While many Japanese were grateful for this aid and other contributions, MacArthur's open endorsement of Christianity brazenly contradicted the occupation's goal of separating the state from religion and angered many Japanese critics of the occupation.

Starting in the fall of 1945, officials from the Religious and Cultural Division of the Occupation's Civil Information and Education Section fanned out across Japan to force compliance with occupation regulations on religion. In December 1945, the occupation's famous Shinto Directive formally severed the relationship between the Japanese state, the Shinto religion and state-encouraged Emperor worship. It also declared that Japanese religion was not to be used "to conceal ultra-nationalism and militarism" -- a rather ironic twist considering the close, formal ties between the faith of the American missionaries and the U.S. military. At the same time, MacArthur’s contempt for Japanese religion was at odds with his unfortunate decision to keep Emperor Hirohito -- the living symbol of State Shinto -- in power and use him to communicate U.S. directives to the Japanese people.

Meanwhile, American supervision of Japanese religion was so deep that occupation officials got involved in internal disputes at Buddhist temples. In one case recounted by Woodward, U.S. Army officials ruled illegal a strike by leftist Buddhist monks against their abbot, who had been an ardent supporter of the war.

By 1946, the contrast between the occupation's support for Christianity and its treatment of Japan's other religions had generated furious protests from Buddhist and Shinto groups. MacArthur totally ignored them. In frustration, some U.S. officials felt compelled to show an "even hand" in their dealings with other religions. They tried to balance their pro-Christian policies by allowing Ruth Sasaki, a Zen Buddhist scholar, to enter Japan for a year of study and allowing a Jewish rabbi into the country. But these pathetic attempts at fairness were undercut by MacArthur himself. In 1947, when the Christian leader of the Socialist Party, Tetsu Katayama, was elected Prime Minister of Japan, MacArthur declared the election a sign of "human progress" that proved Christianity was "an invincible spiritual barrier" against the "infiltration" of foreign ideologies.

My parents and their closest missionary friends shared little of these religious and political sentiments. True to what they learned at Yale and Union, they taught me and my siblings to be open to other religions and belief systems. They despised the fundamentalist missionaries who scorned everyone but Christians and constantly asked people if they were “saved” (“saved from what?” my father would say). Those attitudes didn’t always go down well with other missionaries. In 1955, Church World Service agreed to build a house in the Shibuya section of Tokyo for my family. After the carpenters had built the frame, my parents encouraged them to bring a Shinto priest over to conduct a traditional cleansing ritual. It involved placing white banners, symbolizing purity, on top of the house, accompanied by chanting, burning incense and downing shots of sake. The fact that my parents allowed that to happen in a Christian home shocked some of the missionary families we knew, who considered the ceremony a sacrilege.

COMPETING WITH THE COMMUNISTS

Despite their tremendous advantage in resources, American missionaries and their Japanese colleagues found it difficult to compete with the Japanese Left. In the wreckage of postwar Japan, the reborn Japanese Communist Party filled a political and social void no other Japanese institution could match. The party’s courageous opposition to the rise of Japanese militarism and the emperor system gained the Communists immense popularity and prestige among Japanese workers and students. That record of resistance contrasted sharply with most Japanese religious institutes, including the Christian churches, which had united in 1941 under government decree and offered only cursory opposition to Japanese militarism.

Ironically, the Communists got their biggest break from MacArthur himself. The general moved swiftly in the first months of the occupation to demilitarize and democratize Japan by freeing political prisoners, lifting controls on freedom of speech and the press and abolishing prohibitions against labor unions. Most of the Communists released from military prisons after the war had been active in the labor movement. They quickly threw their energies into organizing unions in the huge industries developed since Japan's militarization of the 1930s.

In the first year after the war, the number of labor unions rose from zero to 12,000, with a total membership of 3.7 million. "These revolutionary steps gave a tremendous encouragement to the Communists, and also gave the entire nation an impression that GHQ (MacArthur's headquarters) is backing up the Communists," wrote a Japanese Christian professor in a 1950 report.

