Protestant Missionaries, Schools, and Churches in Meiji Yokohama (1859-1901)

1. Introduction

The focus of Steadfast: Saint Maur’s 150 Years atop the Yokohama Bluff is on the schools founded by the first Catholic nuns in Japan, led by Mère Mathilde Raclot in 1872. These include Saint Maur International School and its younger sister, Yokohama Futaba Gakuen, as well as the four other Futaba schools in Tokyo, Shizuoka, and Fukuoka. Other Catholic schools in central Yokohama include Saint Joseph College, an international school founded in 1901 by the Society of Mary (but unfortunately closed in 2000) and Seikō Gakuen, founded in 1958 by the Brothers of Christian Instruction. Two other Catholic secondary schools can be found in other parts of the city.

However, the history of Christian and international education in Yokohama is not complete without attention to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in the late 19th century, as well as those who introduced other branches of Christianity to Japan in Yokohama. Their goals were varied, including the spread of Western medical science, as well as encouraging conversion to Christianity. The schools that they established, all originally in the same Yokohama neighborhood atop the Bluff, have contributed to the education of generations of young people, especially Japanese girls and women. Please read on to appreciate the devotion of these idealistic missionaries and their impact on Yokohama—starting with the earliest pioneers, James Hepburn and Mary Kidder.

02. Two American Missionaries: Hepburn and Kidder

James Hepburn lived in Yokohama for thirty-three years, arriving immediately after it opened. Mary Kidder came ten years later and stayed forty-one years, until her death at the end of the Meiji period. Amongst the dozens of Protestant missionaries who flocked into the country both before and after the decriminalization of Christianity, these two made contributions that can only be called unique.

03. James Hepburn 

Dr. James Curtis Hepburn (pronounced “Hebon”, unlike his distant relative, actress Katharine Hepburn) was born in 1815 in Pennsylvania, entering Princeton at the age of sixteen and graduating in only two years. His fascination with chemistry led him to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He was determined to become a medical missionary, a dream shared by his wife Clarissa Leete, known as Clara. Weeks after their wedding in 1840, they set sail for Batavia (now Jakarta), then Singapore and Macao, arriving in China in the midst of the First Opium War. After the British victory, the Hepburns settled in Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian province in southeastern China. In three years there, Dr Hepburn practiced medicine, converted some Chinese, and learned to read the language, but he and his wife contracted malaria, forcing them to return to the US in 1845. Clara’s health was precarious; she bore five children, but only one survived infancy. Fourteen successful but unhappy years as a doctor in New York—“that dreadful, desolate place”—followed. Then Hepburn learned of the imminent opening of Yokohama and immediately applied to the Presbyterian foreign missionary board to send him and his wife to Japan. They arrived in October 1859 and established a free clinic and school in their borrowed quarters: the abandoned Jōbutsu-ji temple in the diplomatic quarter of Kanagawa, where Hepburn was appointed official physician to the hypochondriac American consul Townsend Harris. He began to study Japanese immediately, but after three weeks his teacher quit: he confessed that he was a Bakufu spy ordered to assassinate the good doctor—but that Hepburn was “too ethical to be killed.”

04. A Medical Missionary

Despite official disapproval of his medical practice and a ban on preaching Christianity, Hepburn made a name for himself when he amputated the gangrenous leg of the popular Kabuki actor Sawamura Tanosuke, using anesthesia to dull the pain as well as antiseptic practices to avoid postoperative infection. He also fitted Sawamura with a modern prosthetic limb that enabled him to resume his stage career, gaining great acclaim for both patient and doctor. Hepburn taught his apprentice, Kishida Ginkō, to prepare eye drops, which became a commercial success as well under the brand name Sekisui. Kishida was also a skilled calligrapher who assisted with Hepburn’s study of written Japanese. Another of Hepburn’s medical students, Miyake Hiizu, became the first Japanese to earn a PhD in medical science and later chaired the medical school of Tokyo Imperial University.

