Reconstruction in the Far East: A Letter from Japan

I became a Christian when I was nine years old (1966) and baptized by an American Baptist missionary a year or two later than my father and mother in a northern city of Japan, Sapporo. But I did not realize the true meaning of the Gospel then. A new pastor came to our church and forced us to use so old style Bible that a child and uneducated people could not understand because the grammar of old Japanese is quite different from the present one, though the passages in such style sound solemn when read aloud. Our family decided to leave the church, so we wound up to be a churchless Christian family. So I did not attend churches during my high school days. But through many hard experiences including my father’s illness I came to think of the meaning of the life and religion. When I went to Tokyo to take the entrance exams, I happened to read a Bible written in a plain style. The words in it shocked me because they were the very ones that I had sought for long time. Especially, the words of Jesus impressed me very much, so I found them to be the ones that only God can utter. I was filled with joy and a sense of happiness.

When I became a university student, I would not like to attend a church though I thought myself to be a Christian. But I happened to attend a meeting of a club of Christians’ Bible study without any intention to be a member of it, because all I had wanted to do is to form a rock group, of which I would be the lead guitarist. The Christians belonging to the club were totally different kind of people than I had ever met. They were energetic, kind and sincere in everything. I gradually came to be fascinated by them. A few months later, I was invited to attend an evangelical church and became a member of it. During the first and second years I was not a serious member of the club, because my wish was still to become of a rock star. But when I was a junior, I was compelled to become the chief of the club, because there was no other member besides me to lead that club. Through this experience I was forced to think about how to lead the God’s people’s congregation. I studied the Bible intensely with these members every Wednesday (OT) and Saturday (NT). Our senior members graduated from the university and became seminary students and they are now the young teachers of a leading seminary and a university. I experienced in the club the tremendous works of the Holy Spirit. Many non-Christian members converted to become serious workers in their churches. When I graduated, all that I was interested in was to know how to evangelize the Japanese The subject of my graduation thesis was about the epistemology of C. Van Til. My teacher of the seminar on the philosophy in the university said, “Now we don’t have any answer to the problems of the human thinkings after the unsuccessful experiments of modern philosophy, including the failures of the communism of the Soviet Union and China, and of the Islamic fundamentalism. Where is the exit from this stalemate? We face the death of modern philosophy.” At that time I happened to be introduced a hook about the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til by a friend and realized that the cause of such stalemate lies in the autonomy of the human reason. To get over this crisis of the civilization, we must go back to the wrong basis on which the present world stands. So I began to look into the Biblical laws, because the alternatives of the humanistic government over every area of life cannot be found within the inventions of the humanistic origin. But there were no good books written on this theme. The commentaries of the Biblical law presented me nothing but the word-to-word explication. What I wanted to know was the general principles that penetrate these various laws, that is, the world view presented by the Biblical law. In the meantime, I had to graduate from the university and to enter a trading company to earn money. So I had to stop this research. But I was sent to the Soviet Union in 1982 to study Russian, where I had a chance to see the various things that the humanistic regime had done to establish the godless society.

After several years I quit the company to study the theology at a seminary. I had a chance to go to the United States to attend a Christian college students’ summer camp held in Florida, Panama City Beach in 1986. When I went to a Presbyterian church near the camp site, I came across two fat books at the book store. They were The Institutes of the Biblical Law and Law and Society by R. J. Rushdoony. I did not realize that these are the major books of Christian Reconstruction. I did not read them until I began to write my seminary thesis. When I set out to write about the covenant of God, I happened to read them and found that they were the ones that I had sought for. Surprisingly enough, when I entered the seminary, I had been presented another book by my co-worker in the church, which was Theonomy in Christian Ethics by Greg Bahnsen. The co-worker had not known that it is another major book of Christian Reconstruction. I happened to read it and noticed that this book says similar things to those two books. And I finished my thesis on theonomy with these three books.

After I became a pastor of a branch of the church, I read intensely these three books and formed the Reconstruction world view. Meanwhile, when I met another pastor (Mr. Ryoichi Tokota) at the pastor meeting who became a Christian when I was a leader of the student group in the church and a graduate of the same seminary as mine, I said to him, “I am now interested in the theonomy and reading the works of Rushdoony.” He said, “I am reading them, too.” We were surprised to know that we had the same opinion about the theonomy and the Christian world view. After that, when we met again, he said, “I became acquainted with an American pastor who is a Reconstructionist. He began a ministry to teach the Christian world view to the Japanese, founding a reserch center in Mitaka-city of Tokyo. He wants to meet you.” So I met him in 1988, who is Rev. Ralph Smith. Three of us started to meet once a month to read the Institutes.

Two years later, when Mr. Tokota threatened to be dismissed by his branch’s members because of his Reconstructionist belief, I was also about to resign the pastorate due to the same reason. When we met the senior pastor, he said, “We are not bound by the laws of God. It is a stupid dream that the Japanese as a nation are to be the disciples of Jesus.” I realized that if I would stay in this church as a pastor, the church would be in a great turmoil because he would not allow me to hold the Reconstruction belief. So I decided to ask him to let me resign as a pastor. Then he told me to come to the elder meeting which would be held a few days later. I was summoned to it on the evening of the memorial day of the Lord’s crucifixion, so there was a service in the evening. Some elders came to the service, so I said to them, “As you know, today we will have the elder meeting to discuss my theology.” The two elders were surprised to hear this. “Ah? We did not hear this. But we will attend it anyway.” At the meeting there were only five pastors out of thirteen and two elders out of twenty present. The senior pastor said to me, “Please demonstrate your thinking about the Reconstructionism.” I explained what the Reconstruction was like, and what belief I had. He said, “We understood. Please get out of this room. We will discuss this matter.” After thirty minutes or so, I was told to come back. He said, “We will notify you of our decision on Sunday, after I phoned to the other pastors and elders, asking their opinions.” Because of the oppositions by some pastors and elders who said that I had not done anything wrong, they could not dismiss me, so the senior pastor said to me on Sunday, “Actually, you have done the wrong things enough for you to be dismissed, but this time you were forgiven, so we let you resign as you wish. But if you work on the other church members from now on, you will be treated as dismissed.”

After this, he published at the Sunday service before the church members that I resigned because of my theology being different from theirs and that Reconstruction is a dangerous theology if not a heresy. Right after this, a few weeks later, the church got involved in a serious problem caused by one of the senior eiders who claimed to deal with the problem of the son of the senior pastor, who is also the pastor of that church. The church was split into two groups and the majority of the church members left it.

Since I had been invited by Rev. Smith, I began to go to his church and became the member. It was 1990. Two years ago, in 1994, I was called to start my own ministry to proclaim this thinking broadly to Japanese, so now I am a pastor of the church supported spiritually by several other churches. I have some men who became Reconstructionists and want to start to publish many books on this cause. I am working on the PC network nationwide and on the Internet, publishing the translated theses of Rushdoony and other Reconstructionist writers. We are feeling that God has started this work and wants to do a great thing in this country and the whole world. I think this movement will become greater than even that of the Reformation.

Thank you and God bless you!