was in the eyes of Finnish missionary women a “little sister”. However, the hierarchical sisterhood between foreign and local women, where the missionary was the elder sister and the local woman the younger sister, reveals a set of blurred boundaries within the female community. Relations were dependent on background and even personal chemistry. The foreign sister’s seniority derived from both spirituality and status, i.e. her professionalism. Often it was a question of biological age, too. Accordingly, in missionary thinking the foreign sister was wiser and more developed in all respects. Furthermore, Christian thinking and colonial discourse nourished an idea that the “humblest missionary considered

33 Jon Miller, The Social Control of Religious Zeal. A Study of Organizational Contradictions (New Bruns-

wick, Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp.7–8. 34 On hierarchical sisterhood and brotherhood between foreign missionaries and converts, see

also Rowbotham, “‘Hear an Indian Sister’s Plea’”, p.248.

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himself an aristocrat” due to his/her moral superiority, as an historian of Congregational missions has concluded.35

Religious and spiritual seniority rested on the fact that the foreign missionary was born in a Christian country, had been baptised as a baby and raised as a Christian in the “proper” order, instead of being reborn as a Christian, as happened with a convert (except for second-generation Christians, who were usually younger than the missionaries). To become a missionary it was necessary to show proper religious understanding, which was often buttressed by a religious awakening at some point in life. Thus the missionary might also have experiences of secular temptations in life, which moulded her understanding of the reality facing potential converts. At the same time, religious awakening and devotion to her missionary vocation had turned her into a devoted Christian and evangelist. In this sense she was a model Christian and, in practice, a role model for many female converts.

Maids as potential converts

Once in the field, the missionaries dedicated the first two years to learning the language and cultural habits of the country without being able to put much effort into actual evangelising.36 Before active full-time work, however, they had a small mission field within their own homes.37 After learning a few phrases of the local language, the foreigner began communication with her maid who thus became her first potential convert.

Amanda Westén (1879–1944), a Finnish missionary to Japan in 1907–12, described her relationship with a maid called Tsuya (who we know only by her first name and through Westén’s writings) in a book that came out a few years after she returned home. When Tsuya entered Westén’s household, she possessed the notion common among many inland Japanese that foreigners cursed people. Westén tells us that with patience and friendship she managed to win the maid’s trust, which also led to Tsuya

35 Cited by Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility. American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century

China (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984), p.151. Hunter adds that this “aristocracy” was also based on material advantages enjoyed by missionaries.

36 Women sang and played the harmonium in meetings and services, and followed more experi-enced colleagues into house calls, as well as distributing leaflets on street corners.

37 Hunter discusses this in her study of American women missionaries in China. Such converting was typical of missionary wives who were primarily confined to managing their household and had few opportunities to act outside the home. Hunter, Gospel, p.157.


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becoming interested in what made the foreigner so friendly and contented. Now the missionary could begin evangelising her maid.

Westén describes the change that acquaintance with the gospel (and the foreign Christian woman) brought about in the young girl: “Day by day Tsuya turned happier and friendlier. The icy asperity and harshness of the world melted from her heart. Tsuya was gentle and obedient as a child.” Eventually the maid wanted to be baptised and she became “open-hearted and thoroughly obedient like a Finnish girl.”38 According to Westén, conversion had turned the reserved “pagan” into a happy and kind person, like “a Finnish girl” who was by nature (in Westén’s thinking) obedient and open-hearted. Conversion therefore equalled an overall change in the nature of the “pagan” and, although the analogy of “the Finnish girl” was intended to help a Finnish audience understand the Japanese situation better, it also reads as an overall goal to be achieved through Christianising the “heathen” sisters. Personal faith therefore included a civilising factor that enabled individuals to resist both the immoral practices and the petty human faults that were interpreted as consequences of a “heathen” culture.

The missionary women typically called local young women “girls” and “children” although the actual age difference was not that significant. For example, Amanda Westén was only six or seven years older than her maid, but nevertheless regarded Tsuya as a child — which reflects the missionary sister’s spiritual seniority and status as the maid’s employer.39 Correspondingly, the female converts called the missionary women “big sisters”. Their (as well as young men’s) letters often start with “Natsukashii ane” (Dear big sister),40 where ane (big sister) refers to the spiritual seniority of the foreign missionary.

Another convention that also emphasised the convert’s reincarnation as a child who needed to be guided on the right track he/she had chosen in 38 Mandi Westén, Japanitarten parissa (Helsinki, Suomen Lutherilainen Evankeliumiyhdistys,

1916), pp.39–40. 39 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’”, in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation. Cultural Represen-

tations and Signifying Practices (London, Sage Publications, 1997), pp.262–263, maintains that Westerners typically regarded people from other cultures as children whom there was no need to take seriously and who were not quite as capable as the “western adults”. Beidelman, Colo-nial, p.17, speaks about the same phenomenon in the missionary context.