After moving from Kanagawa to a clinic in the Yokohama Settlement in 1862, Hepburn contributed to the development of Western medicine in Yokohama by treating patients and supporting the hospitals that were established by each foreign power in the 1860s, including those supporting the British and French forces based on the Bluff. The American Naval Hospital was built overlooking the steep Yato-zaka slope in 1872, and a German military hospital operated throughout the Meiji period as well. Dr. William Willis of the British Legation set up a clinic to treat smallpox victims, which grew into a major hospital in nearby Nakamura. Dr. Willis and a surgeon in the Royal Navy, Dr. George Newton, were instrumental in persuading the Foreign Ministry and the Yokohama local government to fund a broad vaccination program, ending a smallpox epidemic in 1870. (Hepburn and Willis were also the first responders who treated the wounds of the victims of the Namamugi Incident of 1862.)

Another American medical missionary, Dr. Duane Simmons, had arrived in 1859 as well. After the Yokohama Chamber of Commerce, composed of prominent and wealthy silk exporters, funded a public hospital in Nogeyama, Simmons was recruited as its director. Jūzen Byōin, originally built atop Nogeyama and later relocated to Urafune in Minami-ku, has continued to this day, greatly expanded as the main medical center of Yokohama City University. 

Although the Dutch presence remained Yokohama was smaller than in its original base in Nagasaki, a Dutch clinic dating back to 1863 soon became the Yokohama General Hospital for the whole Western community, serving many Japanese and Chinese patients as well. As the Bluff Hospital, it survived the end of extraterritoriality in 1899, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and the bombing in World War II. After it closed in 1980, the current Bluff Clinic was established on part of its original land, with the rest purchased by Yokohama Futaba Gakuen (including the pathway along which Saint Maur and Futaba students walk to school each morning). 

For thirty-five years, the Bluff Clinic has served Saint Maur students, parents, and teachers, just minutes from the school gates. Its director, Dr. Akashi Tsunehiro, has preserved the history of his predecessors, especially Dr. Edwin Wheeler, a young British naval surgeon who was closely associated with Yokohama General Hospital. From his arrival in 1869 until his death in the Kantō Earthquake of 1923, he delivered over 500 babies. In what spare time remained, he played rugby and cricket, raced at the local Yacht Club, and watched his horses win at the Negishi Race Track. The location of his house, next to the U.S. consul’s residence, gives its name to the modern Amerika-yama Park overlooking Motomachi.

05. Translation and Lexicography

Hepburn’s influence was not limited to medicine, despite training the first generation of Japanese physicians. His main goal was the salvation of souls, but until the ban on Christianity was lifted, he could not directly preach to the Japanese. Instead he (and another missionary-scholar, Dr. Samuel Brown of Yale) set themselves the mammoth task of translating the entire Bible into Japanese! Before they could even begin, they faced a major problem: no English-Japanese dictionary yet existed. So Hepburn set out to compile one, making use of his knowledge of the Chinese characters also used in written Japanese. But even that required preparation: how could the spoken language and the pronunciation of its words be represented in the Roman alphabet, for the benefit of Western students and preachers?

The accomplishment for which Hepburn is best known today in Japan is his brilliantly simple yet accurate system of transliteration, or Romanization, called Hebon-shiki. Its modified form is in almost universal use in Japan, using macrons to represent the vowels of double length found in words such as Tōkyō, Hokkaidō, and Kyūshū. Without it, Western students of Japanese, then and now, would find even the first stages of learning the language far more daunting.

After eight solid years of work, Hepburn had finished the first edition of his Japanese and English Dictionary, published in Shanghai in 1867. He continued to expand and revise it, with a much more extensive third edition in 1886. It was the starting point for all Japanese-English dictionaries to this day, and it could have made Hepburn a rich man—but he sold the copyright to fund construction of the dormitory at Meiji Gakuin University. Translation of the Bible, based on the English King James Version of 1611, proceeded more solely. Samuel Brown’s initial work on the four Gospels was destroyed when his house burned down in 1867. 

Jonathan Goble, a Baptist missionary whose first visit to Japan was as a Marine on Perry’s frigate USS Mississippi, returned in 1860 and translated the Gospel of Matthew in 1871. Goble, whose wife Eliza suffered from polio and found the steep slopes of the Bluff difficult to climb, had the motivation and ingenuity to invent the first rickshaw (jinrikisha), which quickly became ubiquitous throughout Yokohama and East Asia. It was a cheaper alternative to the horse-drawn carriages (basha) that also proliferated, providing the name of the main avenue of the Nihonjin-machi that is still called Bashamichi today. Modern visitors who admire the 19th century-style buildings lining the street don’t have to tolerate a 19th century nuisance: each horse produced ten kilograms of odiferous waste each day, swept away by a small army of street cleaners. 

