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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
This essay addresses the role of individual actors in unofficial diplomacy, and the contributions of non-governmental projects in building international relations in post-WWII Asia. I treat the case of one Christian female as an illustration of the role of progressive intellectuals working outside official circles—a much neglected aspect of Japan's mid-twentieth century foreign relations.
* Chō is Takeda Kiyoko's married surname. After her marriage, she continued to use her maiden name, and thus in this essay I refer to her as Takeda. This essay is part of a larger study of Takeda's intellectual and scholarly activities, that situates her rich and engaged life in an alternative narrative of twentieth-century Japanese intellectual life. (See Vanessa B. Ward, Takeda Kiyoko: A Twentieth-Century Japanese Christian Intellectual, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10:2 (December 2008), pp. 70-92). I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Takeda for her continuing support for this project, and to her son and daughter-in-law, with whom she resided in 2009-2010, for their generosity in facilitating our meetings.
1 Takeda Kiyoko, ‘Watashi no naka no “Ajia” ‘[My “Asia”], Sekai 340 (March 1974), pp. 270-276, p. 271.
2 The Japanese term most commonly used, “minkan gaikō” [private diplomacy], points to the engagement of non-state actors in unofficial relations between countries, with or without official encouragement. This sort of engagement constitutes a low-key means for Japanese private companies and businesses to support charitable projects and the work of Japanese non-governmental organisations abroad. I understand unofficial diplomacy as the promotion of friendly relations between peoples, independent of nation-states. It may be distinguished from the terms “people-to-people diplomacy” and “people's diplomacy” [kokumin gaikō], which by contrast, are more closely associated with national identity, and often used to describe the Chinese state's policy of sponsoring friendship groups, cultural missions and trade unions sympathetic to China in other countries. People's diplomacy also involves the promotionng of cultural ties through exchanges of students, artists, tourists and so forth, in order to keep open channels of communication between countries, and shape foreign public opinion and, indirectly, official policy.
3 Historian of modern Japan Peter O'Connor has discussed the difficulties inherent in evaluating the influence of informal diplomacy in his ‘Introduction’ to Japan Forum 13:1 (2001), pp. 1-13, p. 8.
4 For an account of the school's early years and its Puritan ethos, see Noriko Kawamura Ishii, American Women Missionaries at Kobe College, 1873-1909 (Routledge, 2004).
5 Takeda Kiyoko, Deai: sono hito, sono shisō (Kirisutokyō shimbunsha, 2009), p. 29.
6 Takeda, Deai, p. 30. This Chinese student is identified as 龔甫生. (Gong Fusheng) in an NHK ETV special series on the Cold War era (ETV tokushū shirīzu “Ampo to sono jidai”), first broadcast on 1 August 2010.
7 Upon returning to Japan, Takeda had been apprised of the persecution of prominent Christian social reformers and members of Churches that had not joined the official umbrella organisation Nippon Kirisuto Kyōdan (later, the United Church of Christ) in the summer of 1941. She was also aware of the intense pressures faced by Christian educators and Christian schools, where failure to observe rituals of Shintō worship came to be seen as the ‘litmus test of patriotism’ (John Breen, ‘Shinto and Christianity, A History of Conflict and Compromise’, in Mark R. Mullins (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in Japan (Brill, 2003), pp. 250-276, p. 263).
8 Through contact with the Indian YWCA and the wife of the Indian Finance Minister, a Christian, Takeda was invited to meet with Nehru at his New Delhi residence. His particular interest in Japan's postwar economic recovery led to several repeat invitations.
9 Okazaki Masafumi details the positive response to the proposal to establish a Christian University in ‘Chrysanthemum and Christianity: Education and Religion in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952‘, Pacific Historical Review (2010) 79:3, pp. 393-417, pp. 410-415.
10 While employed at ICU, Takeda attended WSCF Conferences in South Asia, WCC meetings and conferences in the United States, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and Australasia, and meetings of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia in the United States and Asia.
11 As director of ICU's Institute for Asian Cultural Studies between 1974 until 1983, Takeda oversaw the Institute's close engagement with Asian scholars, visits by Asian visiting researchers, and collaborative research projects between Japanese and Asian scholars.
12 John Howes, ‘Internationalism and Protestant Christianity in Japan before World War II’, The Japan Christian Review 62 (1996), pp. 54-66, p. 54.
13 John F. Howes, ‘Nitobe Inazo’, Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan Vol 6 (New York: Kodansha, 1983), pp. 21-22. Howes considers Nitobe to have been ‘one of the most cosmopolitan Japanese of his generation’ (p. 22).
