76. Consolations of a Christian

BUY CONSOLATIONS OF A CHRISTIAN This is the Art Life Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. I’m excited to announce to you that we just released a new book, Consolations of a Christian, by Japanese writer Kanzo Uchimura. Written in 1893, it has never before been translated into English, which is surprising because this is the book that made Uchimura famous, instantly becoming a bestseller and launching his career as a writer. Here’s some backstory for this book. In 1890, the Emperor of Japan issued an Imperial Rescript on Education. Kanzo Uchimura was at that time a teacher in one of the top schools in the country, but he did not bow deeply enough to the Emperor’s signature on the document, for as a Christian, he saw this as a kind of idolatry. However, his fellow faculty members saw this as a huge sign of disrespect, and the press saw it as an act of treason. His name and face were plastered on newspapers across the country. He was fired from his job. His friends distanced themselves from him. He fell into deep poverty. And from all the stress, he got really, really sick, even to the point of death. While his wife was caring for him, she too got very sick, and then she died. This was especially crushing because they were newlyweds, having been married little more than a year. Uchimura hit rock bottom in his life, but rather than giving up, he cried out to God in ink, brush, and paper, capturing the minds and hearts of so many with his uniquely Japanese understanding of the Bible. And his book came out during a time when Christian books were mostly just translated Western authors. This book is fascinating for many reasons, but I can tell you from personal experience that I was greatly encouraged working on this project, and so I know it can be a great consolation and comfort to you as well, and anyone going through a difficult time in their life. Let me say a quick word about the translator. Chris Born is a longtime friend of our Grace City Church community here in Tokyo. First, he came for a year to work on his doctoral thesis on Uchimura, and during that time he and his family poured into the church community, helping with many of the ministries. Then he returned to the States, where he’s the Associate Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. But he recently came back to Japan for post-doctoral research and to write a number of books including this one. Again, he and his family poured into the community, and even his oldest daughter worked with us as an intern, giving piano concerts, leading worship with her playing and singing, and helping out in so many ways. They go back to America this month, and we’re very sorry to see them go. They will be missed. Let me also say a word about the cover designer, created by the immensely talented Emma Grace von Fange, one of the interns who worked with us this summer. She did such a beautiful job getting inspiration from the text and making it appealing while also giving a sense of what we find inside. It’s a very attractive cover and really a work of art. I’m so grateful for her hard work on this project. Recently we had the launch day, and one of the church members threw a dinner party for the event. So I took a few minutes to sit down with a translator just before the party to invite all of you into the celebration. Here’s our conversation. Roger So today is the launch day of Consolations of a Christian by Kanzo Uchimura, translated by Christopher Born, who is sitting right next to me. Thank you so much for being with us tonight. Chris Thanks for having me, Roger. This is awesome. Roger Yeah, so we are meeting in a friend’s home downtown Tokyo. We’re going to have a launch party tonight. Some of us are already here preparing the food, and others are going to be arriving soon. You’re probably going to hear some doorbell ringing… Chris So pull up a chair and hang out with us. Roger I’m just so thankful that it’s finally out in the world as of today, July 13, 2026. Chris Wow. Unbelievable. Roger A lot of time has gone into this, hasn’t it? Chris Yes, from your own kind encouragement for me to follow through and get it done from about 10 years ago when I started it to bringing it to completion just now. It’s been quite a journey, but exciting to be part of it and also be working so closely with an amazing team. Really, you assembled a wonderful cover designer, and you’ve done so much of the editing. Roger She was great. Chris She was fantastic, and you put it together so quickly. I mean, you really have a lot of talent behind this project. You just made it pop and shine. I’m grateful. Roger I really like that about putting out books. It’s not just about the writer writing solo in a solitary room somewhere, but there are a lot of people who are part of the whole project and are excited for it when it comes out. Chris That’s right. It’s a big production team. Roger Yeah. So, how did you get into this project? Why did you translate this book? Chris So that’s a great story for me. I’ve been studying Uchimura since about 2009. When I was working at a seminary, and I was able to take courses while