Progress accelerated after the 1877 unification of the Presbyterian and Reformed missions from the US, Canada, Scotland, and the Netherlands, symbolized by Yokohama Union Church—its modern recreation still a landmark on the main road of Yamate-chō today. With interdenominational rivalry behind them, James Hepburn and Samuel Brown collaborated on a joint translation of the New Testament, completed in 1880, followed by the Old Testament in 1887. A Baptist missionary scholar, Dr. Nathan Brown, used his knowledge of ancient Greek to publish a New Testament translated directly from the original language in 1879. A monument on the site of his house in Yamate-chō commemorates his work. We shall learn more about Nathan Brown a bit later.

Hepburn, Goble, the two Browns, and the other missionaries never forgot their first motivation: to convert Japanese to Christianity, despite implacable opposition by the Tokugawa regime. Hepburn risked deportation in 1864 when he attempted to publish the first religious tracts in Japanese. In his eminently readable pamphlet, Yokohama in 1872, Paul Blum reports, “No Japanese printer dared to print them, so severe were the punishments he would incur. Hepburn turned to Raphael Schoyer for assistance. He was an American of culture and taste, a popular Jewish member of the business community.” He was also well-known for the beauty of his much younger wife Anna, the first Western woman to live in Yokohama. She caught the eye of many men starved for female company, including Dutch merchant Assendelft de Coningh, whose diary refers to her husband as “an elderly Israelite gentleman.”

The irony of relying on a Jewish colleague to promote Christianity was not lost on Hepburn: "I am now publishing a Christian tract. I have to be very secret about getting the blocks cut. No doubt, if the officers of the Government knew it, they would soon put a stop to it. Most providentially, as it seems, the man who is cutting the blocks is employed by one of our merchants and lives in his compound; and that merchant, strange to say, is a Jew."

Without Schoyer’s help, Hepburn would have been silenced.

06. Protestant Missionary Schools

Young Japanese, eager to learn Western science and culture, flocked to Yokohama from the 1860s onwards. Clara Hepburn opened a school for ambitious young men, with the goal of teaching Christianity under the guise of English. She tried to use her husband’s ongoing Bible translation as a textbook, to be met with polite indifference. Most missionaries shared her disappointment: the Japanese were intrigued by every aspect of Western learning, with the single exception of Christian dogma. She persevered, undeterred, and her students patiently endured her parables and moral tales as they absorbed the foundations of European culture to augment their studies of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

If James and Clara Hepburn had been more successful in converting their students, the Bakufu might not have offered them the chance to open an official school in 1863, where they taught students sponsored by the government, aided by Samuel and Elizabeth Brown. James Hepburn opened the private Hepburn School as well in the same year, which eventually expanded to Shirogane-dai in Tokyo in 1887, after merging with a Presbyterian theological seminary. Today it is the hub of Meiji Gakuin University, one of the most prominent Protestant institutions in Japan. Its English Gothic Revival chapel, a registered landmark, was designed in 1916 by William Merrell Vories, architect of many other Protestant universities, schools, and churches throughout Japan, whose own wedding took place there in 1919.

Hepburn was involved in almost every Protestant religious and educational development for over thirty years. In 1889, he devoted himself entirely to Meiji Gakuin University, serving as its first president until his retirement in 1892. (His successor was August Reischauer, whose son Edwin was born on its campus; Edwin Reischauer became an influential scholar of Japanese history, a Harvard professor, and U.S. ambassador to Japan.) Graduates of the university in its early years included author and poet Shimazaki Tōson and future Prime Minister Takahashi Korekiyo.

07. Mary Kidder

Clara Hepburn was no less influential than her husband. Her small school for girls, started in 1863 in the heart of the Foreign Settlement, kept growing until a second teacher was needed. She joined forces with an energetic young woman named Mary Eddy Kidder, who had arrived in 1869 as the first female missionary sent to Japan by the American Reformed Church.

