General Told of Barring Offer To Create a Christian Japan (from 1964)

The New York Times ^ | April 7, 1964 | Archived

[MuttTheHoople]

The Rev. Billy Graham said here yesterday that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had once told him that he turned down an offer by Emperor Hirohito to make Japan a Christian nation.

[MuttTheHoople]

Why did he turn Hirohito down? Because MacArthur thought that “No nation must be made to conform to any religion. It must be done on a voluntary basis.”

[Leaning Right]

Hirohito offering to make Japan a Christian nation? I find that very hard to believe.

Now, Douglas MacArthur wildly exaggerating? That I would believe.

[Othniel77]

I think this might have been a misunderstanding. But if it did happen and if the General agreed it would have been great. But thinking further the Emperor did not need MacArthur’s permission he could have just declared Japan Christian. Japan has been largely closed to the gospel. Early on the island of Kyushu accepted Christianity wholeheartedly but later all the Christians were killed. I don’t think individualist Americans understand clearly how a society like Japan works. They have to have people laughing in the corner of the tv screen for them to know when to laugh.

[Oratam]

This reminds me of something I recall reading over 25 years ago. During the 70s, a senior American diplomat in China asked a senior Chinese official (Zhou Enlai?) what he wanted most for the Chinese people. He answered “that they become Christians.”

I think it was a senior Chinese administrator who had been educated in the West and saw that Christian nations were orderly and prosperous. I doubt very much he viewed it with anything other than a practical end in mind. Perhaps that was Hirohito’s view as well.

I wish I had saved that article (from National Review?) because I cannot find any reference to it. Oh, well.

[Wuli]

I was trying to find independent confirmation of this, outside of Mr Graham, and I thought the Japan Times would be a good source - from Japanese sources. And there is a Japan Times article on it. But it requires a paid - $30/month - subscription to see the whole article, before the article becomes covered in the demand for a subscription. Too bad.

[imardmd1]

Now, Douglas MacArthur wildly exaggerating? That I would believe.

Not so, taking the moment of opportunity into consdideration. There are three significant points which I well remember, that did influemce the world's future.

The first was for our country to supply Japan with a thousand Christian missionaries, and a million Bibles (in the Japanese language) in which our government refused to cooperate with MacArthur's explicit Christian-based request as a believer in it.

The second was Japan's rebuilding of its destroyed steel-making capability by replacing it with the basic oxygen process, the product of which was far superior in quality and economy to the obsolete methods of Pittsburgh, which our steel industry businessmen clung to rather than modern methods, thus making Japanese steel (and later Korean and finally Chinese) in the position to dominate the world market.

And thirdly, Japan received with open arms the lessons taught by Robert Deming of Quality Concepts by which its products were to be made economically and superior in overall value, and by which the Japanese automobile, television, and other semiconductor products far exceeded the expectations of the American customer, which thus obliterated our national economy, leaving it in the current mess of insurmountable debt owed by the consumeres' posterity. Japan money invested in American real estate put them into ownership of our West Coast (a retribution for putting loyal Japanese citizens into concentration camps for the duration of the war?).

Of course, our national debt to the founder of our Constitutional precepts is no longer recognized, worshiped, nor adored as He was by our Founders who formed our Constitutional law on Biblical Christian principles,

And our children wonder, not having experienced this roller-coaster decline of Americanism through the influence of apostate denominations and the liberal universities producing communistic antichristian believers in humanism and "progressivism.".

Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Dubya Bush (Protestant); the Kennedys and Joe Biden (nominally Roman Catholic); and Barack and Michelle Obama, guided by Valerie Jarrett (wholly unchristian communist-trained Constitution-destroyers).

Someone had to vote them all in, didn't they?

[DiogenesLamp]

(a retribution for putting loyal Japanese citizens into concentration camps for the duration of the war?).

Ran across an interesting bit of information regarding this last year. As you may well know, J. Edgar Hoover was opposed to putting the Japanese into concentration camps, but he was overridden by Roosevelt.

The information I ran across last year sheds new light on what was happening. Our codebreakers had broken some of the Japanese codes and through information decoded in this manner, we identified all of the Japanese agents that were likely to engage in sabotage efforts.

A discussion ensued about what to do about it. If we left them alone, they might do serious damage to infrastructure in the US. If they were rounded up, the Japanese would become aware we must have broken their codes, and would then change their codes, possibly costing us valuable military intelligence for the war effort.

It was decided to round up all Japanese as a cover for rounding up the agents, and to keep the Japanese from realizing we had broken their codes. The Japanese government would just assume it was being done for racist reasons, and not look at it too closely, being satisfied with that explanation.

The article at the time mentioned more details, but this is the gist of what I recall. If you weren't familiar with it, I thought you might find it interesting.