40 Natsukashii translates “longed-for”, which refers to the fact that the missionary is far away and the writer has not seen her in a long time. Ane is the rather neutral form of big sister and used when talking of one’s own sister, whereas oneesan is used when speaking of someone else’s big sister.

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baptism, was the adoption of Christian names. Men and women chose new first names either from the Bible or from among the names of missionaries and their family members. Among the first converts of the Finnish missionaries in 1905 there were John, Philip, Joseph, Lazarus, Daniel, Ruth and Anna.41 In 1907 the missionaries baptised Rebecca and one convert’s wife, who took the Finnish name Naimi after a missionary wife.42 Such a step doubtless bound the convert to follow her namesake’s example as a Christian wife and mother.43 In turn, it transformed the original holder of the name into a big sister or even a godmother. Within the congregation and mission, the converts were called by their new names after baptism, which accordingly aimed at creating in them the identity of a re-born believer and disciple. Naturally, foreign Christian names also helped create a sense of social unity in a situation where the congregation was marginalised within the surrounding community and culture.

According to Amanda Westén, the guidance of new converts required their staying close to the missionaries, or else the care of their souls would not be successful. She claimed, however, that Japanese Christians had the disadvantage of being more “interdependent on their own missionary rather than on God’s living and forceful word”.44 Tsuya, for example, wanted to stay “until her death with the missionary sister” in order to avoid a marriage orchestrated by her relatives.45 Conversion and employment in the mission community (even if only as a maid) gave the Japanese woman a chance to stand — at least to some extent — against her family’s say in deciding her future. Accordingly, it enabled the female missionaries to see the economic advantages of the mission holding onto their converts.46

41 Autuus Pakanoille, 4 (1906). The foreign names were usually adapted to better suit Japanese

speech. Thus John, in Finnish “Johannes”, turned into Yohane in Japanese, which is pro-nounced like its Finnish original.

42 LEAF Archives, Vihtori Savolainen to Klas Henrik Ekroos, 31.12.1907. Correspondingly, Minkkinen’s two daughters who were born in Japan were given Japanese names, Teru and Nami. Among the altogether ten Finnish families, this was the only one to adopt local names for its children. One Finnish-Japanese couple gave their first child a Finnish name, whereas the two younger ones were given Japanese names.

43 It would be important to analyse what features of cultural invasion, even cultural imperialism, the re-naming of local people included.

44 Westén, Japanitarten, p.110. 45 Ibid., p.40. 46 Hunter, Gospel, p.181.


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Westén described Japanese marriages as unhappy and often ending in divorce, which reflects the idea that Christian marriages (based on mutual love and respect and sealed with shared religious beliefs) were far better. In an ideal case, the family would allow a Christian woman to marry a Christian man, which missionary women, themselves unmarried, would not oppose. Marriage was, after all, the most noble of the vocations of a Christian woman. In a Christian marriage, the wife and mother would raise her children as Christians and thereby spread the gospel through her own life. Japanese customs and value systems, however, defeated the missionaries’ aims time and again. Yet they never really induced young converts to be disloyal to their families in matrimonial matters. In that sense, marriage was considered an integral part of the ideal female Christian life. Besides, the missionaries were unwilling to risk either their good image as benevolent foreigners or their potential success in converting people by overtly manipulating the social customs of the country.47 By her own example, however, the unmarried lady missionary could try to convince a young female convert of her more extensive options in life.48

In the case of Amanda Westén and her maid Tsuya, there appears an interesting feature from the point of view of hierarchical relations, on the one hand, and sisterly relations, on the other. Westén says that she “held onto general Christian equality and sisterhood” and treated Tsuya like a companion (probably to ease her own emotional loneliness). This included, among other things, using a more polite language than was customary with servants. Westén’s experienced colleagues warned her about this, but she felt “a little reluctant to consider herself worthier than someone else”; in addition, “Tsuya now was her sister in faith”.49 When Tsuya, for her part, responded to Westén’s altered behaviour with independence, even disobedience, the foreign sister interpreted that as the devil’s doing. According to Westén, stubbornness and pride were caused by an evil spirit, which bothered recent converts especially, although it was a nuisance to older believers as well.50 The lady missionary required servitude and obedience of her Japanese “sister in faith” (who was still her maid and

47 In China the missionaries began openly objecting to the foot binding of local women only af-

ter Chinese opposition mounted on the issue, argues Hunter, Gospel, p.22. 48 Jane Hunter’s study indicates that the missionaries’ professional example was even greater in

China where women were confined within the four walls of their homes. Ibid., p.249. 49 Westén, Japanitarten, p.41. 50 Ibid., p.42.

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employee). The ideal for the converted woman was the active and busy Martha of the New Testament who in relation to her “big sister”, the missionary (and Jesus), sat obediently at her (and symbolically at his) feet in the manner of Martha’s sister Mary.

Emotionally the missionary women were often very much in need of their female converts’ loyalty and willingness to follow the foreign sister’s role model and advice. In the LEAF mission unmarried women were regularly the only Finnish female workers, while the missionary wife was busy tending her family and household. Friendships between mission wives and unmarried Finnish women did develop, but they faced the risk of uncomfortable consequences. The unmarried female missionary could not confide fully in the missionary wife, whose loyalty rested above all with her husband. Therefore the first-generation missionary women seem to have sought friendship and companionship among local Christian women — and then mostly with the unmarried. Female missionaries were more likely than their married male colleagues and their wives to lean on the local community in their everyday life. That is what the still rather inexperienced Amanda Westén tried to do in her secluded post in Iida city with her maid. In practice it turned out to be very difficult.51 Trying to maintain outward professionalism and still satisfy personal emotional needs was a challenge. Thus finding a friend among “little sisters in faith” was not simple. One had to consider the status differences as well.52 Finnish missionary women in Japan were, without exception, trained elementary school or kindergarten teachers and, as such, above many of their local female acquaintances. Friendship between Japanese and foreign women seemed more attainable when they stood professionally and socially on a more equal level.

51 Amanda Westén never managed to adapt socially to Japan and inside the mission. After falling

ill with rheumatism she was transferred to a mission station in Shimosuwa, where she caused confusion by accusing the missionaries’ Japanese male language teacher of courting the other female missionaries. In 1912 she was called home and denied the chance to return to Japan despite her many requests. Seija Jalagin, “‘I didn’t come here to play, that’s for sure’. Finnish Missionary Women and Authority in Early 20th Century Japan”, in Inger Marie Okkenhaug (ed.), Gender, Race and Religion: Nordic Missions 1860–1940 (Uppsala, Studia Missionalia Svecana XCI, 2003), p.91.

52 Westén also made friends with her language teacher Takamatsu-san who “being a woman her-self understood well the difficulties facing missionary sisters in their work”, and had recog-nised their loneliness especially. Westén, Japanitarten, p.100.


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Fellow workers and friends

In another book on mission work in Japan, Amanda Westén presents the ideal case of the foreign missionary woman’s life on the mission field. The underlying fact is the emotionally and physically isolated everyday life of an unmarried female missionary who could in practice ease her loneliness only by making friends with local women. Westén’s story indicates that the options were scarce. By contrast with her first book that illustrates episodes in the lives of Japanese women Westén had encountered in her missionary years, the second one is a fictional story of a foreign missionary and her Japanese fellow-worker.53 Yuri, the young woman, has come across Christianity already as a little girl in Sunday school. At the beginning of the story, she becomes engaged to a man she loves and moves into his family home, but is forced to leave because of a stereotypically cruel (future) mother-in-law. In time Yuri meets a foreign lady missionary at a Bible class in a silk factory.54 Eventually the two begin to work together, but instead of describing their work and its hardships at length, “the sowing with tears”, Westén conjures up the two women’s life together:

…everything was extraordinarily simple. They tried to manage with as little as possible…Yuri’s room was Japanese in style…Miss Vaulo’s room had some rags, a desk, a bookshelf and a couple of chairs. Nevertheless, everything was homelike, feminine and pretty.55

As the story continues, the reader is convinced of how compatible the two women are together, despite the differences in their ethnic background and former life course. This unanimity permeates all aspects of their life since “they happened to be like-minded in even the major issues concerning their work, as well as the smaller ones”.56 In Westén’s story, Yuri fulfils the hopes of Miss Vaulo, the foreign missionary who says that “life should be

53 Westén’s second book goes by her new surname, Veste, adopted in the early 1920s to replace

the earlier Swedish version. The book is subtitled: “Fictional story of real events in Japan”, re-ferring to her own experiences and observations there.

54 Interestingly, Westén calls the Japanese woman by her first name, Yuri, although it is the Japa-nese custom to address people by their last name. The foreign missionary, on the other hand, is always referred to by her surname, as “Miss Vaulo”. The reversed practice in the book high-lights the hierarchy of the foreign missionary as the “big sister” and the Japanese woman as “little sister”.

55 Mandi Veste, Päivää päin. Kuvitelma tositapahtumista Japanissa (Hämeenlinna, Suomalainen Kirja-paino, 1923), p.28.

56 Ibid.

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both salutary and wonderful”.57 The two women live in a little house on a remote hillside somewhere in inland Japan. The Japanese and European gardens surrounding the house symbolise the union between the Japanese and the Western woman that is realised only because of “God’s merciful blessing”. Between the lines, one can read what loneliness haunted unmarried foreign women in the mission field and what relief could be found in sharing one’s life and work with someone. For a foreign woman who was not willing to compromise her work by marriage and family life, that someone would be a local female co-worker. According to the story, shared religious vocation and respect for each other’s cultural background held the key to a satisfying life together. Amanda Westén herself suffered from loneliness in Japan, but had witnessed the harmonious combination of life and work shared by a missionary colleague and a Japanese Bible woman.

