The stubborn lovingkindness of a single American woman missionary in Japan from the end of World War I through the 1960s—with a painful hiatus in the 1940s. Proposed date of commemoration: June 16.
Eleven-year-old Maud heard Jesus’ call to serve in Japan. For the next decade and a half she prayed and prepared for it, imagining herself walking through a rural village on the other side of the world, Bible in hand, telling “the boys and girls of Japan about Jesus their Savior.” Her sole wish was to evangelize, bringing hope of salvation to those who’d never heard the good news.
The other missionaries said no.
That was the rule “in the field”: decisions were made by a strict majority vote—democratic in nature, except for the not insignificant matter of excluding women—and the longer-term missionaries in Japan determined that what they needed was not more evangelism, but more works of mercy. Locals converts needed to see that service to the needy was part and parcel of the gospel. Besides that, the need was enormous: at the time, neither Japanese culture nor the Japanese state perceived any obligation to help the suffering. The Christians had their work cut out for them—and Maud, utterly unqualified for the task, was going to lead the way.
She arrived late in 1918, shortly before the Armistice, and put in her two years of language study before settling in Kumamoto in Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Charmed as she was by its quaint environment, it wasn’t long before she saw the dark side: the homeless, mentally ill, desperately sick, addicted, and abandoned, all left to fend for themselves. It was for them that she was to establish a “colony of mercy” or, as it came to be called, Jiai-En, “The Garden of Merciful Love.”
It was hard enough to care for the elderly and orphaned alike in the first bare-bones version of a loving, safe, and clean home. Harder still, Maud quickly found, were the cases of girls whose parents took loans against their indentured servitude as prostitutes. The ones who ran away from their nightly assaults were berated for failing to uphold the family honor. By law, brothel keepers could not physically restrain the abused girls, but the psychological and emotional pressure placed on them was so enormous that sometimes, even with an ally like Maud and a sympathetic judge, the girls returned to their servitude. At other times, Maud found that the “rescue” of an older prostitute was in fact the brothel kicking her out as too diseased and exhausted to suit their needs, happy that she was now someone else’s problem.
Maud’s task of organizing a new community for unwanted souls was hampered, unsurprisingly, by shortness of funds. Often she spent out of her own meager food budget to pass a few roasted sweet potatoes on to the homeless elderly. She gave up the thousands earmarked to build her a home in order to erect the first structure of the orphanage instead—a decision she made without permission, earning her the nickname “a law unto herself.” Disenfranchisement couldn’t stop her from making her voice heard.
As if that weren’t enough, the biggest problem of all was the lack of personnel. Maud mothered the first few babies herself, and even once housemothers were found she regularly lent a hand, especially when the measles or tuberculosis broke out. But finding women in the first place who were willing to care for the children as their own was next to impossible. If she was lucky enough to find them, inevitably they’d have to leave. When Maud learned that one of her most reliable helpers was moving away,
“I threw a blanket down on the narrow porch between the inner paper doors and the outer glass ones and tumbled down on it, a lump of discouraged, disheveled clay. The hot sunshine did what it could to warm my exhausted body and my drooping spirit, but I was disconsolate. My pity for the poor and my desire to help suffering humanity was satiated, if not stunted for life. I was perfectly willing to let the rest of the unfortunate people of Kumamoto City suffer on, as they likely had done for centuries. Why should I work to help suffering Japanese when none of their own people would help? I was certain I had never been a quitter, but this was too much, too useless.
“How long I lay there, I can’t remember. At last, however, I knew that no Christian could spend two years going from slum to slum, taking mental pictures of all the victims of a non-Christian economic system, filling the subconscious with cruel stories of injustice and misery, without paying a price, if he tried to escape without doing something to help. Just as ‘God was in Christ reconciling men to himself,’ (II Cor. 5:19), even so Christ was in me, and I dared not walk out on the job he had given me to do. Whether anyone helped or not, my commission was to ‘gather up the fragments that nothing be lost’ (John 6:12).”
