Kanzo Uchimura: The Boy Who Prayed Against God

In the autumn of 1877, a sixteen-year-old student walked out of a new college in the frontier town of Sapporo and went to a shrine to pray. He was not praying for good marks or for a safe journey home. He was praying that a god would destroy something.

The something was Christianity. In the few weeks since Kanzo Uchimura had arrived at the Sapporo Agricultural College, the older students had been pressing him and the other newcomers to put their names to a document written in English called the “Covenant of Believers in Jesus.” Every member of the senior class had signed it. Now they wanted the freshmen. Uchimura did not want to sign. He was the son of a samurai family, raised to honour the gods of Japan and the lord his father had served, and as far as he could see this foreign religion was an invasion. So he went to the shrine, and with all the sincerity he had, he asked the god there to put out the new enthusiasm in the college and to punish the students who had gone over to it.

We know about that afternoon because Uchimura told the story on himself, years later, in a book called How I Became a Christian. It is not the kind of story most people tell about their own conversion. He admits he fought. He admits he was pushed. And he admits that the pushing worked before the believing did. What makes his story worth reading is what happened next: how a signature he never wanted to give turned into a faith that cost him his job, his reputation, and very nearly everything else, and that he never once gave back.

A Fretful Boy and His Many Gods

Kanzo Uchimura was born in March 1861 in Edo, the great city that within a few years would be renamed Tokyo. His family belonged to the samurai class, the hereditary warriors who had ruled Japan for centuries. His father was a scholar of Confucius, the ancient Chinese teacher whose sayings about duty, loyalty and respect for parents shaped the whole moral world of a Japanese gentleman. From his father the boy learned to be loyal to his lord, to honour his parents and teachers, and to care more about honour than comfort.

He also learned to be afraid. Japan in the 1860s was full of gods. There were gods of places and gods of things, gods of the hearth and the well and the road, and each one had its shrine and its proper way to be treated. Young Kanzo took all of them seriously. Every morning he prayed to the gods of the four directions, east, west, north and south. When one god asked him to give up a certain food as an offering, he gave it up, and then another god asked for another, until there were things on his plate, eggs and beans among them, that he was no longer allowed to eat. Some gods seemed to want opposite things, and he worried constantly about which one he might be offending. On the way to school he would take a longer road just to pass fewer shrines, because at each one he felt he had to stop and bow and pray.

Looking back as a grown man, he summed it up in one honest sentence: “With so many gods to satisfy and appease, I was naturally a fretful timid child.”

Meanwhile, the country around him was turning upside down. In 1868, when Kanzo was seven, a revolution restored the Emperor Meiji to the centre of Japanese government and swept away the old military rulers. The new government wanted Japan to become strong and modern, quickly, and it began sending for Western teachers, Western science and Western languages. The samurai class lost its old privileges. For centuries Christianity had been banned in Japan and its believers hunted down; the public notice boards announcing that ban were only taken down in 1873. Being a Christian was no longer a crime, but most Japanese people still saw it as foreign, suspicious, and disloyal.

Kanzo was a bright student and learned English young. In 1877, at sixteen, he accepted a government scholarship to a brand-new college on Hokkaido, the wild northern island the government was trying to settle and farm.

A Covenant Left Behind

The Sapporo Agricultural College had opened in 1876 to train young men to develop Hokkaido. To get it started, the government had hired an American, William S. Clark, the president of a farming college in Massachusetts. Clark was meant to teach science and agriculture. The Japanese officials who hired him did not want him teaching the Bible. He taught it anyway, as part of teaching the students how to live, and before his eight months in Sapporo were over, he had written out a short document in English and invited his students to sign it.

That was the “Covenant of Believers in Jesus.” In it the signers promised, in short, to follow Jesus Christ as their Lord, to take the Bible as their guide, to meet together for worship and prayer, and to live clean and honest lives. Every student in the first class signed it. Clark sailed home in the spring of 1877. The story told ever since in Japan is that his parting words to his students, called out from horseback, were “Boys, be ambitious!” Whatever exactly he said, he left behind him a group of young Christians who were very ambitious indeed for their friends.

So when Uchimura and the second class arrived in the autumn of 1877, Clark was gone, but his covenant was not. The seniors had caught his enthusiasm and set about converting the freshmen. Imagine being sixteen, far from home, at a small boarding college on the edge of a frontier, where nearly every older student you looked up to was urging you to join them. That was Uchimura’s situation. In a place like that, the opinion of the older boys is not just one voice among many. It is the weather you live in.

