Given that only about one percent of the Japanese population is Christian, how is one to account for the preponderance of “Christian authors”? Where did they come from? Here I examine the Protestant tradition that influenced so many prewar authors—and the Catholic tradition that was more influential on the postwar generation. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive examination and discussion of those authors who interacted with the faith.

Introduction: Where did Japan's Christian writers come from?

Included in the category of “Japanese Christian writers” here are writers who were baptized as Christians, along with those who, though never baptized, were deeply interested in Christianity and wrote works of literature influenced by the faith. This Introduction covers those authors who were baptized during their youth and yet whose faith and literature would gradually grow apart; those whose baptism generated a creative relationship between their faith and literature; and even those who kept their faith hidden in the innermost depths of their work and who came to baptism later in life. For each of these, the year of baptism will be noted alongside the dates of birth and death for each writer. In this sense, this Handbook will be dealing with a wide range of Christian writers who played an active role in modern Japan.

From the beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912), many missionaries came to Japan. This resulted in vigorous missionary work, and yet, to this day, the number of Christians in Japan has never exceeded one percent of the population. However, as Dazai Osamu, who remains one of the most popular modern writers in Japan, expressed in HUMAN LOST, “with the Bible alone, Japan's literary history has unmistakably split into two with unprecedented clarity” (cited in Endō T. 1994, 363). That is, when we survey the more than one thousand years of Japanese literary history, it can be said without hesitation that, starting from the Protestant missions in early Meiji, the vibrant works of writers who engaged with the Bible held an important place within modern Japanese literary history.