At the dock in Yokohama, my parents were met by a U.S. Army chaplain, who drove them in a jeep through the bombed-out city to Seigakuin, the junior high school in Northeast Tokyo where they made their home for the next three years. On their second day in Japan, they took a circular train ride around Tokyo. Most of the city west of the busy railroad center of Shinjuku was a wasteland, flattened by the American firebombing in the spring of 1945. Although roads had been cleared, rubble from the bombing was still piled neatly between lanes and along the street. Except for the few ferro-concrete banks, insurance companies and department stories that withstood the incendiary bombs, the only buildings in Tokyo were shacks. Children begged from the roadside, asking in broken English for “chocorato,” the Hershey chocolate bars carried by every GI. At my parents’ first welcome party, at a Japanese church outside of the city, they were served tea and boiled sweet potatoes, a sign of the poverty that still gripped most of the country.

In 1948, my father was asked by the World Council of Churches and the Congregational Services Committee to set up a network of international work camps in Japan and South Korea. That experience, which brought together students from North America and Asia, was the high point of their early days in Japan and, until my mother’s untimely death in August, 2001, remained the subject of their fondest memories of missionary work. Working through the summer, the young people under my parents’ care built a nursery school in Hokkaido for the children of Japanese soldiers returning from the war, a youth center in downtown Tokyo and an elementary school in Nagasaki that replaced a structure destroyed by the atomic bomb dropped on August 9, 1945. Ray Downs, a lifelong friend of my family’s whose father was one of the six prewar missionaries chosen to work with SCAP, fondly remembers his experiences in the work camps. “They were an optimistic, bouncy group of characters who just worked like maniacs,” he says of his fellow volunteers.

My father was visibly proud two years ago when I showed him a report I found in the National Archives on the religious situation in Japan, written by Luman Shafer of the Horton delegation in January 1950. “Under the leadership of Hal Shorrock, a number of important projects have been carried out,” Shafer wrote after a four-month visit to Japan. “The youth camps of last summer [have] attracted more attention to the Christian movement than any other one thing” except a Christian college in Tokyo. But the hard work and discipline of the young people apparently surprised other missionaries from prewar days, who spent the sweltering Japanese summers in Karuizawa, the drowsy summer resort high in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture. “No one had ever heard of missionaries working all summer,” my father laughs. “Some of the old missionaries were kind of in shock.”

In 1950, my parents returned to America for a two-year furlough so my father could complete his degree at Yale. I was born in New Haven on May 5, 1951. A year later, my parents took my older sister and me back to Japan, where we lived for most of the next 18 years. For the rest of the 1950s, as my mother raised the family, my father directed relief work in Japan for Church World Service, the relief arm of the Federal (now National) Council of Churches. It was an enormous job: By 1955, American churches had distributed two million pounds of U.S. government agricultural commodities, 3,000 bales of clothing, and 10,000 pounds of food to two million Japanese. The position gave my father an opportunity to travel all over Japan and, later, Korea and the rest of Asia.

Some of my first memories of Japan are of going with my father to the Port of Yokohama to meet freighters loaded with dairy cows donated to Japanese farmers by American churches. We woke at dawn and drove to the port in our tiny Ford Counsel (imported, amazingly, from England). From there we’d take a little launch to the ships, where the black and white Jersey and brown Guernsey cows were packed into stalls that smelled of hay and manure. Sometimes the Japanese stevedores would lift me on their shoulders as they worked the machinery to unload the cows on their way to dairy farms in Hokkaido in the faraway north. Once, during a big flood on the southern island of Kyushu, my father took me to the old U.S. Air Force Base at Tachikawa in western Tokyo, where we met a fleet of military transport planes that had donated their services to carry goats donated by the churches to help people recover from the disaster.

THE MOST UNUSUAL PRIVILEGES

As those incidents show, MacArthur’s favorable disposition to Christianity helped spur close ties between the US military and the churches. The Horton delegation, for example, flew to Tokyo on a U.S. Army transport plane and, in Dr. Horton's words, were "accorded the most unusual privileges by the Army both in transportation and in billeting." In the fall of 1945, Army Colonel Ivan Bennett, MacArthur's chief of chaplains and Dr. Horton's escort in Japan, arranged to have thousands of Bibles shipped to Japan. Bible exports got another boost in 1949, when MacArthur personally endorsed the Bible to the Japanese public. Writing on official SCAP stationary, MacArthur informed the Japanese that the Bible was the "chief cornerstone of all liberty, the basis of fair and honest government, and the foundation for a true and living faith in God Whose promises never fail."

