THE NEEDS OF JAPAN by H. Luelle Jenkins

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 3, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 35.

THE NEEDS OF JAPAN.

By H. Luelle Jenkins

BY H. LUELLE JENKINS.

For three months we have been in this fair land of the “Rising Sun,” where flowers of surpassing beauty are in sad contrast with the crowds of little children which throng us everywhere, some physically blind, but all with the greater blindness of heathenism. Think what must be the influence of the mother who blackens her teeth to advertise that she is virtuous! God pity the children of such mothers! And remember that our lives at home are often quoted as standards. Foreigners object to the nudity of the Japanese, but the Japanese reply: “It is not so bad to go unclothed here as in America, where they wear ‘low and behold’ dresses. Our nudity is a case of necessity, yours of desire.”

Talk of the highly civilized condition of the Japanese! In one town, the headquarters of the army before embarking for China, 1,800 illegitimate births are reported within three months. At Nagasaki little girls are employed in coaling ships at an age when your little girls are at school. O mothers, you who have your sweet children, your happy homes, God help you to have a living interest in the children of heathendom! What were Japan’s future, however seemingly brilliant her prospects, while 2,000,000 of her women—ten per cent of her female population—are numbered with harlots, 1,000,000 of whom carry government commissions, while thousands of fathers and brothers are fed, clothed, and kept in idleness by means of the money secured by daughters and sisters engaged in this awful business? Some of the attractions of her famous shrines are unnamable, and most sacred groves are the scenes of practices inconceivably revolting save to one given over to lust. . . .

The hope of Japan is in the leaven of Christ, in her Christian sons and daughters. We strongly indorse the words of a missionary who said, “Our brothers and sisters are in India, Japan, and China, not because we are Methodists, Presbyterians, or Church of England Christians; not because it is a pleasant thing to leave home and native land; not because Chinese cities and tropical lands and Japan’s storm-swept islands constitute places of abode half so desirable as our home land, but we are here because a ray of light from the throne of God has penetrated the recesses of our minds, and we have been made to see and to feel as God sees and feels.” . . .

It is said, “The life of a good woman is a motor which gets its power from heaven.” We have realized this lately in observing the busy life of one frail missionary wife, who lives constantly under these shadows of heathenism. Beside having the care of home, she teaches school from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M., does all the sewing for herself and three boys, conducts a children’s meeting and a Sunday school of waifs from the street, visits among the women, and superintends the work of a Bible woman. She it was who introduced the making of book-marks, by the sale of which these native Christians might erect buildings in which to worship the true God in spite of the wrath of their heathen neighbors.—Gospel in All Lands.