Siiri Uusitalo (1879–1945, in Japan in 1903-41) and Hide Soejima (b. 1890) laboured together in the LEAF mission between 1907 and 1914. They were separated only for some 14 months when Siiri was on furlough in Finland in 1910–1911. For almost six years they shared their life and work, most of this time in Tokyo where they had moved in the summer of 1907 to start a mission station in the metropolitan area. Once a month a male colleague came to hold services and perform pastoral duties. In practice, Hide was Siiri’s assistant, a Bible woman, with almost equal rights to the lady missionary who, in turn, was below male missionaries and Japanese pastors in authority. What made the Bible woman “little sister” was her position on the lowest step of the mission hierarchy. She was allowed to attend the joint mission meetings of Japanese and Finnish workers, but had no voting rights. Bible women, together with Japanese evangelists and pastors, were again excluded from the foreign missionaries’ meetings where the most important decisions (regarding finance and employment) were made. Hide's salary echoed her unacknowledged status by being less than one-third of Siiri’s and half of a Japanese male evangelist’s salary.58

The background and number of Bible women depended on the mission context.59 In the LEAF mission in Japan, they were young 57 Veste, Päivää, p.29. 58 LEAF Archives, “Wid Lutherska evangeliföreningen i Finland anställda Japan-missionärers

lönevillkor på missionsfältet och i henlmandet äfvensom de infödda missionsarbetarnes löneförmåner”(Statistics of salary in LEAF mission field in Japan in 1913).

59 According to Jane Haggis, Bible women in the 19th-century South Travancore mission of the London Missionary Society, for example, were “all married women, often older and frequently


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unmarried converts with a missionary calling that was a mixture of religious thinking and willingness to belong to the foreign mission community. In female missionaries Bible women found role models as well as trusted and appreciative companions. In many cases companionship with a foreign missionary woman sustained their faith and actions, as was true of Hide Soejima and Siiri Uusitalo. Missionary women in turn regarded Bible women as missionaries like themselves. For Hide, Siiri’s year-long absence opened up the chance to work independently in Tokyo. She in fact acted as a substitute for her Finnish “big sister”. At the lowest level of the mission hierarchy, Bible women usually worked in silence and invisibility, which is clearly reflected in another female missionary’s letter to the mission board in Finland. Jenny Nylund (1882–1962), who worked in 1911 on a small inland mission station and visited Hide Soejima in Tokyo once a month, stated that the Bible woman’s work was indeed of importance among the women and children of the Tokyo suburb. Rather unusually she also criticised the foreign missionaries for judging the Japanese believers excessively and called for “the love of Christ who died for his enemies”.60

What was admirable in a Japanese Bible woman resembled, however, the qualities of the foreign missionary woman. According to Amanda Westén, Hide Soejima was an unusually independent Japanese woman, while another Bible woman trainee, Anna (Kumie) Oguchi, was “rather delicate and sentimental by nature. She was not independent like Soejima san but longed for the support of her seniors”. Once she told one of the female missionaries: “I speak to you like to my own mother. It eases my mind”.61

Japanese female workers were usually employed for only a limited period as compared with their male counterparts, some of who became pastors in mission congregations for life. For women, marriage was an alternative to a career. Just as for a missionary woman marriage excluded paid work and the formal status of missionary, so likewise for a Japanese

widowed”. Like the Bible women of the LEAF mission in Japan, their LMS Indian counter-parts were also paid employees, not voluntary workers. Jane Haggis, “Ironies of Emancipa-tion: Changing Configurations of ‘Women’s Work’ in the ‘Mission of Sisterhood’ to Indian Women”, Feminist Review, 65 (Summer 2000), p.117.

60 LEAF Archives, Jenny Nylund to Klas Henrik Ekroos, 2.8.1911. Jenny Nylund had called for patience in judging both the Christian Japanese as well as the “pagans”, letter 24.9.1909, pub-lished Autuus Pakanoille, 7 (1909). Overall, in the early decades the missionaries were very criti-cal about the depth of faith of their converts and their ability to act as “real” Christians, as were missionaries in many other fields, too. Beidelman, Colonial, pp.151–152.

61 Westén, Japanitarten, p.24.

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Bible woman or kindergarten teacher. As both ideal and reality, marriage was a norm for men and women equally, but for women only did it also deny and exclude any professional role outside the home. In 1914 Hide Soejima’s family found her a suitable spouse, a Christian man who also became an evangelist in the Finnish mission for a couple of years.62 In this sense, Hide’s marriage to a servant of the church realised the Christian woman’s ideal as generally upheld by the missions. Meanwhile Hide’s years as a Bible woman guaranteed her ability to evangelise in the new role of a pastor’s wife. For Hide and Siiri the marriage, however, denoted a devastating separation.63 As a farewell gift Hide wrote Siiri a story of a camphor tree and a forest flower, where the tree represented Siiri and the flower depicted Hide herself. Hide described the separation as the flower being torn from its roots that had firmly entwined themselves around the roots of the camphor tree. The tree had covered and strengthened the weak flower and turned it into a strong and happy one.64