It would not be an exaggeration to say that missionaries were treated as a virtual auxiliary to the occupation -- a policy that boosted the prestige of the church in the eyes of most Japanese. The U.S. Army processed all the mail for the 38 American denominations represented in Japan and gave some missionaries shopping privileges at the Army's Post Exchange on the Ginza. Missionaries traveling on Japanese trains were directed by MPs to special cars reserved for occupation forces that were easily recognized by the white stripe down the side. "It took people a long time to accept the fact that we should buy tickets," my mother said. "That was the first really difficult thing to do -- how to disassociate ourselves from the occupation."

One of the most enduring symbols of the occupation’s support for the missionary effort was International Christian University, a college and graduate school in Tokyo that now ranks as one of Japan's most prestigious private schools. ICU was the dream of a group of American missionaries and Japanese Christian educators, who started looking for money and support for the project in 1948. MacArthur himself served as honorary chairman of the ICU Foundation, which eventually raised $500,000 to buy the school from the Nakajima Aeronautical Research Company in Mitaka, a western suburb of Tokyo. ICU opened for classes in the fall of 1953.

In the early 1960s, after 15 years of distributing church relief, my father was appointed vice president for financial affairs of ICU, and my family spent most of the 1960s living on its spacious campus in western Tokyo. When we first moved there in 1963, ICU was a forested oasis, thick with pine and birch trees. Our house, like other faculty homes, were nestled along a ridge from where, on a good day, you could see Mount Fuji towering over the Musashino plains. Down below was a stream where we caught frogs and crawdads, running through an expanse of woods that ended at the edge of the ICU farm, which bought some of the cows brought to Japan by my father in the early 1950s. Pleasant as it was, the campus was filled with reminders of the war that had been fought just 20 years before. My father’s offices were in a long, drab building that had once been the headquarters for Nakajima, where the Japanese air force had tried to build long-range bombers that could attack America. Next to it stood the remains of a huge hangar where the prototype bombers were once stored; as adolescents, my brothers and other faculty kids used its cement floors as a track for bicycle races, dodging charred cement blocks, rusted girders and broken glass. On the ridge below our house, my friends and I found caves local people had dug into the hillsides to hide from the incendiary bombs dropped by the American B-29s that attacked Japan throughout the spring and summer of 1945.

While I always thought ICU had been borne out of the wreckage of World War II, I only discovered years later that its true origins lay in the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War. In their campaign to attract American money to their proposed Christian university in Japan, MacArthur and other officials dangled the specter of a communist Japan before wealthy American donors. "If Stalin can bring German and Japan into the communist orbit, he will have won the Cold War and the United States, lying midway between Europe and Asia, will be isolated," warned William L. Clayton, a former State Department official and ICU board member, in a speech to prospective ICU donors. Therefore, America "must lend a helping hand to the liberal forces of Japan in a spiritual and moral sense...The establishment of the International Christian University in Japan is a step in this direction."

When U.S. donations began to dry up during the Korean War, the pleas took on a hysterical tone. “The present aggressive action in Korea is a direct challenge to America and our way of life and -- if it succeeds -- America will lose prestige, and worse, Japan will probably backslide to her former status or become a slave to communism,” U.S. Navy Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz wrote in a fundraising appeal in 1950. “The ICU is a powerful lever in keeping Japan on the right track.”

By the mid-1950s, this rhetoric, along with ICU’s early relationship with the occupation, had been largely forgotten. But the linkage between U.S. Cold War policies and missionary efforts remained strong. For example, the millions of dollars donated to Japan by American churches after the war helped support American policy in Japan by serving as a safety net for people suffering from the fallout (sometimes literally) of the Cold War. In 1954, American churches distributed clothing and food to families of the fishermen suffering from radiation poisoning spread by the fallout from the American hydrogen bomb test over Bikini Island. That test, which caused the death of three fishermen and the destruction of thousands of pounds of fish caught in the Pacific waters near Bikini, sparked a nationwide protest movement in Japan against nuclear weapons. But the Eisenhower administration refused to pay indemnities, leaving American missionaries with the sad task of sustaining the broken villages where the fishing boats came from. Another big missionary project in the early 1950s provided food and clothing to 200,000 coal miners who lost their jobs when the Japanese government, under pressure from American oil companies, switched its energy use from coal to oil and cracked down on the militant unions in the coal fields. In such ways, American missionaries inadvertently served as caretakers for the human consequences of U.S. foreign policy.