THE GOSPEL OF CIVILIZATION: MISSIONARIES AND OKINAWANS UNDER U.S. AND JAPANESE EMPIRES, 1846-1939

Ever since the U.S and Japanese governments signed their 1951 Security Treaty, they have agreed to maintain U.S. military bases in Japan’s peripheral island of Okinawa despite long-standing opposition from the islanders. My dissertation shows that this collaborative intervention by the United States and Japan into Okinawa in fact began in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on previous scholarship that has shown the intimate relations between missionaries and empire, this study depicts the quotidian interactions among Okinawan Christians and American and Japanese Protestant missionaries from the late nineteenth century to the pre-World War II period. It argues that Japanese and American Protestant missionaries collaborated to support Japan's colonization of Okinawa, which was originally an independent kingdom but forcefully incorporated into Japan in 1879. I suggest that religious values were a driving force in this process. Both groups, believing in the superiority of their religion as well as their ability to improve “the others” culturally, contributed to the assimilation of Okinawans into Japan, which both parties regarded as more westernized and civilized than Okinawa. In that way, both Japanese and American missionaries ultimately served Japan’s imperial project. Likewise, the Okinawans who converted to Christianity were not passive recipients of an imposed religion, but central historical actors who appealed to transnational Christian identities in order to leverage Japanese and American missionaries’ ambitions for their own benefit. By analyzing the personal letters, diaries, and religious pamphlets of the Japanese and American missionaries, as well as Okinawan Christians’ memoirs and church records, my project highlights how intersectionality among religious, racial, political, and gender identities generated paradoxes in the relationships within and among all these parties.

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→It seems that figure numbering gets messed up when I uploaded my file. I changed figure number to simple 1,2,3,4, and 5. And also uploaded pdf version this time. Hope this fixes the problem.