When the American churchmen met MacArthur in the fall of 1945, over 160 Japanese cities, including the great industrial centers of Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kobe, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in ruins, the last two poisoned by the world's first atomic weapons. Throughout the country, food was scarce. As defeated Japanese soldiers trickled back from their outposts in China, Korea and the South Pacific, the hungry, exhausted populace left at home ached for rice, vegetables, meat, sustenance.

The desperation was keenly felt by the visiting Christians. In meetings with Japanese ministers and laypeople, they encountered a confused, dispirited people ashamed of their complicity with militarism, bitter at the terrible American bombing raids that destroyed more than 500 churches and killed countless civilians, and desperate for outside assistance and relief. The people are "shocked and hurt and humbled and miserable," a Japanese colleague told them.

The delegation was led by Dr. Douglas Horton, who represented the American Committee for the liberal World Council of Churches, and Dr. Lumar J. Shafer of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, who had been a teacher at a Tokyo Christian school for 11 years before the war. Their mission, as they summarized it in a 1946 report, adopted MacArthur’s convergence of spiritual and political goals. "We came as citizens of a country which was interested in bringing Japan into its own political orbit, yet our chief, in fact, our only purpose was to advance the cause of the Church of Christ,” they said.

After completing its survey of Japanese churches, the Horton delegation returned to New York and began the task of setting up the missionary effort. Six missionaries who had previously worked in Japan were selected by their churches to work out the procedures with SCAP. They began to recruit volunteers to work in Japan, particularly in Christian schools where, according to a youth magazine published in 1946, the "day to day influence of a Christian life will count for the most.”

The first wave of new missionaries came primarily from churches affiliated with the Federal Council of Churches, America's largest coalition of Protestant denominations. Since the days of the "social gospel" of the late 1800s, churches in the council had emphasized social work and education above the task of evangelism and conversion. As part of their social commitment, they had been cooperating with churches in England to send missionaries to Japan, China and other Asian countries for over a century. But now, with the British Empire in ruins and the United States eclipsing England as a world power, the American churches were suddenly the major source for missionary work overseas.

Most of the volunteers were young people just out of college, Bible school or the military. They were motivated by a raft of postwar concerns: reconciliation with the former enemy, guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and sorrow for the Japanese-Americans assigned to relocation camps. "Conspicuous by its absence was the old, stereotyped missionary jargon such as saving the heathen," wrote a missionary who arrived in 1948 and conducted a survey of missionary attitudes 40 years later.

On May 22, 1947, MacArthur’s General Headquarters, known as GHQ, announced the liberalization of its entry procedures for missionaries following a meeting with a large group of Catholic and Protestant representatives in Japan. The policy allowed families with children into the country for the first time since the war and authorized the churches to ship tons of food, clothing, prefabricated housing, motor vehicles and other supplies to the new arrivals. “Under this review policy, it is anticipated that the flow of missionaries to Japan within the next three years will be greatly increased,” GHQ said in a press release that is stored at the U.S. National Archives in Suitland, Maryland. “This is in line with General MacArthur’s desire to encourage Japanese understanding and acceptance of basic principles [of Christianity]. The Supreme Commander seeks to facilitate the entry of as many qualified missionaries as possible.” My mom and dad arrived three months later.

GOD OR GOVERNMENT?

My father, who is retired and living in a community of former ministers and missionaries in Southern California, first learned about Japan as a boy in Seattle as he watched sleek Japanese freighters gliding in and out of Puget Sound. But his admiration for Japan’s economic potential was mixed with apprehension when his grandfather, a Baptist missionary in the Philippines for many years, returned from a voyage to Asia in 1938 predicting war with Japan. In 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, my father joined the Navy. After a short stint on destroyer duty, he was selected to study Japanese at the Naval language schools in Colorado and Oklahoma. For the rest of the war, he was a member of the “Boulder Boys,” an elite group of scholars who parlayed their Japanese language skills into careers as interpreters, occupation officials, C.I.A. officers and diplomats.

My father might have gone that way, too, but he was persuaded by one of his language professors, a Japanese-American, to take a different approach. “We had a small class of people,” he recalls. “One day, an older Japanese teacher, who must have been a Christian, was talking about what we would be doing after we left language school. And he just said off-hand, 'I wish at least one of you would go, not with the government, not with the Navy or State Department or whatever, but go to Japan and be a friend in Christ, just be a civilian and have no strings attached.' I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. And I wasn't too thrilled with the Navy. So I did it."

First, he wrote the YMCA, which was overwhelmed with applicants eager to go to Japan, and then his own church, the Disciples. They were interested, and brought him to church headquarters in Indianapolis. But before sending him to teach at a boys school in Tokyo, the Disciples asked him to learn theology at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. There, he met my mother, the daughter of a Connecticut dairy farmer whose ancestors first came to New England in the 17th century.

My mother developed her interest in the Far East from childhood conversations with a retired English teacher who had founded a Christian girls’ school in China and returned to Connecticut in the late 1930s with gripping stories of the Japanese invasion that began in 1931. Those tales sparked a driving ambition in my mother to become a doctor and go to China; but fate, sexual discrimination and economic circumstances led her instead to seek a career as a minister. In 1946, after working for two years at the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company in Hartford, she enrolled in Yale Divinity, one of ten women in a class of over 100.

My parents’ desire to serve overseas was given a powerful jolt at Yale and Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where they also attended classes. Both schools were at the center of the spiritual and political awakening that swept through America in the heady days after World War II. Young Americans returning from the war against fascism looked at their surroundings and concluded that unfinished business remained: America, the new leader of the free world, should now right the social and racial injustice left untouched by the New Deal. Those ideas inspired young people to reach out, to try to heal a world sickened by war and tyranny.

"What were the lessons that come home to loyal American citizens at that time?" wrote Charles Germany, a Methodist minister from Oklahoma who went to Japan in 1947 and stayed for over 15 years. "First, ideal society is a democratic society. Second, the country where this is the most fully embodied is where? The United States of America. We had won the war against totalitarianism. Three, the foundation of the democratic society in the United States was the Christian religion. This was part of the ethos that I breathed."

My parents’ professors included Reinhold Neibuhr, the Christian socialist from Detroit who founded the liberal magazine Christianity and Crisis; John Bennett, a teacher at Union who became a noted expert on communism and later edited Neibuhr’s magazine; and Liston Pope, the son of a North Carolina textile mill owner whose life was transformed by his study of a strike of black and white textile workers, later published in the classic book Millhands and Preachers. Those experiences, which took place against the backdrop of nationwide labor unrest, racial tensions in the South and the first rumblings of the Cold War, had a decisive influence on my parents’ intellectual lives.

They set off for their assignment in Tokyo on a converted army troop ship, the USS Marine Adder. It was filled with other missionaries heading for China and Japan. They slept apart, my mother in a section for women, my father five decks below with the men. “We used to kiss once in a while and watch the sunsets together,” my mother recalled with a smile when I asked her about that trip a few years ago. Every night, she said, movies were shown on deck; but many of the new missionaries rejected the entertainment and attended prayer meetings instead. “We went to the movies,” my mother laughed. “This trip across showed us the missionary community we were getting into.”