Hide’s marriage thus led into a final separation that was far worse than Hide’s year alone in Tokyo had been. Hide and Siiri had developed a deep friendship that rested on the original ideal of the foreign missionary as the big sister and the local convert as the little sister. Yet they found a space in the mission hierarchy that enabled women to live and work together indeed like sisters. Additional factors contributed to their overcoming of both “racial” and status differences. Although an assistant, Hide as a Bible woman was a salaried worker, which put her on something of an equal footing, in the form of economic independence, with her foreign missionary sister. Furthermore, Hide came from a noted samurai family that had also given her a good education. Together, her social standing and education raised her above the average of Japanese employees in the mission.65

62 Eventually illness forced Hide’s husband G. Takada to resign in 1918. 63 Siiri Uusitalo’s diary in July, August and September 1914 (the original diary is in the possession

of Merja Seppälä-Mäkinen, Lahti, Finland). The photograph taken at Hide’s farewell party also confirms the strong and distressed feelings of the two women, in addition to which other mis-sionaries and Japanese workers discussed the issue in their correspondence.

64 “Kusu no ki to nogusa” (the original Japanese story is followed by a Finnish translation by Siiri herself under the title “Kamferttipuu ja metsäkukka”). Siiri Uusitalo’s notebook, “Poimittuja murusia, ynnä muita lisäyksiä” (in the possession of Merja Seppälä-Mäkinen, Lahti, Finland).

65 Siiri Uusitalo herself was the daughter of a petty farmer and an elementary school teacher.


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The intimacy of their friendship is manifested in Hide giving Siiri a Japanese name, Tsuyu (dewdrop).66 Tsuyu can be read as offering the refreshing gospel to the dried soul of Hide. Siiri, in turn, while in hospital in 1913, addressed Hide in her diary as follows: “My beloved Hide! You are a precious gift from God, you are my friend, sister, more than a friend and a sister: you are like a mother to me, although still young… You are a lot like my mother, my own mother, in far away Finland.”67 The friendship had developed into a familial relationship; in her farewell words, Hide also referred to Siiri as a father and a mother, as an older brother and an older sister, but she, the “little sister” also saw her foreign friend as sensei, “a teacher”, which in Japanese indicates high esteem towards the person so named.68

After her years with Hide Soejima, Siiri Uusitalo never shared her professional and private life with another Japanese woman. In that sense, their relationship had been unique. In a way, it was a result of the uncertainty and small size of the mission in its early years, and also of the degree of freedom with which the first-generation missionaries sought to create meaningful lives for themselves in the mission field. As such, that era was also idealised by Amanda Westén. For Siiri Uusitalo, cultural open-mindedness was perhaps more broadly characteristic and typical of her approach in general. She stood by a Japanese male evangelist, Tadao Watanabe (1888–1944), when Finnish missionary men did not accept him, although he was educated in Finland to be a fully-fledged missionary in his own country. The two worked together and Siiri made friends with Watanabe’s Finnish wife.69 Siiri Uusitalo also befriended one of the young converts in the early years in Shimosuwa. Kuniko Imai, later a noted poet, became a Christian secretly without her family’s knowledge, which made her lean more on the foreign missionaries. Both women subsequently moved to

66 Siiri preferred Tsuyu to an earlier name, Sada, given to her by another Japanese Christian (Sada

means “virtue”). Siiri Uusitalo’s diary, fall 1908. 67 Siiri Uusitalo’s diary, Midsummer Day 1913. 68 For Siiri the end of their life together and the devastating sorrow following it signified the self-

denial that was typically expected of missionary women. Of self-denial, see Hunter, Gospel, p.197.

69 The Watanabe case demonstrates how complex the issues of “race”, gender, sexuality and re-ligion were together once the boundaries were crossed. Seija Jalagin, “Japanilais-suomalainen rakkaustarina: Etnisyyden rajankäyntiä lähetystyössä”(“A Japanese Finnish Love Story: Cross-ing Ethnic Boundaries in Mission Work”) in Olli Löytty (ed.), Rajanylityksiä. Tutkimusreittejä toiseuden tuolle puolen (Helsinki, Gaudeamus, 2005 forthcoming).

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Tokyo and met occasionally. Although the friendship was not as intense after Imai grew cold towards Christianity, the two women stayed in contact.

The professional older sisters

In foreign missions institutionalised forms of work have also created gendered spaces where foreigners and local people have come together as missionaries and missionised or co-workers. According to Leslie A. Flemming, American female missionaries in India could influence local women the most by absorbing them as students into girls’ mission schools. Students were expected to adopt missionary zeal and, for instance, to act as Sunday school instructors for the children of servants, as well as continue evangelising in their home villages after graduation.70 The resources of the Finnish mission in Japan, however, were too meagre for it to establish schools; besides, mission schools were under strict government control in the early 20th century.71 Instead, the Finnish missionary women established three kindergartens between 1913 and 1939 that formed both an autonomous line of work for women in raising new Christian generations72 and an arena for local female Christians to pursue a type of professionalism that did not compromise their feminine qualities.