14 Nitobe's multiple allegiances caused inner conflict: he struggled to reconcile his love of country with the denunciation of Japan's aggressive state policies by sections of American society formerly friendly towards Japan. His patriotism was neither chauvinistic nor did it denote unconditional loyalty to the emperor. Howes relates Nitobe's strenuous efforts to explain Japan's presence in Manchuria to his weakening health and death (‘Nitobe Inazo’, p. 22), and Davidann describes his plea for American understanding on Manchuria (Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 152-154). Neither Nitobe nor Tsurumi engaged in public relations work for the Japanese state; both were motivated by their patriotism and close feelings for Americans, and both were opposed to militarism, if not, colonialism per se.
15 Sasaki Yūsuke, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations and People-to-People Diplomacy: A Comparative Analysis of the Institute's Unofficial Diplomacy and Track II Diplomacy’, unpublished paper presented at the 16th Colloquium (25 July, 2009) of the Japanese Association for American Studies.
16 Yanaihara's Christian identity, love of country, and his involvement in the unofficial diplomacy of the IPR were closely imbricated. His faith and sense of public justice infused his patriotism and underpinned his political judgement to an unusual degree. For Yanaihara, faith (love of God) sanctioned critical judgement of the state; this was ‘the manifestation of true patriotism’ (Takashi Shogimen, ‘“Another Patriotism” in Early Shōwa Japan (1930–1945)‘, Journal of the History of Ideas 71:1 (January 2010), pp. 139-160, p. 156).
17 Takeda alludes to this connection when she notes that the term ‘intellectual exchange’ was coined by Nitobe, that the purpose of the Committee was to advance and develop Nitobe's spirit (seishin), and that those people who were behind it were all, directly or indirectly, Nitobe's students (see ‘Nichibei chiteki kōryū i'inkai no koro’, Tsuisō Matsumoto Junji (Kokusai Bunka Kaikan, 1990), p. 153).
18 Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941, p. 108.
19 Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Independent World (Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 132.
20 This literature includes essays by Elizabeth Dorn Lublin and Manako Ogawa on the World Christian Temperance Union ('Mary Clement Levitt, Japan, and the Transnationalism of the WCTU, 1886–1912', in Kimberley Jensen and Erika Kuhlman (eds), Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Republic of Letters Publishing, 2010), pp. 13-36; ‘“The White Ribbon League of Nations” Meets Japan: The Trans-Pacific Activism of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, 1906–1930', Diplomatic History 30: 1 (January 2007), pp. 21-50); and essays by Helen S. E. Parker, Karen Garner and Elizabeth A. Littell-Lamb on the YWCA ('Women, Christianity and Internationalism In Early Twentieth-Century Japan: Tsuda Ume, Caroline McDonald and the Founding of the Young Women's Christian Association in Japan', in Hiroko Tomida & Gordon Daniels (eds), Japanese women : emerging from subservience, 1868-1945 (Global Oriental, 2005), pp. 178-191; ‘Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947', Journal of World History 15:22 (June 2004), pp. 191-227; and ‘Localizing the Global: The YWCA Movement in China, 1899 to 1939', in Jensen and Kuhlman (eds), Women and Transnational Activism, pp. 63-87).
21 Personal communication, 23 January 2011.
22 It is instructive to contrast Takeda's approach to unofficial diplomacy with that of women like the Chinese-American Anna Chennault, whose extensive ‘inside track’ contact with American policy-makers and lobby groups Catherine Forslund has examined in Anna Chennault: Informal Diplomacy and Asian Relations (Scholarly Resources, 2002). Unlike Chennault, whom Forslund describes as an ‘ardent Cold-Warrior’ and skilled in the art of entertaining, Takeda neither forthrightly expressed an ideological posture in regards to Japan's relations in Asia nor cultivated a reputation as skilled hostess whose generous hospitality or mere presence could facilitate diplomatic engagement or the promotion of business or political relations (p. xvi).
23 This contrasts clearly with the posture of journalists, prominent businessmen and former politicians comprising the so-called “Japan Lobby”. Howard Schonberger describes the Lobby's campaigns to change American policy towards occupied Japan in ‘The Japan Lobby in American Diplomacy’, Pacific Historical Review 46:3 (August 1977), pp. 327-359.
24 Personal communication, 23 January 2011.
25 Takeda Kiyoko's writings on Ichikawa include chapters in Fujin kaihō no dōhyō: Nihon shisoshi ni miru sono keifu [Milestones of Women's Liberation: the lineage in Japanese intellectual history] (Domesu Shuppan, 1985); Sengo demokurashī no genryū [The origins of postwar democracy] (Iwanami shoten, 1995); and articles in Asahi Jānaru (17-24 August, 1984), pp. 36-40 and Japan Quarterly 31:4 (1984), pp. 410-415.