The remarkable career of Mary Kidder, and of the other women pioneers of Protestant evangelism in Meiji Japan, have been examined by only a handful of scholars. Among them, Pamela Lee Novick stands out for her curiosity and eloquence, and the story of Kidder’s contributions to Christian education in Yokohama could not have been told without her research. Professor Kohiyama Rui of Tokyo Women’s Christian University is also particularly active in this field, and this narrative owes much to both scholars.   

Mary Kidder was born in 1834 in the mountainous village of Wardsboro, Vermont; its bracing winter climate toughened her to face all challenges. She had taught in Niigata for one year while living with Samuel and Elizabeth Brown, also of the Reformed Church, whose zeal and commitment to the education of women had inspired her to come to Japan. 

From September 1870, Kidder began teaching at the Hepburn clinic. She was independent and tireless, and by 1872 her school had grown to fifty girls, outgrowing the Hepburn premises. Unlike Clara Hepburn, whose career was tied to her husband’s, Kidder was determined to act on her own, as an unmarried and self-reliant educator. She acted on behalf of her students, thirsty for education yet starved for encouragement from their parents and a society that saw no benefit in educating girls. 

However, the progressive vice-governor of Kanagawa, Ōe Taku, was impressed by Kidder’s success and ideals. He became her ally, allowing her to move into a much larger prefectural building. His support, along with donations from the American board of missions, resulted in the construction of school buildings and a dormitory at the prime location of 178 Bluff—where it still stands today. 

08. Ferris Seminary

On June 1, 1875, the enlarged school was dedicated and named Ferris Seminary, Japan’s first Protestant school for girls. Isaac Ferris, president of New York University and founder of the women’s college at Rutgers University, had led the Board of Foreign Missions that sponsored Kidder’s overseas work, and his son John was the current secretary of the Board. Together they had made possible the foundation of the school, but it was Kidder’s dynamic, spirited leadership that ensured its longevity. 

Like Saint Maur, Ferris has survived and thrived for 150 years. Like Saint Maur founder Mathilde Raclot, Mary Kidder had to operate in a world dominated by men who often tried to control their lives and made decisions from far away. Both were self-confident, self-reliant women who guided generations of young women to seek independence as well, whether married or not.

Unlike Mathilde, whose vows precluded marriage, Mary stabilized her position by marrying a much younger Presbyterian missionary, Edward Rothesay Miller. She was thirty-nine; he was ten years her junior. While there were only minor doctrinal differences between Reformed and Presbyterian theology, which are both based on Calvinism, their organizational structures had not yet been merged, and she had to combat hierarchical pressures from two separate denominations. Rather than endanger her school, her husband joined the Reformed Church, prioritizing his wife’s interests over his own! Together they expanded its curriculum to include English, history, geography, and mathematics, while ensuring that their graduates could always make an independent living by teaching sewing, knitting, and embroidery. This consistent goal of freeing women from dependence on men was a hallmark of the Infant Jesus schools around the world as well, including in Singapore and Japan. 

09. Ferris Jogakuin

Ferris Jogakuinフェリス女学院 (178 Yamate-chō 山手町178) [All addresses are in Naka-ku unless specified otherwise.]

Mary Kidder Miller and her husband continued on missionary work in Nagano, Iwate, Hokkaido, and Kōchi, especially after she relinquished day-to-day administration in 1881. The school that she founded attracted ambitious young women from across Japan, from as far away as Kyushu. Many of its alumnae went on to careers in higher education, especially in universities for women. One of the best-known early Ferris graduates was Wakamatsu Shizuko, an educator, novelist, and translator, who entered the school at the age of seven in 1871. She was one of the first graduates in 1881 and later taught Japanese literature there and at Meiji Girls’ School. She is remembered for her translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (Shōkōshi), a popular children’s book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The impact of this book on generations of Japanese children can be compared to another classic, Anne of Green Gables (Akage no An), and its translator Muraoka Hanako, also the product of a Protestant mission school. Wakamatsu died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-one, following a fire that destroyed Meiji Girls’ School.