Kindergartens were a “borrowed” western institution in Japan and trained teachers were still few in number at the beginning of the century.73 It was especially difficult to find teachers who had “proper” religious belief, or were responsible and dutiful enough in the eyes of the missionaries.74 The 70 Flemming, “A New Humanity”, pp.200–202. 71 Their golden days had been in the 1880s, although in the early 20th century the missions dis-

tinguished themselves in improving girls’ higher education. Paul Tsuchido Shew, “Historical Motivations for Christian Education in Japan: An historical analysis of the purposes and goals of Christian education in Japan from the Meiji thorough Showa eras”, in “The Study of Chris-tianity in Japan”, Seigakuin University General Research Institute Bulletin, 18 (November 2000), pp.52–77. Also available on http://christianityinjapan.com/research/articles/2001.04Shew-Xtn-educa-tion.html (accessed 24.4.2002).

72 The founding of the first kindergarten in Iida was preceded by a bitter conflict about the status of women as missionaries. In kindergartens, female missionaries secured themselves an autonomous line of work as well as legitimising their presence as more than just assistants to male missionaries. Jalagin, “Negotiating”.

73 In 1906 there were 423 public and private kindergartens in the country. Roberta Wollons, “The Black Forest in a Bamboo Garden: Missionary Kindergartens in Japan, 1868–1912”, His-tory of Education Quarterly, 33, 1 (Spring 1993), pp.1–2.

74 The founder of the Iida kindergarten, Rosa Hytönen (1877–1952), considered young teachers and trainees irresponsible. She claimed that whenever the missionary was not around, they ne-


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mission had to invest in educating kindergarten teachers itself. For example, in 1930 missionary Tyyne Niemi (1901–1991), who was in charge of the Iida kindergarten, rejoiced in the baptism of kindergarten trainee Yuriko Yonekubo. Not only did baptism make Yonekubo a good and spiritually reliable employee; it also proved that the missionary’s own evangelisation efforts had reached adults in addition to the little kindergarten pupils.75 Niemi and Yonekubo had spent countless evenings studying the Bible together. The kindergarten employees were, therefore, exposed to being converted “at home” in the same way as the maids.

In the 1930s kindergarten and Sunday school work became increasingly important to the whole mission due to the growing spirit of nationalism and militarism, which turned the adult population away, making them indifferent towards Christianity. Besides that, work among children now served the second-generation Japanese Lutherans, which further highlighted its importance. On the initiative of their members, mission congregations established kindergartens of their own (with the mission’s assistance);76 as permanent institutions, such kindergartens provided work and career opportunities for local Christian women.77 While Bible women were always assistants and their professional image remained rather weak, at least in the eyes of the mission and its men, the kindergarten teachers and assistant teachers were trained professionals.78 Thus work among pre-school children enabled the combination of professionalism with the traditional female caring role.79 As role models of women whose life centred on career and

glected their duties and even left the children unattended. LEAF Archives, Rosa Hytönen to Jenny Nylund, 19.12.1914.

75 Work among adults had been a joy for Jenny Nylund, too, who during Siiri Uusitalo’s absence had visited Tokyo once a month to help Hide Soejima with the women’s meetings. For Ny-lund who was mainly in charge of the Sunday school in Shimosuwa, these visits were a much needed experience of evangelising adults where the results, i.e. conversions, were visible earlier than with the children. See LEAF Archives, Jenny Nylund to Klas Henrik Ekroos, 2.8.1911.

76 The mission congregations of the LEAF work in Japan gained financial independence very slowly. Before the Pacific War, only Ikebukuro congregation in Tokyo was independent. Plans for the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Fukuin Rūteru Kyōkai) were not carried out until the late 1940s.

77 Akaho congregation established a kindergarten in 1933, and Shimosuwa congregation in 1935. 78 A kindergarten teacher’s salary in 1913 was 2.5 times as much as that of a Bible woman (60

yen compared to 25 yen per month). Even the assistant teacher in the Iida mission kindergar-ten earned as much as the Bible woman.

79 See also Karin Sarja, “Ännu en syster till Afrika”. Trettiosex kvinnliga missionärer i Natal och Zululand 1876–1902 (Uppsala, Studia Missionalia Svecana LXXXVIII, 2002), p.320.

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calling, the missionaries were channelled into encouraging local women into kindergarten work.

