The opening of Japanese ports to Western trade and thought at the end of the Tokugawa period necessarily involved a readjustment of the official policy toward Christianity. Since the early seventeenth century Christian beliefs and observances had been rigidly proscribed. Now the country was assailed by bands of missionaries, principally American Protestants, persistently evangelistic in purpose. Beyond that, the legal system, literature, and whole culture of the West were so permeated tjy religious elements that many thinking Japanese reluctantly concluded that it was impossible to become modern without becoming Christian. Escape from this dilemma was to be provided, by Western thought itself, through new materialistic philosophies based upon science, and through the historical relativism of the higher Biblical criticism. The battle between science and theology, evolution and revelation, then raging in England and America was fought again in the Japanese press and lecture hall. This controversy involved intimately only a small minority of the Japanese people, principally students and intellectuals, and was definitely secondary to the broader conflict between conservative nationalism and all foreign religion. It was, however, a significant aspect of Japan's response to the West, of her process of acculturation.

During the half century before the Communist take-over of 1949, there occurred twice in China a large scale opposition to Christianity: the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and the anti-Christian movement of 1922–1927. Both these movements were crises of East-West contact, and Chinese reactions against foreign culture. They can be understood only in the context of the modern changes in Chinese culture and society. This study of the anti-Christian agitation of 1922–27 seeks to clarify the nature and constituent forces of this movement in the rapidly changing and complicated history of China in the 1920s.

One of the most important problems which independent Burma faces is how to establish a basis for constructive cooperation between politics and religion in meeting the needs of the new state. The youthful political leaders; who dominated the immediate post-war period, were for the most part, disdainful of religion, and enamoured of Socialist or Communist ideas. They were acutely conscious of their country's relative backwardness in terms of education, health, and economic development, and wanted to move forward rapidly with their modernizing program and social reforms. They were by the same token impatient of popular apathy and resistance, which were strongly reinforced by religious traditionalism. The viewpoint of the influential Buddhist monastic community (Sangha) was poles removed from that of the sophisticated radicals. The traditionalist lore of the Buddhist teachers (Sayadaws) was pre-scientific, obscurantist in terms of modern learning, and unrelated to technological needs. The Sangha, furthermore, at the end of the war, was itself rent by factionalism and demoralized by its heavy involvement over the preceding quarter of a century in political matters which were not properly the concern of the monks.

No phase of the contemporary history of the interaction between the peoples of Eastern and Southern Asia and the carriers of European civilization is likely to be more rewarding than the study of religion. Fortunately the chronological record of Christian missionary activity is extraordinarily detailed. We know who the missionaries were, where they came from, what their social background was, how they were recruited, trained, organized and financed; how much time they devoted to preaching, teaching, healing, building, publishing, and the like; how they conceived the strategy of selecting audiences and the tactics of approach. In a word we are remarkably well informed about who said and did what to whom in the name of Christ. We know when they did it and the “why” that they gave themselves for doing it. Granting that there are many more chronologies to be filled in, the point remains valid that research effort is sufficiently well endowed with information to justify the scholar in directing his attention toward more ambitious tasks than the calendar of missions. The most attractive problem is that of providing the materials on the basis of which an ever-improving answer can be given to the ultimate question of effect: What of it? What were the impacts of Christian missionary work or indeed of Christianity? What factors have conditioned successes and failures?

Arthur Henderson Smith, writing near the end of the previous century, characterized the Chinese village organization as “the self-government of the small communities” and asserted that “the management of the village was in the hands of the people themselves.” His enthusiasm was shared in varying degrees by other writers, both native and foreign. For good reasons, however, this encouraging view is no longer supported by students of Chinese society. Among other shortcomings, it ignored the existence of a considerable number of tiny villages, especially in north China, and the fact that the inhabitants of such villages were usually too impoverished to be able to afford organization.

These recent years have brought to Japan an array of new political institutions and procedures. If judged by the contents of the statute books alone, there would appear to be small resemblance between the basic legal structure and concepts of the prewar Japanese state and those of the present. The theoretic status of the emperor has been fundamentally altered, a new constitution of highly suspect paternity has appeared, civil rights have been accorded recognition and formal protection, and a system of government noted for its centralization and authoritarianism has been subjected to decentralization and democratization. All these are the works of the Occupation or, to be more precise, of the Japanese Government acting as a result of the directives or “suggestions” of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP).