'The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed': Evangelizing modernity between the United States and Japan, 1905--1948

Intended as a contribution to the histories of modern Japan, of American religion, and of missions, this dissertation uses the history of one missionary encounter—in rural Shiga prefecture between 1905 and 1947—to examine the place of Protestants in modernity as unfolded in Japan. The narrative centers on the Omi Mission (after 1934, the Omi Brotherhood) which was founded by William Merrell Vories (1880–1964; after 1941, Hitotsuyanagi Mereru) and several young Japanese students who became Christians under his influence, including Yoshida Etsuzō (1890–1942).;Following an examination of Vories's and Yoshida's tellings of the story of Vories's arrival in late Meiji Japan as a member of the Student Volunteer Movement and firing two years later as an English teacher in a public commercial school, each of the five central chapters of the dissertation is organized around a concept integral to probing modernity as a way of being in the world: conversion was experienced by new gendered figures of the ‘student’ and ‘Protestant woman’; seikatsu, the practices of daily life, were demonstrated in the middle-class homes designed within the bunker seikatsu movement, in gospel schools for farmers, in a settlement house and a school for female factory workers, and in the mission's utopian ideals; health was exhorted through local reform movements, a tuberculosis sanatorium, and the marketing of a popular salve; empire enabled the sending of missionaries into the world and circumscribed movement of people and knowledge; and questions about religion were raised by ritual worship at state Shinto shrines and by the search for “Christianity on Japanese terms.”;The grappling with modernity by the men and women of the Omi Brotherhood is placed in the context of missionary thought and practice—including attention to the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry and International Missionary Council—and of such Japanese Christian intellectuals as Uchimura Kanzō, Kagawa Toyohiko, Morimoto Kōkichi, Kozaki Hiromichi, and Hiyane Antei. A closing section examines five popular narratives about Vories that have circulated since 1945 as parables of Christianity's place in modern Japan.