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Masayoshi Oshikawa (押川方義 1850-1928) was a Japanese evangelist, political activist and founder and first president of Tohoku Gakuin University.

Young Masayoshi Oshikawa

Masayoshi Oshikawa

Early life and edcation

Masayoshi Oshikawa was born in 1850 in Ehime prefecture, the third son of the Hashimoto family, and later adopted at age eleven by the Oshikawa family. In the Japanese feudal adoption tradition the son usually became the son-in-law if the father had a daughter; this was the case in this adoption. At age 18 he married Tsune, the daughter of Masayuke Oshikawa. The father was bitterly opposed to anything foreign; due to this family opposition, he he saw his wife only twice in the nine years after his subsequent conversion. A year after his marriage he was sent to Tokyo by a feudal lord for education. He first studied at Kaisei Gakko school of Western learning, a predecessor of Tokyo University. After three years he moved to Yokohama to obtain a better knowledge of English and studied under Christian missionaries at an English school.

Career

While in Yokohama he converted to Christianity in 1872 and started missionary work, founding the Church of Christ in Japan, the first Protestant church in the country. At the time of his conversion there were only six known Protestants in Japan. While preaching in Nigita, the city was largely destroyed by a fire in 1878. Having visited Sendai twice overthe preceding year, he moved there in 1879. The first year was difficult. Many in the city were hostile to the "Jesus meetings" and he could not rent a house for the meeetings. The religion was felt to be for women and children. By 1881 there were 45 church members with a large rented house. The work was non-denominational and there was no mission. Donations from local Christians were not enough to expand the local work. He met with William Edwin Hoy, a missionary from the Reformed Church in the United States, in Tokyo in 1885 and invited him Sandei. In 1886 he co-founded the Sendai Divinity School with Hoy, under the aegis of the Reformed Church in the United States. By that time there three chirches and200 Chrisitans in Sandei. In 188y Oshikawa was voted president os the Miyagi Classis, covering the territory of all northern Japan. Starting with six students. The school prospered, and by 1892 it had 17 theological students and 133 other students. It became Tohoku Gakuin University,one of the most influential Christian institutions in the country and he became its first president. In 1886 he founded Miyagi Gakuin Women's University. Actively involved in evangelical activities in several places he resigned as president of Tohoku Gakuin in 1891. In 1882 he was the first Japanese Christian missionary to Korea. This was a decade before formal Japanese colonial expansion and appeared to be motivated by a Christian transnational cosmopolitanism. He viewed the foreign mission of of Japanese Christians as an extension of "Western" Christian missionary activity in Japan; for him the mission was an "obligation." In 1894 with other Christans he established the Greater Japan Overseas Education Society, a strictly Christian organization. They established Japanese language schools in Korea. Although Christian and educational in mission, "it cannot be denied ...that the establisment of these schools was the cornerstone of Japanese influence in Korea." Later activities went beyond Christian mission, and he actively intervened in Asian politics against political oppression in Asia. He supported Emilio Aquinaldo's Philippine war against the United States and the Mongolian independence movement; in 1918 he criticized the Japanese people for their neglect of Japan's responsibility to improve Asian societies.

References

Category:Protestant missionaries in Japan Category:Japanese educators Category:Christian missionaries in Korea Category:Japanese Christian missionaries