Matsumura Kaiseki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matsumura Kaiseki (松村介石, 1859 - 1939) was the founder of an indigenous Japanese Christian church known as The Way. He was born in Akashi, a town just southwest of Kobe in the year the first Protestant missionaries arrived in Japan.

Matsumura was from a samurai family and received his early education in the Chinese Confucian classics from his father. Following the Meiji Restoration and the new government's promuglation of a new law of military conscription for all, hundreds of thousands of samurai families in Japan found themselves without land, and were forced to find another means of livelihood.

With the encouragement of his father, Matsumura decided to pursue an academic career. At the age of twelve, he was sent to Tokyo to continue Confucian studies. Many leaders in the early Meiji period recognized the importance of Western learning for Japan's modernization, with the result that in 1874, at the age of sixteen, Matsumura began his study of English at the Osaka School of Foreign Languages. Later that year he moved to Kobe and continued his English studies with the missionary John Atkinson. This was Matsumura's first encounter with Christianity and the Bible. Two years later he returned to Tokyo to pursue his studies and in 1876 entered the Hepburn school in Yokohama, then under the direction of John Ballagh, an American Missionary of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Besides his study of English, Matsumura wrestled with the doctrines of Christiantiy that were being taught by Missionaries associated with the Hepburn school and the Yokohama Band. According to his spiritual autobiography, Fifty Years in the Faith, one night in December 1876 he claimed that he had a divine revelation that the God of Christianity was none other than Tentei (天帝), the God of Confucianism. As a result of this experience he made a profession of faith and was baptized in 1877.