I was working there as like staff. I took a course called Christianity in East Asia because that was always interesting to me. And when I did my master’s in East Asian studies, we covered some tangential aspects about Christianity in the Meiji period and how it influenced social movements, how there was a big missions movement that helped grow women’s education and the YMCA, things like that, but we never focused on Japanese Christian thinkers. So this course was the first time I was exposed to an actual Japanese Christian thinker who not only originated a number of writings but also had his own theological perceptions from a Japanese perspective that he wanted to add to sort of global Christianity. And he really thought that if Japan learned about Jesus and became more Christian, it would be a light to the world. So I thought that was an interesting entryway. Roger Okay, so using Western years, when are we talking about? Chris Uchimura lived from 1861 to 1930. He became a Christian around 1873 when he went off to Sapporo Agricultural College, which is now University of Hokkaido, one of the larger state schools. And when he became a Christian, he realized monotheism was the answer to a lot of his problems because he had such a strong religiosity as a kid and would bow to every shrine and every temple. And as he got older as a student, he really still held on to those beliefs. But when monotheism was presented to him, he really didn’t want to become a Christian. He was sort of pressured into it, but he went along with it primarily because he said, well, there’s only one God I need to worship, then I don’t need to worry about all the other gods. So that I thought was interesting because Japanese are famously known for having 8 million gods or something like that. Roger Okay, so for those who don’t know their Japanese history, this is like the very beginnings of Protestant church planting in Japan. Chris Yes. Roger So he’s one of the first of modern Christians. Chris That’s right. Christianity was banned from about 1609 to 1872. In the interim, in 1859, there was some missions activity but it was kind of underground. Uchimura was a part of the early generation of the different bands. There’s the Sapporo Band and the Yokohama Band and the Kumamoto Band in Kyushu. So these were sort of early Christian groupings. Uchimura was from up north. But yeah, he was active in the 1890s when he came back to Japan. He had studied abroad in America in the 1880s and sort of grew. He was always good at English, but he went to, Amherst College and then went off to Hartford Seminary before realizing— Roger Near Boston. Chris Near Boston, yes. Northeast. In the book, you’ll see a lot of references to northeastern literature and sort of abolitionist thinkers. He loved them. Roger Yeah, actually that was fun for me because I grew up near Boston, so a lot of the things he’s mentioning only people in Boston know. Like Mount Monadnock, a mountain I climbed with my dad. Chris Does it look like Fuji? Roger Well, it stands on its own and it is kind of conical, but it’s really short. It’s not a very tall mountain at all. It’s more like a tall hill. Chris There you go. So even better comparison to how much more grandeur Fuji has, which he keeps referring to. But yeah, he loved the northeast. In his other book that was written in English called How I Became a Christian, or Diary of a Japanese Convert, he talks about his experiences in the northeast. Roger How can you explain why Uchimura is important? Why should we care? That was a long time ago. Chris As one of Japan’s earliest modern Christians—I mean, his collected works are 40 volumes. He was an important thinker for the time period. Not only did he write in a Christian vernacular of the time, he attracted a number of future authors who would become aware of Christianity, at least in terms of their own understanding of the world. Even if they didn’t become Christians, they embraced a partially Christian worldview or romantic worldview. So from a literary perspective, which is what my main focus of my academic work was on how he’s an important literary figure, but I knew that he was an important Christian figure. And for Japanese theologians in general, anybody who’s going to seminary knows who Uchimura is and has read him. Now, the reason this book is important is everyone suffers, right? Everyone has a hard time. We get sick. Our wives get sick. People die. People we love are gone in an instant. We don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like. We can lose our job. We can get canceled because of the things we say and do. Even if we’re speaking the truth, we get punished for it. Roger Mm-hmm. Chris Uchimura suffered for telling the truth as he saw it, and he was willing to take that on and be that lightning rod in a society that was quickly becoming anti-Western and anti-Christian. And especially in the mid-1880s when he was still in America, there was a big turn toward emperor worship and connecting the state to religion in a very strong way, and in the 1890s when the Imperial Rescript on Education came out and later the 1891 Constitution, they really