According to this anonymous professor, whose remarkable study I found in the ICU archives, the Communists' strident condemnations of Japanese capitalists and landowners won the allegiance of millions of Japanese left homeless and destitute by the war. "Communism is easy to understand, and meets the present need more than any other thought," he wrote. "It is running into the minds of the people like a flood... One of the immediate objectives of the Communist Party is to abolish the private property system, and this war made the majority of Japanese propertyless." (sic)

The Communists also tapped into a deep urge among Japanese to reject the ultra-nationalism that had guided Japan's invasion of Asia and led them into the disastrous war with America. Elizabeth Grey Vining, the Quaker tutor of the Crown Prince (now Emperor) Akihito, noted this Japanese need for transcendence in her memoirs, Windows for the Crown Prince. The Japanese communists, she observed, gained a large following because they projected a sense of idealism that reached beyond Japanese shores. "Communism, they said, is human brotherhood; here is something noble to which you can give yourself; you can sacrifice yourself for humanity," Ms. Vining wrote. At the same time, the Left "capitalized on opposition to the Occupation and its mistakes and inequities. They assured people that the Communists were the only ones who wanted to help them."

The difficulty of competing with the communists was a major theme in Christian literature of the 1950s. According to Missions at Work, a handbook for missionaries I recently found on my parents’ bookshelf, half the books on social science in Japanese bookstores were Marxist texts. "There is great interest in reading the Bible,” the authors reported. “It is certainly a best seller. But there is a strong rivalry between it and communist books. The people are weighing the relative merits of the two." One chapter described a Communist-led labor demonstration ("a band of students, bewildered, seeking, young people”) and asked if those “lost souls” would follow the church or the "Communist neighbor to the west, with their system of armed suppression in the name of peace and equality?"

My father remembers watching many of those demonstrations from his office on the Ginza, which was close to the Imperial Palace parade grounds where protestors used to vent their anger at the conservative Japanese government and its American backers. But as he watched Communists organize labor unions and rally young people to their cause, he began to feel that Christians and the missionaries were doing far too little to improve conditions for ordinary Japanese. "The Communists were trying to do something about society and the Christians weren't all that interested," he says today. Sentiments like that soon got him into hot water.

In 1949, Japan’s Council of Christian Education asked my father to conduct a survey of Japanese youth. His report, based on interviews with young people and church leaders in 21 cities in Japan, concluded that unless the church moved quickly to revamp its education and social work, it would lose even more ground to the Communists and slip into oblivion. The report captured the attention of Peter Kalischer, a correspondent for the United Press (and later CBS) and brought my father his first 15 minutes of fame.

“Christianity is losing to Communism in the battle for Japan’s youth, in the opinion of one American Protestant Missionary,” Kalisher reported in the lede to his story, as reprinted in the Japanese daily Mainichi (I recently found this and several other clippings mentioning my father in a file on Christianity and communism in the U.S. occupation section of the National Archives).

“The Japanese church has no program to offer the thousands of young people searching and trying to grasp some sort of meaning for life,” Kalischer quoted my father as saying. “It is regrettable that many non-Christians think that the only thing a Christian does is pray.” The church, he went on to say, “is not challenging young people today. If anything, it is causing many young people to turn from Christianity, to fall headlong into an empty chasm of doubt and materialism, forcing them to join the Communist bandwagon, for at least the Communists have a program and a cause.”

Kalischer’s report was widely reprinted back home -- as well as in the Japanese Communist Party newspaper Akahata -- and quickly came to the attention of the Disciples board in Indianapolis. My father patiently explained that he wasn’t suggesting that communism was a viable alternative to Christianity, but simply that Christians had a lot to learn from their spiritual rivals. That seemed to mollify the board, and the controversy ended there. But somewhere in Washington, I’m sure, my father’s name was filed away for future reference.