Today Ferris Seminary, renamed Ferris Jogakuin, is one of the most prominent private girls’ schools in Japan, with sections for junior high (grades 7 to 9) and high school (grades 10 to 12). Its links with Meiji Gakuin University go well beyond the Presbyterian roots of both institutions: after Jennie Kuyper, the third headmistress was tragically burned to death in the fire following the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, Albert Oltmans took charge and rebuilt the school while also serving as president of Meiji Gakuin. In 1950, Ferris expanded into a two-year junior college and then in 1965 to a full four-year university, with majors in English and Japanese Literature. A second college campus in suburban Yokohama opened in 1988, along with more academic departments, and the Yamate campus became the home of the School of Music, for which Ferris is best known today. Postgraduate courses began in 1995, with doctoral courses in four fields. Today the number of students tops one thousand in grades 7 to 12 and almost 600 at the university level.

Mary Eddy Kidder Miller established an example for independent women, both as educators and as models for their students, and she also blazed a trail for unmarried female missionaries, a rarity at the time. Three other Protestant schools were born in Yamate around the same time as Ferris, and all continue today (some relocated to other parts of Yokohama), joined by a fifth postwar foundation.

10. Kyōritsu Jogakkō (now Yokohama Kyōritsu Gakuen)

Yokohama Kyōritsu Gakuen 横浜共立学園 (212 Yamate-chō 山手町212)

Three American women set off for Japan in 1871, sponsored by the Women’s Union Missionary Society for Heathen Lands, a Presbyterian organization founded by Sarah Doremus. The group’s worldwide mission was for women to help women and girls, and in Yokohama those in need were mixed-race daughters, the results of brief relationships between Western men and Japanese women. They faced discrimination, poverty, homelessness, and starvation. Presbyterian missionary James Ballagh appealed for help, especially education, and offered his own home for a residential school. Mary Pruyn, Julia Crosby, and Louise Pierson answered the call. Crosby and Pierson had teaching experience, in their late thirties, while Pruyn, fifty-one, supervised the dormitory and classrooms at the American Mission Home. The following year they were able to move into a larger lot at 212 Bluff, next to the home of Samuel Brown, and in 1875 they chose the name Kyōritsu Jogakkō (now Yokohama Kyōritsu Gakuen, but also known as the Doremus School).

Student numbers increased after Christianity was legalized, and the school today educates over 1,000 girls in grades 7 to 12. A seminary to train women as church leaders shared the site and was the origin of today’s Tokyo Christian University. The historic half-timbered main hall of Kyōritsu was designed in 1931 by William Merrell Vories to replace the building destroyed in the 1923 earthquake. For decades an easily recognizable landmark of the Yamate area, it was designated the first-ever Yokohama Historical Cultural Property in 1988.

11. The Brittan School (Yokohama Eiwa Jogakuin, later Seibi Gakuen, and now Aoyama Gakuin Yokohama Eiwa School)

Aoyama Gakuin Yokohama Eiwa Gakkō 青山学院横浜英和学校 (124 Maita-chō, Minami-ku 南区蒔田町124)

Harriet Brittan, born in Britain and raised in New York, came to Yokohama in 1880. At the age of fifty-eight, she had already overcome a childhood accident that injured her spine and left her unable to walk, as well as severe tropical fever as an Anglican missionary in Liberia. She was active in India for eighteen years, working alongside Elizabeth Guthrie. The Methodist board chose Guthrie for a mission in Yokohama, again responding to pleas by James Ballagh; but when Guthrie died suddenly, Harriet Brittan stepped into her place. (Those who have followed Sister Carmel O’Keeffe’s life will find this a familiar twist of fate.) 

Harriet Brittan followed the pattern set by the three Kyōritsu founders, moving into Ballagh’s house to teach the first four students. Her assistant Harada Ryōko was a recent Ferris graduate. In two years, the four students had become sixty-four, and Harriet Brittan used her own savings to buy a larger building on the Bluff. Like Kyōritsu, the school educated mainly Eurasian girls but also some male students, one of whom was Arishima Takeo, later a prominent novelist. The Brittan School, renamed Yokohama Eiwa Jogakuin and then Seibi Gakuen, moved in 1916 from Yamate to another hilltop location in Maita, a suburb of Yokohama. It has since become coeducational and affiliated with Aoyama Gakuin University, also a Methodist institution. Today it educates almost 1,700 girls and boys from kindergarten through high school.