In some cases this strategy bore ample fruit. In the 1930s Momoe Saito, who had been a pupil of the Iida kindergarten and later trained as a kindergarten teacher, herself ran the Iida kindergarten.80 The missionary women’s entire agenda thus culminated and found fulfilment in Saito’s person: she had already been converted as a child in their care, and in time returned to her alma mater as a devoted professional. Eventually, after some ten active years in kindergarten work, she married to raise a Christian family of her own. There were also those who dedicated their entire life to serving the mission. For example the dedication of Masago Ishizaka (1895–1998) to her work in LEAF mission kindergartens was backed up by the fact that she had no family members who could orchestrate her life. Ishizaka had been converted while a teacher in Iida kindergarten. She was baptised in 1923 after two years of employment. During the war years in 1941-45 she defended the mission’s estate and property in Tokyo from confiscation until the missionaries were able to return from Finland to re-establish the work.81 With only a few years’ exception, she worked at the mission kindergartens (not the congregational ones) from the early 1920s until she retired in 1960.82

The kindergartens afforded unmarried Christian women in Japan a unique opportunity for a career at a time when women’s work outside the home was still unusual or limited to only a few years before marriage.83 In this sense Christian kindergartens were also a place to proceed in the footsteps of the unmarried missionary women without compromising either professionalism, calling or appropriate female ideals that found support in not just Christian, but also Confucian and Buddhist thinking that insisted on a domestic role for women.

80 Saito worked in the Iida and Sapporo kindergartens between 1930 and 1940, when she mar-

ried and resigned. 81 Marja Vilkniemi, “Lähetyksen koira – Ishisakan täti”, Musubi (1998). Musubi is the annual

magazine of LEAF’s Japan mission. 82 Vilkniemi, “Lähetyksen”. 83 Over half of Japanese factory workers were young girls and women in the late 19th century, of

which the Finnish missionaries were well aware since they evangelised in the silk factories of the Suwa and Kami-Ina areas in Nagano prefecture. Big cities, on the other hand, offered edu-cated women easier jobs in offices, movie theatres, cafeterias and the like. Hunter, Emergence, pp.146–147.


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Tyyne Niemi can be regarded as a powerful role model for the many Japanese kindergarten teachers and assistants who worked under her supervision in the mission kindergartens. The letters between her and Masago Ishizaka reflect the deep trust and loyalty the two felt for each other. For Ishizaka, Niemi was always sensei, the teacher, and Ishizaka’s senior because of her position as the head and founder of the mission kindergartens in Sapporo and later in Ōokayama in Tokyo. Deep friendship in the intimate manner of Siiri Uusitalo and Hide Soejima does not seem to have developed, though. For the kindergarten staff, Tyyne Niemi was a warm-hearted and loyal matron who set an example of a Christian professional woman for everyone working with her. Tyyne Niemi’s personal correspondence indicates that she developed personal friendships with foreign missionary colleagues rather than her Japanese workmates. An American Lutheran female missionary whose life and work situation paralleled Niemi’s as a spinster supervisor of a mission kindergarten, became an especially close friend and confidante, despite the long distance that kept them apart while in Japan.84

In addition to her professionalism, Tyyne Niemi’s missionary life was characterised by straightforward action whenever she saw a person in need. In 1931 she rescued a young girl, Taki Ōkura, from a brothel in Iida city and gained ample publicity for it. Her help for the young woman included not only fearless opposition to the brothel owner and local authorities, but also a strong proselytising element that can be termed “caring power”.85 When Taki refused to be Christianised and headed her own way, she demonstrated the limits of the caring power of Tyyne Niemi as the professional and spiritual “big sister”. The sisterhood ideal and its hierarchy succeeded only when local women and missionary women belonged to the same religious community and the local women were willing to consent to the hierarchical realisation of sisterhood.

In the early years of her missionary career, Tyyne Niemi had also helped her maid Takeyo Hiramatsu, an example of a local convert who in many ways became dependent on the mission community. She had married a

84 Tyyne Niemi’s correspondence, the hundreds of letters she received between 1918 and 1988,

offers an ample source for studying a missionary woman’s web of social relations, as well as her actions and life on the mission field.

85 The concept of caring power acknowledges the differences in power relations but at the same time sees power as a process that leaves space for the less powerful to resist the caring power of the mightier party. Markkola, Synti, p.20.

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Japanese evangelist of the LEAF mission, but was later deserted by him. After serving a considerable number of years in several missionary households, of both unmarried women and families, she came to Tyyne Niemi’s home in 1927. In the meantime her former parents-in-law were bringing up her son and daughter. With the help of Tyyne Niemi she managed to gain custody of her children despite the grandparents’ opposition and also an official divorce from her husband.86 Tyyne Niemi’s actions therefore present her as a professional “big sister” and a mother-like figure within the female sphere of the mission and its kindergartens.

Christian womanhood and missionaries

Foreign missionary women lived in a web of social relations where ties with other women seemed to offer the best chance for the satisfaction of emotional needs. Not being able to work with other missionary women, they were likely to turn towards local women. Within this group, however, it was not easy to create permanent relationships. Maids were employees, they came and went, and so did many of the young Bible women and parish members who were being married according to their families’ wishes and decisions. With ordinary congregants, in any case, missionaries had to be careful not to arouse suspicion as overtly favouring one over others. The foreign missionary woman was independent, yet isolated and sometimes even on a pedestal. She occupied an authority position that signalled her as a “big sister” compared with the local women as “little sisters” in faith.