pointed to the emperor as the Confucian father of the nation that everyone must worship and obey. And Uchimura’s like, “Look, I respect the emperor as much as the next guy. He is my sovereign, but I’m not going to bow down and worship him in that way.” And as a result, that made him become persona non grata. That turned him into an anti-patriot to like the worst of the worst, the most disloyal of the disloyal, and of course in a Confucian samurai heritage worldview, that’s terrible. Disloyalty is the worst thing, right? So Uchimura suffered as a result of his own public intellectual beliefs, and then as a result, he lost everything, and part of losing everything meant he had to reinvent himself, and so he became an author as part of that process. Roger One of my favorite parts of the book is in the afterword where he’s talking about when he was writing the book and an American missionary, came in and said, so Mr. Uchimura, what are you working on? And he’s like, well, I’m writing this book. And he’s like, oh, what are you translating? He’s like, no, I’m not translating. I’m writing it, my own words. And the missionary was, was surprised and like, how can you be doing that? I mean, because Christianity came from the West, what right do you have as a Japanese to write? That was the attitude of the time. Chris Yeah, it was a very culturally bound enterprise, reproducing Western culture, civilizing the world, so to speak. And many Westerners didn’t think Japan was civilized. They had no idea how civilized it was. Roger Yeah. And you were explaining to me earlier how he was trying to figure out what it means to be Japanese and be Christian because there wasn’t— Chris It’s an identity issue. Roger There wasn’t any literature at that time. They were only looking at translated Western literature. And so he was kind of delving into this to try to figure it out, right? Chris That’s right. When he did become a Christian, the amount of stuff they had at Hokkaido University or Sapporo Agricultural College was so small. The amount of things they had to work with were so small. They were just some tracts, a few— they had a Western Bible, they had some parts of the Bible translated that was still in process, and they had things from many different denominations, so they didn’t know what was what and which one to ally with. And he became a Christian through the Methodists, but in Sapporo you had a Methodist church and an Episcopal church, and he wanted to work with both, and sort of create an independent Japanese church in Sapporo, but there was really no way to do that. They had to make it up themselves. And when the Western missionaries who they borrowed money from got wind of this, they were like, “You have to give us all our money back because you’re not part of us anymore.” So they scrimped and saved and did everything they could to pay it back. So there is this sense that independence, Japanese theology from a Japanese perspective became his life’s work. Roger So Uchimura is part of the birth of the church in Japan. So to me, as a missionary here, it’s especiallyinteresting. This is the first time ever that this book is in English. Chris That’s right. Roger I mean, it was published in 1893. Chris Yes. Roger And it’s incredibly important to missionaries today, and yet there’s never been an English version. And you translated it from classical Japanese. Chris That’s right. Roger So it’s really difficult Japanese. Chris It’s really difficult. It’s a long process of learning to be able to parse all that out. There is a modern translation now, but the original I thought was best to go from and take it from Uchimura’s own words. Roger It uses a lot of characters that aren’t used anymore. You showed me your manuscript, which is a work of art, by the way, all your notes around all of his, all the earlier published version, but like, I don’t even know what to call that. I mean, just various characters that are… Chris Yeah, kyujitai. Most Japanese don’t read it. I was talking to some students earlier today at a campus here, just kind of explaining that this book’s coming out and what it’s about, and I think maybe one or two knew who Uchimura was, and they knew about this fukeijiken or this incident of disloyalty to the emperor, or lesè-majesté as they call it, but they said they’d never read him, and when I mentioned it’s all written in this kind of really classical style Japanese, they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t really read that.” Yeah, I imagine not. He’s still unknown, so we can also help people understand that you can get a modern Japanese translation too, but I think Americans especially who want to know more about Japan at that time and about sort of authentic Japanese Christians and just from the perspective of a very sensitive soul who loves God and is searching for answers to his pain. Roger Right, that’s what I love about this book. He’s not afraid to basically be cry out to God, Why are you allowing these things things? And trying to search for the answers as a Japanese person, not trying to look for pat answers, but asking in his context, really what’s going on, how can I