12. Kantō Gakuin School and University and Sōshin Jogakkō (now Sōshin Gakuin Jogakkō)

Kantō Gakuin 関東学院 (4 Miharu-dai, Minami-ku 南区三春台4)

Kantō Gakuin Daigaku 関東学院大学 (1-50-1 Mutsuura-Higashi, Kanazawa-ku 金沢区六浦東1-50-1)

Sōshin Gakuin Jogakkō 捜真学院女学校 (8 Nakamaru, Kanagawa-ku 神奈川区中丸8)

Dr. Nathan Brown, a Baptist missionary and classical scholar, was born in the US state of New Hampshire and attended Williams College, graduating first in the Class of 1829. His first overseas missions were in Burma (now Myanmar) and the northeast Indian region of Assam. The linguistic skills which later led to his translation of the New Testament from the original Greek into Japanese were honed by a similarly ambitious project to produce an Assamese version. Brown returned from India to the US in 1850 to join the abolitionist movement to render slavery illegal. After the Civil War, at the age of 65, Brown set out again for Japan, arriving in 1872 with his wife Charlotte. 

In 1884, Brown and fellow missionary Albert Arnold Bennett opened a Baptist seminary, located in what is now Motomachi Park, commemorated by a memorial plaque. His life ended only two years later, but that seminary was the origin of Yokohama’s preeminent Protestant schools, Kantō Gakuin. Today they educate girls and boys from kindergarten through high school in three locations. Kantō Gakuin University enrolls 11,000 students with campuses in southern Yokohama and in the city center, across from JR Kannai Station, where the ground floor coffee shop is named “Nathan-1884.”

Following Nathan’s death in 1886, his widow, Charlotte Brown, took over a small school run by Clara Sands, with only seven girls studying in the same house where Nathan had translated the New Testament from Greek into Japanese. Like the other schools in the Bluff area, many of its first students were Eurasian girls abandoned by their mothers. By 1910, as Sōshin Jogakkō, it had expanded well beyond its original capacity and, like Harriet’s school, moved to a larger location north of the present-day JR Yokohama Station. Today Sōshin Gakuin is coeducational in the elementary grades and educates girls in junior high and high school. A memorial plaque on the main Yamate road, next to Yokohama Union Church, explains its roots.

13. Yokohama Jogakuin

Yokohama Jogakuin 横浜女学院 (203 Yamate-chō 山手町203)

Yet a fourth Protestant girls’ school, Yokohama Jogakuin, emerged in Yamate after World War II, with quite a different origin. Kaneko Tadashi, born in 1915, was raised as a Buddhist but converted to Christianity after his marriage. His traumatic experience as a soldier in World War II convinced him to devote his life to education, and he set about reviving two defunct girls’ schools, one Buddhist and the other Shintō, and merging them into a Christian institution. From 1947 until his death in 2000, Kaneko developed and expanded the school, which now has over 1,000 girls in grades 7 to 12 as well as a kindergarten. Its campus is adjacent to Kyōritsu Gakuen in Yamate.

Thus Yamate-chō today is the home (or the origin) of many “mission” schools, both Catholic and Protestant, predominantly for girls. The exits of the two major train stations, Ishikawa-chō and Motomachi-Chūkagai, are filled every weekday morning with girls wearing the distinctive uniforms of these schools, trudging or frolicking up the steep hill. One of the slopes leading to the Bluff has been dubbed Otome-zaka (Hill of the Maidens) for this picturesque daily procession.

14. The Earliest Christian Churches in Yokohama 

14a. Taking full advantage of the treaty provisions allowing religious services exclusively for foreigners, churches sprang up across the Foreign Settlement. The earliest was the Catholic Tenshudō, built in 1862 by the pioneering French missionary Father Prudence Girard in the original Foreign Settlement (along today’s Honchō-dōri avenue). It was the first Christian church to be legally opened in Japan for over two hundred years, and it was the basis of today’s Sacred Heart Cathedral, which moved to its current hilltop location in 1906. Although destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, it was rebuilt by the versatile Czech architect Jan Josef Švagr and remains a Yokohama landmark today, with its soaring spire visible atop the Bluff.