Uchimura resisted. He saw himself as a patriot defending Japan against foreign gods. That is why he went to the shrine. But one boy cannot hold out forever against an entire college. Before the year was out, he signed. He was honest about why: he did it, he said, “against my will,” because the pressure of the older students was too strong for him. Some of his classmates signed too, among them a quiet, clever boy named Inazo Nitobe, who would one day be one of the most famous Japanese people in the world.

It is worth stopping here, because this is the uncomfortable part of the story. Uchimura himself, looking back, wondered whether it had been right to force a teenager into a promise like that. Faith that is signed for under pressure is not yet faith. A name on a paper is not a changed heart. If his story had stopped at the signature, it would be a story about peer pressure, nothing more.

It did not stop there.

One God, and Not Many

Here is the surprise. Once Uchimura had signed, he started to actually read and listen. And the first thing that struck him was not a doctrine about sin or salvation. It was much simpler than that. The covenant, and the Bible behind it, said that there is one God. Not eight million. One.

For a boy who had spent his whole childhood trying to keep a crowd of anxious gods from being angry with him, this was like having a weight lifted off his back. If there is only one God, then there is no need to bow at every shrine, no need to worry that pleasing one god means offending another, no list of foods to avoid for a dozen different reasons. There is one Creator, the Lord of everything, and he can be known. The apostle Paul wrote to Christians living among the temples of ancient Corinth that “even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth... yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist. And there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Uchimura was discovering the same thing, nearly two thousand years later and on the other side of the world.

He described it in words that are among the most famous in his book: “One God, and not many, was indeed a glad tiding to my little soul.”

He remembered that he now walked past the shrines on his way without stopping, with his head up, not worried at all, talking and laughing with his friends. The fear was gone. The new faith did something for him, right away, that the old one never had. He was free.

That freedom drew him further in. He began to study the Bible with the other Christian students. They met in their dormitory rooms to read Scripture, pray and sing, and they took turns leading. They gave each other Christian names. On 2 June 1878, at seventeen, Uchimura was baptised along with six of his classmates by a visiting Methodist missionary, Merriman C. Harris. When the moment came, he knelt and was asked whether he would take on himself “the name of Him who was crucified for our sins.” He answered, “Amen.” He chose the Christian name Jonathan, after the son of King Saul in the Old Testament, whose loyal love for his friend David was the kind of friendship he wanted to have.

It is important to be honest about how far he had come. At seventeen, Uchimura had been set free from fear of the many gods, and he had begun to follow Jesus, but he would say later that he did not yet really understand the heart of the Christian message: what Jesus’ death on the cross had to do with him. He had found the one God. He had not yet found peace with that God about his own failures. That would take years.

A Little Church in the North

The Christian students at Sapporo were not content to stay a dormitory club. After graduating, Uchimura and his friends decided they wanted a church of their own, not one run from abroad or tied to any single foreign denomination, but simply a Japanese church of believers in Jesus. They were troubled that the divisions between Western churches were being carried over to Japan. They raised money, built a small church building in Sapporo, and when a mission had lent them money, they worked to pay it back so that they owed no one.

That longing, for a faith that was fully Christian and fully at home in Japan, was already part of Uchimura at twenty. It would shape the rest of his life.

Uchimura graduated in 1881 and went to work for the government on Japan’s fisheries. Then came a crisis. In 1884 he married, and the marriage broke down within months. He never fully explained what went wrong, but he was left crushed by grief and guilt. The young man who had felt so free at Sapporo now found he could not make his own heart clean. Like many troubled young people before and since, he decided to go somewhere far away. In November 1884 he sailed for the United States. He had a romantic idea of America as a Christian land, and he hoped that the country that had sent him the gospel would give him the peace he could not find.

Looking Up

America disappointed him. He found greed, racism and drunkenness in the land he had imagined as holy, and he wrote about it with sharp honesty. For about eight months he worked as an attendant at a school for children with intellectual disabilities in Elwyn, Pennsylvania. He had gone there, he later admitted, hoping that by doing hard and humble good works he could earn his way to peace. It did not work. No amount of goodness could fix what was wrong inside him.