apply to it? And it’s just so interesting? Chris Right? Because one of the most important questions any human being will ever ask is, who is Jesus Christ and why does he matter? Roger Right. Chris And Uchimura knew who he was and why he mattered, but in the midst of this sort of dark doldrums of the soul why Jesus really mattered wasn’t just a nice, you know, it’ll all be okay someday, and just being a Christian makes everything all right. No, it’s like, Lord, you are my God, and I’m imploring you to give me an answer and give me strength and understanding to get through this situation. Roger Okay, so now you touched on this briefly. It’s called Consolations of a Christian. Why is this book important to people who may have little interest in Japan? Chris Sure, well, it certainly is full of what we call classical allusions to both Japanese literature, nature, history, and culture that are written for a Japanese audience. So he wasn’t writing it for us. So as a foreigner looking in on that, we can get a glimpse on the conversation which Uchimura is having with his own people about Christianity. Roger And with himself. Chris And of course with himself, and with God, and all the other little demonic voices that are harassing him. Roger You know, one of the things I thought was really interesting about the book, you’ve mentioned to me in conversation just how there’s a number of places where he lists scripture verses, but he doesn’t print it out. Chris That’s right. Roger And you said it was your idea that perhaps it was because he was wanting people to open the Bible for the first time. Most of the people who read this book were not Christians. Chris That’s right. Roger Because he wanted people who didn’t know anything about Christianity, very few did at that time, to read this and become interested in the God of the Bible. And he really makes that clear at the end of the book, right? Especially on the last two pages. “We looked at different answers throughout this book, but it’s clear the Bible is going to offer these answers that you really are searching for. God has those answers. Don’t stop until you find those answers.” That kind of thing. Chris That’s right. All of his literature points back to that. He doesn’t waver on that one bit. And in fact, he devoted his life to becoming a journalist for a while. He wrote for the Yorozu Choho for about 5 years, which was kind of like a New York Post or a LA Times kind of magazine, a little bit sensationalist but very political. He was the English language editor of that for a number of years until he decided to quit that and start his own work, which was called Seisho no Kenkyu, the Study of the Bible. And it was a magazine that he put out, which was all his own reading, parsing, interpreting the Bible and applying it to daily life. Roger To the general public, right? Not only to churches or Christians, but to everybody? Chris A lot of people were reading this even if they weren’t Christian. They were curious. Consolations of a Christian was a bestseller. And then as a result, he became hired as a journalist, then those copies of Yorozu Joho were also circulating, and then Seishun no Kinkyu as well. So, he really did use the words that he wrote as a way of reaching people in an evangelical way and pushing them to look at the Bible. That’s what all his life was about. Roger Well, this book was very meaningful for me. The fact that he, in the lowest point in his life, that he would turn to writing, crying to God, and trying to bring the nation along with him to cry out to God. He didn’t fall into despair, but he gave that anguish to God. Chris Yes. Roger And that’s just such an important message for all of humanity. Chris Yes. Roger You know, anywhere in the world, we all suffer. Chris That’s right. Roger And the fact that he writes a whole book addressing that and trying to help us turn to God through that is so important. Chris Yeah, because the Bible says God draws near to those who are suffering, and we suffer with Christ. But Christ was there with him in that suffering. In that moment, he knew it, but he had to put that anguish towards and use it for something. And that’s what’s really cool. He never wasted the experiences he had. He says it’s not my autobiography, but it’s a record of an authentic person who’s trying to struggle with being Christian. I think that’s gorgeous. Roger So I hope many of you who are listening to this will download this book, either buy the paperback, buy the hardcover, buy the ebook, go get the Kindle. It’s such a blessing that you’ve done this. Thank you so much. Chris Thank you so much for working with me and giving me the opportunity. Roger Yeah, so I guess we better get this party started. Chris Let’s enjoy this gathering around this table in many ways similar to what Uchimura would have done. Roger All right, so thank you for talking with us now. Chris Thank you. Thanks so much. Roger You’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith Podcast. You can pick up a copy of Consolations of a Christian by Kanzo Uchimura wherever you buy your books online. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.