In the mid to late nineteenth century, many missionary women from Western countries arrived in Japan to engage in educational work. They made a significant impact not only on the establishment of Christian kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training schools but also on the dissemination of Friedrich Froebel's theory of kindergarten education…

In the mid-Meiji period, the leading scholar Kato Hiroyuki proposed relying on religion in moral education as he was dissatisfied with the Ministry of Education's inclination towards Western ethics in their reform. Triggered by Kato's proposal, there arose an intense debate over the 'standard' for moral education in the educational circles. The…

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion…

This essay is part of a collection of short essays solicited from authors around the globe who teach religion courses at the college level (not for professional religious training). They are published together with an introduction in "Teaching Theology and Religion" 18:3 (July 2015). The authors were asked to provide a brief overview of…

This is a study of the contribution of Christian missionaries to kindergarten education in the Empire of Japan. The study concerns an American Missionary woman, Annie L. Howe (1852-1943) and her kindergarten in Kobe, Japan. Annie L. Howe had a great impact on the history of early childhood education and is still remembered as the "Mother of…

Christianity as a world religion was propagated from Europe and North America to Africa and Asia. Global Christianity spread to East Asia when Robert Morrison (1782-1843) arrived in Canton, China in 1807, and later in the late 19th-century Protestant missionaries from North America arrived in Japan and Korea. This Christianity experienced a modern…

The work of the Australian mission in the southern part of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century has been a relatively undeveloped subject in scholarly research. By focusing on the educational work of the mission between 1910 and 1941, this article provides an overview of how the missionaries interacted with the Japanese colonial…

This article discusses what kinds of religious education led to the improvement of women's status and the realization of higher education for women in modern Japan, by reconsidering the educational views of Jinzo Naruse (1859-1919), both a pioneer of Japanese women's education and a promoter of the Concordia movement (1912-1941), within the…

Based on a one-year longitudinal experimental study with 3,782 kindergarten school children across 15 countries, this article examines the association between prayer and happiness. Results show that the post-test scores on the faces scale were higher for the participant group who had taken the prayer lessons vis-à-vis the comparison group.…

The term "Asian values" became popular in the political discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. The most vocal proponents of Asian values are Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir and their deputies and government officials, as well as post-Tiananmen Chinese leaders. Most notable of all these three strands of the Asian values debate…

The Christian missionary movement is a kind of global movement that aims to evangelize the whole world; hence the concept of globalization can be useful for the study of Christianity as a worldwide movement. However, recent studies have suggested another equally important concept: the process of localization, which runs parallel to the process of…

This article provides some concluding reflections on religious education and peace-making in different countries in East and West (Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Israel, Spain, Germany, USA), as discussed in the previous papers of this volume. I mention the changed nature of modern forms of violence and war, so that peace is no longer just an option in…

Describes the author's experiences during a week spent in a Zen monastery in Japan living the life of a monk. (Author/CK)

Protestant Christianity was brought to Japan during the modernization of that country in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the Second World War, except for a short time, Christianity in Japan as a Western religion had experienced a difficult course of history because of hostility due to nationalism of the populace and the leaders of the…

Although inter-religious conflicts have not yet surfaced as major social problems in Japan, religious education for peace and tolerance is needed in the country as much as in other countries. This article aims to disclose that, in light of political contexts, supposedly neutral "teaching about religion" can be as problematic as history…