That is not accurate.
A main reason why Christianity NEVER took root in Japan, is that when missionaries came to India both in pre-war and post-war Japan - the Missionaries limited their preaching to the New Testament.
The Shinto and Buddhist peoples of Japan were never given any proper understanding of WHY the world needed a Savior, because the entire concept of sin was never explained from Creation onward.
Churches with roots in the scriptures are those that establish a vibrant Christian community.
As a missionary, I’ve seen this at work in India. When missionaries come to preach a social Gospel and limit themselves to only testifying from the New Testament, congregations they establish have no root and it’s members stay for only as long as provisions are handed out. Once those cease or are diminished, the locals go right back into their old religion. This is especially true of Evangelical and some Baptist congregations in India.
Congregations that were established by giving the brethren an understanding of the Old Testament, and WHY the world needed a Savior in the first place are the congregations that endure and last and are growing.
The attempted establishment in Japan of Christianity was neutered from the beginning, because the missionaries themselves started at the middle of the Salvation story. Knowing WHO the Savior is is not as important as knowing WHY we need a Savior and WHY it is specific to Christ.
It's not accurate that we didn't send legions of missionaries to Japan?
1500 - 2000* (link) doesn't seem like what I had in mind: fifty thousand. (25x that and approx. .0003 of the US population at that time.) This would mean that, statistically speaking about 1 in 1666 people in Japan would be Christians with the purpose of spreading the gospel.
As Jesus said: The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.
(Lk 10:2)
The attempted establishment in Japan of Christianity was neutered from the beginning, because the missionaries themselves started at the middle of the Salvation story. Knowing WHO the Savior is is not as important as knowing WHY we need a Savior and WHY it is specific to Christ.
That's absolutely backwards: knowing Jesus is absolutely essential… the why
and how
naturally flow from the who
.
Yes, I agree that you cannot simply jump to the end of the story, but Christianity need not be complex/drawn-out; for example it can be summarized very simply as this:
In the beginning God created man in His own image, but man embraced evil by sinning. Now God, who is both perfectly holy & perfectly just cannot stand sin, which must be paid for in death; but on the other hand, God still loved man so He died. Now if the story ended here it would be terrible: we would be free from judgement but have no God, the God of Life would be weaker than Death. But the God of Life is stronger than Death and so restored life to Himself** — now God, who is perfectly Just, can look at His death and regard that as payment for sin, but we must accept His payment on our behalf.See? Single paragraph synopsis.
* — (2,000 / 83,199,637[1950 pop] ≈ .000024)
** — All three persons of the trinity claim responsibility for the Resurrection: Father, Son, Spirit. (Acts 5:30; John 10:17-18; Romans 1:4) -- this, the resurrection, is ultimately the focal-point of our faith: it is the proof that Jesus is who He says He is.