Japan-US Negotiations on Christian Mission Civil Code Corporations in Japan after the 1899 Implementation of Treaty Revisions

Abstract

Scholars generally agree that Japanese religious policy fundamentally changed in 1899. That year, new treaties abolished consular jurisdiction and foreign settlements. As a result, the Japanese government began to have jurisdiction over the foreign Christian missions that had engaged in religious, educational, and medical activities in Japan for a long time.

Many studies have examined the religions bill (shūkyō hōan) that would have made it possible to establish religious corporations but was abandoned by the Imperial Diet in 1900. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fact that many foreign Christian missions organized another type of religious corporation: religion-related Civil Code nonprofit corporations.

In this paper, I consider the Japan-US negotiations from 1899 to 1901 regarding the right of foreign Christian missions to establish corporations under the provisions of the Japanese Civil Code. The main actors were the Japanese government (the Ministry of Education), the United States government (the US legation to Japan and the Department of States), and the American Baptist Missionary Union, the first mission to organize one.