Sacred Heart Cathedral (Yamate Catholic Church) カトリック山手教会 (44 Yamate-chō 山手町44)

Sacred Heart Cathedral is the headquarters of the Catholic Diocese of Yokohama, which includes the thirteen parishes within Yokohama, as well as all of the Catholic churches, schools, universities, and other facilities in four prefectures: Kanagawa, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, and Nagano. Next to the church is the official residence of the Bishop of Yokohama, Umemura Raphael Masahiro.

14b. Soon after the opening of the port, Anglican missionaries established Yokohama Christ Church, originally the Garrison Church for the British Army detachment in Yokohama. Services were held inside the British Consulate, beyond the reach of the Japanese authorities, until a small church was built in the Settlement next to the Horikawa Canal, on a site currently occupied by the Excellent Coast wedding hall in Yamashita-chō. It was relocated in 1863 to its current location on the Bluff, in front of the Foreign Cemetery. A much larger building, designed by prominent British architect Josiah Conder, replaced it in 1901. Like so many other buildings, it fell victim to the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Its reconstruction by the prominent American architect Jay H. Morgan has long been regarded as “one of the most beautiful churches in the Far East.”

Yokohama Christ Church 横浜クライスト・チャーチ (235 Yamate-chō 山手町235)

14c. Before and during the early Meiji period, Protestant missionaries arrived one after another. James Hamilton Ballagh arrived from Rutgers University in November 1861, remaining in Yokohama for fifty-eight years as missionary of the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian denominations. His wife Margaret’s book Glimpses of Old Japan is still readable today, with insights that seem fresh. His first covert baptism was of his own Japanese tutor in 1865, eight years before it was legal to do so. In 1872 Ballagh built the first Presbyterian church in Japan, a small stone chapel called “Ishi no Kaidō.” Like the Catholic nuns who founded Saint Maur, Ballagh took the risk of opening his church to Japanese worshippers a year before the ban on Christianity was lifted. “Ishi no Kaidō” later expanded into Yokohama Kaigan Kyōkai, still located next to the former British Consulate and the spot where Perry had signed the Treaty of Kanagawa less than a decade before. It is affiliated with the United Church of Christ in Japan (Nihon Kirisuto-kyōdan), which includes most of the mainstream Protestant denominations.

Yokohama Kaigan Kyōkai 横浜海岸教会 (8 Nihon-Ōdōri 日本大通8)

14d. Also in 1872, with support from Hepburn and Ballagh, Samuel Brown became the first pastor of Yokohama Union Church, an English-speaking and interdenominational place of worship that dates back to 1863. It is also in its original location on the main road of Yamate and operates an English-speaking pre-school.

Yokohama Union Church 横浜ユニオン・チャーチ (66-2 Yamate-chō 山手町66−2)

14e. In 1873, exactly one week after the Meiji government’s decriminalization of Christianity, Nathan Brown and Jonathan Goble founded the First Baptist Church of Yokohama in the Yamate area. Although destroyed by fire and earthquake several times, the church was rebuilt in its current location after the Great Kantō Earthquake, in 1928. The First Baptist Church of Yokohama now stands below the Yamate Bluff, in its most recent 1981 iteration. The English-speaking Baptist congregation is also served by the Yokohama International Baptist Church, across from Negishi Shinrin Park and near the former U.S. Navy housing area at Negishi Heights.

Nihon Baptist Yokohama Kyōkai 日本バプテスト横浜教会 (2-5-8 Kotobuki-chō 寿町 2-5-8)

Yokohama International Baptist Church 横浜国際バプテスト教会 (60 Nakao-dai 仲尾台60)

14f. Hepburn opened the First Presbyterian Church of Yokohama in 1874 next to his clinic; however, by 1890 it proved too small, and he personally oversaw its expansion as the majestic Shiloh (Shirō) Church, still a landmark in the Kannai area. It was built in Romanesque style with a large rose window and a tower—on only one side. Its reconstruction after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 preserves the original asymmetrical design.