The friendship between Siiri Uusitalo and Bible woman Hide Soejima thus presents a rather special, if not unique, case that clearly demonstrates how ethnic and hierarchical boundaries were blurred when favourable circumstances arose. When deep friendships developed, they did not eradicate the “big sister” and the “little sister” hierarchy, although at times the Finnish and Japanese friends considered themselves like mothers to each other. This clearly shows that in the life they shared together, they were each other’s closest companions, like fellow family members. Despite being unusual within the LEAF mission, their case nevertheless testifies to the

86 Eino S. Rahikainen, Elämälle kiitos. Pienen naisen suuri elämä (Helsinki, SLEY-Kirjat, 1980),

pp.88–91. At times Tyyne Niemi also cared for Takeyo’s children while another missionary employed her. In the 1950s Tyyne Niemi took in two foster children whose family situation was unbearable. Thus she as an unmarried woman became a single parent.


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possibility of similar friendships. Looking at Siiri and Hide together, religion and gender in the colonial context do not seem such a fatal combination.

Deep friendship being a rare case between foreign missionary women and local women, one is left with a handful of other kinds of relationships between the two groups. Mission kindergartens added to the social web of women in mission a professional tone that differed considerably from other examples of female living and/or working together. Kindergarten teachers were educated professionals who came to the mission pre-schools because of their professional abilities and at best they would be or later became Christians. For them the foreign missionary woman was the supervisor of their work and also the spiritual “big sister” if the Japanese teacher chose to be converted. Mission kindergartens would not offer permanent positions for teachers with no Christian orientation and therefore the local teachers were likely to convert and then stay on as loyal employees. In any case, the shared religious calling deepened the sense of belonging to the same group and helped sustain the foreign missionary’s seniority.

This hierarchical sisterhood is also the context for defining what kind of Christian womanhood the missionary women desired to foster in Japanese women. These big sisters, ane, strove to rear the same kind of Christian womanhood in Japanese women that they themselves lived into reality. The missionary was first and foremost dedicated to spreading the gospel, to such an extent that she could be seen as sacrificing close relations with friends and relatives, indeed practically her whole life in her home country, to this evangelistic goal. At the same time she had to abstain from marriage and family life to be able to pursue a missionary career. For many missionary women it was not, in fact, a sacrifice, but rather a conscious choice or satisfying coincidence. In return they obtained a diverse and professionally fulfilling, yet in many ways challenging, life amidst a culture alien to their own background. What was not so perceptible to their hearers in the diverse fields was that foreign missions opened up possibilities for female missionaries that were unachievable at home.

Within the Finnish mission context in early 20th-century Japan, independence is put forward as the strongest quality which missionary women looked out for in local Christian women. For them, in turn, however, the lady missionaries’ lives might appear as almost unattainable ideals. In their own country Japanese women had few opportunities to encounter nominal Western Christians. Instead, they dealt with deeply

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religious men and women who were devoted to their evangelisation and whose revivalist context made them rather categorical and inflexible.87 All Christians were obliged, whatever their personal status, to participate in evangelising, at the very least by the example of their own lives. Local members were expected to keep Sunday holy; attend church services and women’s clubs; bring children to Sunday school; participate in congregational fundraising including for the pastor’s salary; and bury their dead in a Christian way in a country where people were expected to respect their deceased family members with Buddhist and Shintō rituals. In short, the missionaries wanted to see the converts express their Christianity with their whole lives in the same way as they themselves did.

The unmarried missionary woman offered a role model who could dedicate her whole life to spreading the gospel. Yet remaining single to pursue a career in the service of others could not, even by Christian standards, be openly presented as a female ideal. Instead, the unmarried way of life as a choice manifested itself in the person of female missionary, and thus these women were both Christian and professional, or rather professional Christian role models for their Japanese “younger sisters”. Under the umbrella of sisterhood the older sisters, the missionaries, remained as the more experienced and more capable guides for their Japanese younger sisters. For their part the missionary women had no need to overcome the status difference caused by “race”, ethnicity, age, background and spiritual and professional seniority discussed in this article. Sisterhood with its hierarchical structure was seen as natural. After all, the missionaries regarded themselves as bearers of light in the mission field, no matter how civilised the indigenous hearers looked on the outside.

Of course, if we had a chance to grasp the views of a wide range of women evangelised by Western missionaries, we might hear a somewhat different story. What needs to be done now is to look both at the mission context post-World War II, which was different in many ways, and also at local women’s role and voice today. We might then get more idea of what lies behind the scenes, and what the current gendered heritage is of the mission work of those pre-war decades.

87 The Finnish missionaries in Japan disapproved of smoking, for example.

disciples, sisters or companions? japanese and finnish women’s mutual encounter in mission

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