Sunrise Land

“From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same Jehovah’s name is to be praised.”

— Psalm 113:3, ASV

Matsue

Amy Carmichael reached Japan in the spring of 1893, after a voyage by way of Shanghai. Japan was then a country in the middle of headlong change. Only forty years earlier it had been closed to the outside world. Now, under the Meiji government, it was building railways and factories, writing a constitution, and sending its young men abroad to study. Christian missionaries had been allowed to work openly for about two decades, and the churches were small but growing. In the larger cities there were mission schools and congregations, but in the countryside, especially on the western side of the main island, the gospel was still almost unknown.

The Christian story in Japan was older than the Meiji era, and darker. Roman Catholic missionaries had arrived in the sixteenth century, and for a time hundreds of thousands of Japanese had become Christians. Then, in the early seventeenth century, the faith was banned, and it was hunted down with great cruelty for more than two hundred years. Believers were tortured and killed; suspected Christians were made to tread on images of Christ and Mary to prove that they had renounced him. Some communities kept their faith in secret, handing it down through generations without priests or Scriptures. Public notice boards forbidding Christianity were taken down only in 1873, twenty years before Amy arrived. When she spoke of Christ in a Japanese home, she was speaking of a name that many older people had been taught from childhood to fear.

Barclay Buxton had gone to that western coast a few years before. He was a member of a well-known English evangelical family, an Anglican clergyman of independent means, and a man shaped, like Amy, by the Keswick movement. He had settled in Matsue, an old castle town on the shore of a lake in the province of Izumo, and had gathered a band of Japanese and English workers who travelled through the towns and villages of the region preaching the gospel. It was to this band that Amy came.

The work suited her temperament. It was evangelistic, it was carried out in teams, it involved travelling to places where the gospel had not been heard, and it depended on prayer. Buxton believed, as she did, in a close partnership with the Japanese believers, and much of the most effective work was done by Japanese Christians. Amy herself could not speak the language, and she depended on Japanese fellow workers to interpret for her, among them a young Christian woman whom she called Misaki San. With them she visited homes, held meetings for women, and travelled into the countryside. It was humbling work for someone who wanted to speak for herself, and it taught her how much the gospel in any country depends on its own people.

Letters from Sunrise Land

We know a good deal about Amy’s months in Japan because she wrote long letters home, which were later collected and published in 1895 as From Sunrise Land, her first book. The letters are lively, observant and often funny. They describe journeys by kuruma, the Japanese rickshaw, meetings with women and enquirers, and the strangeness and beauty of the country. They also show a young missionary learning hard lessons about herself.

The best-known of those lessons, as she told it later, came on a visit to an old woman who was ill and who seemed to be on the point of believing. Amy had gone in her ordinary English clothes, which included a pair of fur-lined gloves against the cold. As she spoke, she noticed the old woman’s attention wandering to the gloves. The moment passed, and the woman did not respond. Amy went home convinced that her foreign clothes had come between the woman and the gospel, and she resolved from then on to wear Japanese dress. Whatever the exact details, the lesson stayed with her. In India she would wear a sari, and she would ask the members of her Fellowship to dress as the people around them did. She did not believe that clothes could save anyone. But she believed that they could get in the way.

Learning the Hard Way

Not everything went well. Japanese is a difficult language, and Amy made slow progress. Working through an interpreter was frustrating, and she felt keenly her inability to speak directly to the people she wanted to reach. The climate did not suit her. The damp cold of the Japanese winter and the humid heat of summer brought on her neuralgia, which she began to call her “Japanese head.” There were weeks when she could do nothing at all.

There were also spiritual struggles. Amy came to Japan with high expectations, shaped by the Keswick teaching on faith and victory. She prayed for definite results, and sometimes she saw them. But she also saw much that discouraged her: people who listened politely and went away unchanged, enquirers who drew back, and the slowness of the work. She learned, as every missionary learns, that the field is not the platform, and that the stories told at conventions are only part of the truth. It was a lesson she would later put into a whole book.

The Cave

One of the most important moments of her time in Japan was not about the work at all. Many years later, she told a younger colleague about a day when she had gone alone to a cave in the hills to pray. She was troubled by the prospect of a life alone. She was in her twenties; she had chosen a path that would very probably mean she would never marry; and she was afraid of the loneliness of the years ahead. In the cave, she said, she brought the fear to God, and she received an assurance from the words of a psalm, which she knew in the Authorised Version: “none of them that trust in him shall be desolate.”

The verse is the last line of Psalm 34. In the American Standard Version it reads a little differently: “none of them that take refuge in him shall be condemned.” The two translations bring out different sides of the Hebrew word, which carries the sense of being held guilty and also of being left desolate and bereft. Amy took from it the promise that she would not be left alone. She did not say that she was never lonely afterwards; she was, often. But she said that the promise held, and that she never again doubted that God would be enough for her.

The story is told only in her later recollection, and like many such memories it may have been shaped by the years. But it rings true to the rest of her life. She never married. She formed deep friendships, and she gathered a family of hundreds, but she lived without the companionship of a husband, and she knew what that meant. Her writing about singleness, in later years, was neither sentimental nor bitter. It was the writing of someone who had faced the question squarely in a cave in Japan, and found an answer she could live with.

Fifteen Months

Amy Carmichael stayed in Japan for about fifteen months. By the summer of 1894 her health had broken down badly, and she was exhausted. She decided that she must leave, at least for a time. She went first to Shanghai, and then, believing that she was being guided, on to Ceylon. The decision was made quickly, and she did not consult the committee that had sent her before making it. Some of those at home were dismayed. To them it looked as if the Keswick missionary had simply left her post.

It is fair to ask what Japan had amounted to. In terms of visible results, not very much: some meetings, some conversations, a small number of people who professed faith, and a book of letters. She herself seems to have felt that she had failed. But Japan had taught her lessons she would use for the rest of her life: about dress and identification, about the slowness of real work, about the importance of indigenous workers, and about loneliness and the faithfulness of God. Barclay Buxton’s band was also an early model of the kind of community she would later build: a group of men and women, foreign and local, living simply and working together in prayer.

From the Rising of the Sun

The psalm at the head of this chapter speaks of the name of God being praised from the rising of the sun to its going down. Japan, the land of the rising sun, was the first place where Amy Carmichael saw that promise begin to come true in a place far from her own. She saw Japanese men and women turn to Christ and become fellow workers. She saw that the gospel was not English, or Irish, or Western, but belonged to every people under the sun.

She would spend most of her life in India, and her months in Japan are often passed over quickly in her story. But they were the first test of her call, and in some ways the hardest. She went out with no experience, no language, and poor health, under an arrangement that some thought unwise, and she came away ill and uncertain. Yet she did not doubt that she had been sent, or that she would be sent again. The next stage of the journey would be short, and it would end, unexpectedly, back in England.