In time, help came—from Japanese coworkers like Mrs. Nonaka and Mrs. Hatanaka, and even from Maud’s own sister, Annie Powlas, who’d started a kindergarten in neighboring Saga and then (again by missionary majority vote) was moved to Kumamoto to help Maud for a number of years. Another curious source of help was the newspapers. The sheer fact that a foreign lady with red hair showed up in their country to help worthless, no-account, and impoverished children was so bizarre as to be noteworthy. They could always count on Maud to give them a good story.
Even so, it was an uphill battle, and the idealistic Maud had to realize that not every rescue results in reform, or even gratitude. By the time of her first furlough she was ready to give it up entirely, expecting to repatriate to her Christian homeland.
Maud’s idealism was in for another shock, though. She saw the States with new eyes. Japan’s problems did not logically imply America’s perfection. And when news came of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, Maud knew that “the Japanese people had become my people.”
And so the pattern continued: commitment, struggle, desperation, renewal. The bank holding all of Jiai-En’s funds went belly-up. Children raised in the orphanage got sucked in to local superstitions. The elderly refusing the home offered to them, and those who accepted exhibited the bitter egotism that a lifetime of abuse had created in their hearts. All the while Maud kept trying to get and keep girls out of prostitution, with mixed success.
Baptisms remained modest in number. Most days the fight was not for salvation but just to get the children clothed, fed, and off to school—all the bloom falling off the missionary rose. It was only Maud’s salutary stubbornness and singleminded focus on the call to “gather up the fragments” that kept her going.
Nearly twenty years into it, enough progress had been made that Maud could relax a little. Jiai-En was well staffed, the facilities well built. She took her furlough via Siberia and Moscow to attend the International Social Welfare Conference, curious how mercyworkers got on in other parts of the world, and enjoyed a restful year back home in North Carolina. So she was singularly ill-prepared for what she found on her return: a Japan ready to go to war.
Already in 1937 there were swastikas everywhere, factories churning out armaments, and propaganda posters declaring, “Beware of the missionary, for by a pretense of kindness he seeks to learn Japan’s secrets.” Maud discovered quickly that this was the official line, but one not widely shared by the Japanese among whom she lived. From intellectuals to peasants to fellow Christians, they showed their support and love for her, pleading with her to stay—to be a leaven—perhaps to hold off the inevitable by the sheer force of her presence. Protests to the contrary, Japan attacked China, expecting an easy rout. When Japanese soldiers came home wounded and shocked by the failure to achieve effortless victory, Maud went to them, talked to them, nursed them—and kept telling them about the love of Jesus for all people.
But the writing was on the wall. Local police subtly threatened her, and in September 1940 the U.S. State Department advised all American nationals to leave the country. Maud stuck it out another year, but finally local authorities told her that she either had to leave of her own accord or they’d generate a scandal in the newspapers to force her out. By then she’d been in Kumamoto for twenty-three years. She had to leave behind most of her belongings, but more importantly her people. Hundreds saw her off at the train station. She boarded the last American ship to leave Japan, in the company of “comfort women” being sent to the Japanese soldiers in China, and grieved.
“I could not say with St. Paul, ‘…we glory in tribulations’ (Romans 5:3). As I stood there contrasting these two groups of young women [the prostitutes and the colleagues staying behind on shore], this resentment blinded my eyes, and I demanded inwardly, ‘Why, Lord, why?’ An almost audible reply came in a Bible verse: ‘Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut; I knew that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name’ (Revelation 3:8).”
A prayer from a Christian doctor, Yoshinobu Fukuda, comforted her, and she left with the hope that “through this chaotic mess, God is working to bring about a better way to spread the Gospel.”
And yet the next several years were as bitter in their disappointments as her first arrival in Japan. Her home church refused to accept two young Japanese-American men into membership; her alma mater refused to matriculate them; she got disinvited from speaking engagements because of her affiliation with Japan. She listened to American church bells pealing victory as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the war. It reminded her of the Japanese exulting over the Rape of Nanking.