Yokohama Shiro Kyōkai 横浜指路教会 (6-85 Onoe-chō 尾上町6−85)

14g. Robert McClay, the first Methodist missionary in Japan, founded a church along the main Yamate road in 1875. Its location is marked by a memorial plaque. During his long career in Japan, McClay, an American, and Canadian Davidson McDonald, were instrumental in the founding of Aoyama Gakuin University. Today the university system includes Yokohama Eiwa (now coeducational), originally founded by Harriet Brittan in 1880, as described above.

14h. Russian Orthodox priests, led by St. Nikolay Kassatkin, first arrived in Hakodate in 1860, where their church is a famous landmark. Equally memorable is the Holy Resurrection Cathedral (Nikorai-dō) in Ochanomizu, Tokyo, designed by Josiah Conder in 1891. An Orthodox priest, Father Vasily, opened the Protection of Holy Theotokos Church in Yokohama in 1878. After frequent moves, it was rebuilt near Jizō-zaka in Yamate in 1935 and remained there until 1980. It can now be found in Matsugaoka, north of JR Yokohama Station. 

Yokohama Harisutosu Sei Kyōkai 横浜ハリストス正教会 (27-11 Matsugaoka, Kanagawa-ku 神奈川区松ケ丘27−11)

14i. The last group of Christian missionaries to arrive in Yokohama in the Meiji period were four Americans representing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in 1901. Their introduction of Mormon beliefs is recognized by a monument in front of the rebuilt Mormon church along the main road of Yamate-chō.

Matsujitsu Seito Iesu Kirisuto Kyōkai 末日聖徒イエス・キリスト教会 (58-1 Yamate-chō 山手町58−1)

15. Conclusion: Tireless and Uncompromising Women

Mathilde Raclot and the Sisters of the Infant Jesus came to Yokohama to educate the daughters of wealthy foreign merchants and simultaneously to work for the benefit of the orphans who begged on the streets of the city. They were not alone: Mary Kidder, Clara Hepburn, Mary Pruyn, Julia Crosby, Louise Pierson, Harriet Brittan, Clara Sands, and Charlotte Brown all shared their concern for the victims of social and economic distress and their conviction that Western education and Christian charity were the solution. The concentration of so many self-sufficient, indomitable women in the same small neighborhood, all within the same short space of time, shaped Yokohama in its early years and resulted in five generations of women who have contributed to Japan in every field of endeavor.

16. Acknowledgements and Sources

I am indebted to Professor Pamela Lee Novick for her detailed and incisive journal articles in English focusing on Christian missionaries in the Meiji period. Professor Kohiyama Rui (Tokyo Women’s Christian University) and Professor Haruko Wakabayashi ’85 (Rutgers University) were also very helpful in learning more about the careers of these amazing women. Below are some of their invaluable contributions to this subject.

Novick, Pamela Lee. “‘So Long Dependent on Myself’: Mary E. Kidder and the Beginnings of Unmarried Women’s Missionary Work in Japan.” Kiyo, Volume 30, pp 77-100, March 1997, Keisen Jogakuen Junior College

Novick, Pamela Lee. “To Build a School: Miss Kidder’s School for Girls, 1870-1875.” Kiyo, Volume 20, pp 93-129, February 2008, Keisen Jogakuen Junior College

Novick, Pamela Lee. “Excerpts from ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’ Some Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Japan,” Akita Minoru Sensei Kinen Ronshū, pp 189-201, November 2005

Novick, Pamela Lee. “’In the Hand of the Ladies’: The Founding, and Foundering, of Women’s Work for Women in Nagasaki, 1875-1880.” Kiyo, Volume 19, pp 65-89, March 2007, Keisen University

Farge, William J., S.J. “The Japanese Fear of Christianity and European Nationalism in the Diplomacy of Commodore Matthew C. Perry.” Japan Studies Review, Florida International University, Volume XI, 2007

Watanabe, Hideo. “Western Contributors to the Modernization of Meiji Japan: Hepburn and Verbeck.” Japanese Studies Review, Vol. XIII (2014), pp 47-65

Ferris Jogakuin maintains an excellent Archives, open to the public, with a comprehensive and thoughtfully-presented exhibition area on the long history of the school and university. It is located in Ferris Building # 6 at 68 Yamate-chō, just steps from Saint Maur.