JAPAN

The first country for which Buchman prayed on that evening in Mackinac when he heard that the Second World War was over was Japan. Nearly thirty years earlier he had visited that country seven times, although he only twice stayed as much as a month. He did not go back there until 1956. Yet by then he was a national figure on whom the government wished to confer Japan's highest decoration.

In November 1935 Buchman had whole-heartedly backed the decision of a young Oxford graduate, Basil Entwistle, to accompany Bishop Roots and his family on their return from the Oxford house-party to China. They passed through Tokyo and Entwistle took up the introduction of the Washington columnist, George Sokolsky, to meet Kensuke Horinouchi, then head of the American desk at the Japanese Foreign Office. This meeting led to a renewal of the Christian faith of Horinouchi and his wife. A year later Horinouchi, now Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, gave a reception for his friends to meet Entwistle on a return visit. By then a serious power struggle was in progress between the young military and Horinouchi and his moderate friends at the Foreign Office. For a time those in the Foreign Office who wanted peace held their own, though always in danger of assassination. In 1938 Horinouchi was appointed Ambassador in Washington, where he met Buchman. When in 1940 it became clear that he was being forced to pass untrue messages to the Americans, he asked to be recalled. 'I don't know when we will meet again,' he told Buchman and Entwistle in San Francisco before leaving. 'We face difficult times. Maybe we shall not be able to be in touch. But, whatever happens, we are so grateful to God for the peace we have found inside us. We will be faithful to everything you have taught us.'1 Back in Tokyo he had been dismissed from the diplomatic corps and during the war he lived under close surveillance. But he kept his promise.

Other Japanese, who had met Buchman and his friends abroad, had also returned home. Among them was Takasumi Mitsui - brother of the head of Japan's most powerful business house - who had studied under Streeter and Thornhill at Oxford. There he, his wife Hideko and their children were baptised. They worked with Buchman in Europe until 1938, when they returned to Japan. Through the war he and Hideko, too, kept faith through many difficulties. They lost their two Tokyo houses in one night through fire-bombs, and lived for the rest of the war in a concrete store-house. Like all Japanese they had little to eat - one of their children died of malnutrition - and they were watched by the police because of their identification with Moral Re-Armament. But, as members of the powerful Mitsui family, they were not arrested.

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