And then the surprise: the church in Japan invited her back. At the age of fifty-seven, Maud didn’t think she could do it.
“I have never prayed so hard for guidance. Guidance is really the wrong word. I argued with God. I can’t endure seeing the devastation American bombs have inflicted upon beautiful Japan. Even my friends will resent my coming to pry into their suffering, their humiliation. How can I teach ‘God is love’ after a so-called Christian country has killed so many people and wrought such terrible destruction? Lord, I’m too old. I can’t stand the strain.”
But when in October 1946 General MacArthur cleared missionaries for entry—on the condition that they come with their own furniture and one ton of nonperishable food—she, her sister Annie, and their colleague Pastor Stirewalt went back to the land that their own nation had pummeled into defeat.
Maud was appalled by what she saw. Japan lay in ruins. Small buildings obliterated; larger ones whose steel frames had been tied into knots by bombs; war orphans everywhere.
Hiroshima, flattened, was hard enough. But Kumamoto almost broke her. Jiai-En mounted an American flag from its rooftop, hoping to be spared, but it was not: twenty-six bombs fell on its grounds.
The people were shattered, too. Too exhausted and shocked to be excited at Maud’s return, they just clustered around her like children. For a week even Maud could do nothing but walk in a fog through the wreckage. When she finally came to herself and undertook the rebuilding, she had no choice but to resort to the black market for materials and fed her friends out of her one-ton collection of oil, sugar, and Spam.
Then things started to pick up speed. Already a generation of children had graduated out of Jiai-En, and they could be recruited to work there as adults. The treachery of imperialist nationalism opened up Japan to the prospect of democracy—a bumpy ride, Maud calling it “bedlam”—and even more so, to the gospel. For a brief window in time, Maud returned to her original calling of evangelism. From 1947 to 1949 hearts were opened, and so she traveled around Japan, speaking about Jesus to keenly interested groups, seeing the church flower and the eagerness for baptism. And then, as the situation normalized and Japan began to recover from its trauma, interest dropped, and “the Christian church was left again to plod its weary theological way of preaching, teaching, catechizing, and baptizing.”
But it was not the fight it had once been. Moreover, the government took notice. Concern for the least of these became part of the new Japanese society, in no small part due to the efforts of Maud and other missionaries like her all over the country. And Maud had the special privilege of hosting the emperor—once the figurehead of her own nation’s greatest enemy—at Jiai-En in 1949, and hearing his gracious words: “Thank you. Please continue your good work.”
In 1959 it was time to pass the work on to a new generation. Maud was happy and confident that it would be in good hands, and after all her agonies, miseries, and tears, looked with joy on what the gospel had built.
“A seed of love was planted in a harsh, untamed soil. We watered it, and God gave the increase. And what a harvest He has given to the workers in this little Garden of Merciful Love: five cottage-plan orphanages for 330 homeless children; a baby home for 16 babies; homes for 84 old people which stands tops in the nation with the new infirmary; two kindergartens and four day-nurseries; two of the most substantially self-supporting churches in the Japan Lutheran Church, and two aided churches; a number of Sunday Schools and preaching places; and a staff of 130 workers, most of whom are Christian, daily teaching the Gospel message to all who will unstop their ears and hear the good news.”
When she returned ten years later to celebrate Jiai-En’s fiftieth anniversary and see the hospital named for her, the crowds welcomed her as “God’s angel who has just come back.” Some have gone so far as to call her a Mother Theresa for Japan.
On her arrival in Kumamoto so many years before, Maud planted walnut saplings on the land that would become Jiai-En. People scoffed at her. The plants were foreign, they objected; they wouldn’t survive in Japan. She retorted that they would grow and thrive, just like the gospel.
The walnut trees are there to this day.
For Further Reading
Maud Powlas, Gathering Up the Fragments (Greenville, NC: Era, 1978)