In 1885 he went to Amherst College in Massachusetts, the very college where William S. Clark had once studied. Its president, Julius Seelye, received the poor, worn-out young Japanese man with unexpected warmth and gave him a room. Uchimura remembered Seelye’s advice in simple terms: stop looking inside yourself for something good enough to offer God. Look at Jesus, who paid for your sins on the cross.

It took months for that to sink in. Then, in March 1886, he wrote in his diary: “Never was the atoning power of Christ more clearly revealed to me than it is to-day.” The word “atoning” means making peace, making things right. What he finally saw was that Jesus, by dying in his place, had already done what Uchimura could never do for himself. He did not have to make himself clean before coming to God. He could come as he was, and be cleansed.

Uchimura said that he was truly converted at Amherst, around ten years after the day he signed the covenant. That might sound as if the Sapporo years did not count. He did not see it that way. Sapporo was where God first found him, freed him from fear, and put him on the road. Amherst was where he finally understood the cross. Both were real. It was one journey.

What Came After

He came home to Japan in 1888, and his faith was soon tested in public. In January 1891 he was teaching at the First Higher Middle School in Tokyo. The government had just issued the Imperial Rescript on Education, a document signed by the Emperor that set out the moral duties of every Japanese subject. At a school ceremony, teachers and students were expected to step forward one by one and bow deeply before the Emperor’s signature, as before something sacred. When Uchimura’s turn came, he hesitated. He respected the Emperor, but a bow of worship, he felt, belonged to God alone. He gave at most a slight bow.

It became a national scandal, remembered as an act of lese-majesty, an insult to the ruler. Newspapers and students called him a traitor. He lost his job. He fell seriously ill, and his young wife Kazu, who nursed him through it, caught the illness and died that spring. Within a few months, he had lost his work, his good name, and his wife.

In the poverty that followed, he wrote. In 1895 he published, in English, How I Became a Christian: Out of My Diary, the honest account from which most of this story comes. He became a journalist, attacking corruption, and in 1903 he opposed Japan’s coming war with Russia as a Christian pacifist, almost alone, and lost his job once more.

From 1900 he published a Bible magazine and gave Sunday Bible lectures in Tokyo, which many students came to hear. Out of these grew what was called Mukyokai, the “Non-Church” movement: groups of believers who met to study the Bible under lay teachers, without ordained ministers or a denomination. It was a real departure from how most churches work, including leaving out baptism and the Lord’s Supper as church ceremonies, and many missionaries criticised him for it. But the faith he taught was the historic Christian faith: the Bible as the Word of God, salvation through Christ’s death on the cross, his resurrection, and his return.

He loved Japan fiercely all his life, even when Japan called him a traitor. He put his two loves this way: “I love two J’s and no third; one is Jesus, and the other is Japan.” But he knew which came first. In the front of his Bible he wrote the words he wanted on his grave: “I for Japan; Japan for the World; The World for Christ; And All for God.” He died in Tokyo on 28 March 1930.

The boy who prayed at a shrine against Christianity ended as one of the best-known Christian teachers his country ever produced. He was pushed through the door at sixteen. But nobody pushed him to stay. He stayed because, once inside, he had found the one God who did not need to be feared and appeased, and later the Saviour who had done for him what he could not do for himself.

In Their Own Words

“One God, and not many, was indeed a glad tiding to my little soul.”

— Kanzo Uchimura, How I Became a Christian (1895)

Think It Through

1. Uchimura signed the covenant under pressure from older students. Is a decision like that worth anything? What made his faith become real later, and who or what did that?
2. Before he became a Christian, his religion made him “fretful” and “timid.” What was it about the idea of one God that set him free? Are there things people today feel they have to keep “appeasing”?
3. At sixteen he felt free, but at twenty-five he said he finally understood the cross. Can a person be truly following Jesus and still have a lot left to understand? What changed for him at Amherst?
4. In 1891 Uchimura refused a bow he believed belonged only to God, and lost almost everything. How do you decide where respect ends and worship begins?

Read More on Ochorus

There are not yet any of Kanzo Uchimura’s own books in the library, but his full biography on his author page tells the rest of his story in more depth: his lonely years in America, the night he finally understood the cross at Amherst, the death of his daughter Ruth, and how an American friend’s thirty years of daily prayer opened his eyes to the hope of Christ’s return.