26 Ichikawa saw herself as part of a global community of women that existed alongside, and in complementarity with, women's membership of the nation-state, and referred to her internationalism as “kokumin gaikō” (people's diplomacy) (see Barbara Molony, ‘From “Mothers of Humanity” to “Assisting the Emperor”: Gendered Belonging in the Wartime Rhetoric of Japanese Feminist Ichikawa Fusae’, Pacific Historical Review 80:1 (February 2011), pp. 1-27, p. 20).
27 Takeda distinguishes this strong sense of her own Japanese identity from patriotism in ‘Kōkansen no jikan’, in Tsurumi Shunsuke, Katō Norihiro, and Kurokawa Sō, Nichibei Kōkansen (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2006), pp. 460-464, p. 460.
28 This sentiment was influenced by Niebuhr's political realism of her mentor, and by her mother's injunction that a landlord's household must care for its tenant farmers (Takeda Kiyoko, ‘Seikatsu to shisō‘, Shisō no kagaku (December 1995), pp. 4-20, p. 10 passim).
29 Takeda, Deai, pp. 101-102.
30 For an overview of the huge scale of United States government investment in the Philippines through its rehabilitation programme, see Vellut, J. L., ‘Japanese Reparations to the Philippines’, Asian Survey 3:10 (October 1963), pp. 496-506, p. 497.
31 Dingham, ‘The Diplomacy of Dependency: The Philippines and Peacemaking with Japan, 1945–52‘, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 67:2 (September 1986), p. 310.
32 John Price, ‘A Just Peace? The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty in Historical Perspective’ (JPRI Working Paper No. 78: June 2001) (accessed 28 February 2011).
33 Ron O'Grady, personal communication, 7 April 2009.
34 In 1970, 85 percent of the population of the Philippines was Roman Catholic; three percent affiliated themselves with the Protestant denomination; and fewer than four percent identified as Muslims (Elíseo A. De Guzman, ‘Population Composition’, in Mercedes B. Concepcion (ed.) Population of the Philippines (Population Institute, University of the Philippines, 1977), pp. 35-60, p. 57, citing the Census Report for 1970).
35 Grace Gorospe-Jamon and Mary Grace P. Mirandilla, ‘Religion and Politics: a look at the Philippine experience’, in Rodolfo C. Severino and Lorraine Carlos Salazar (eds), Whither the Philippines in the 21st Century? (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), pp. 100-126, p. 112.
36 Takeda Kiyoko, personal communication, 23 January 2011.
37 Takeda Kiyoko, ‘Supirichuaru na kawa no nagare’, Tokyo YWCA (591), 1 October 2005, p. 1.
38 In 1953, Korean students rebuffed Takeda's expression of apology and offer of material assistance (‘Korean Travel Diary, 1953 ‘in Frank Engel, Living in a World Community: An East Asian Experience of the World Student Christian Federation, 1931–1961, WSCF Asia-Pacific, 1994, pp. 71-72).
39 See Timothy Brook, ‘Toward Independence: Christianity in China Under the Japanese Occupation, 1937–1945‘, in Daniel H. Bays (ed.), Christianity in China From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 317-337.
40 Daniel H. Bays, ‘Leading Protestant Individuals’, in R. G. Tiedemann (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China (Brill, 2009), pp. 613-627, p. 617.
41 Bays (2009), p. 619.
42 He was general secretary of the YMCA for 16 years from 1916. Bays (2009), pp. 617-618.
43 Gao Wangzhi, ‘Y. T. Wu; A Christian Leader Under Communism’, in Bays (ed.) Christianity in China, pp. 338-352, p. 343.
44 Bays (2009), p. 877.
45 She had hoped to attend the World Conference of Christian Youth in Oslo, Norway, as a Japanese delegate by the Japan YWCA and YMCA in 1947 but had been denied travel permission by SCAP.
46 Elaine Sommers Rich, ‘Japan's World Council President, Kiyoko Takeda Cho’, The Christian Quarterly (Spring 1974), pp. 106-108.
47 ‘Watashi no naka no “Ajia”‘, p. 272.
48 The seats on the KML flight of Takeda and her travelling companions (three other Japanese delegates to the WSCF conference) were seized by Kuomintang officers fleeing from the advancing People's Liberation Army, and they had to wait ten days for seats on the next onward flight to Kandy (Takeda, Deai, pp. 94-95).
49 ‘Watashi no naka no Ajia’, p. 272.
50 For Takeda's account of her association with Ting Kuang-hsun, see Takeda, Deai, pp. 142-144.
51 Xu Guangping was a former student and later de facto wife of the famous writer, Lu Xun (1881-1936). A dialogue between Takeda and Xu about Lu Xun featured in the October 1956 issue of Sekai (see ‘Taidan: Ru Shun no koto nado’, Sekai 130 (October 1956), pp. 179-185).
52 China was not a signatory of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951. Neither the government of the People's Republic of China nor the government of the Republic of China was invited to the Peace Conference at which the Treaty.
53 Donald C. Hellmann, ‘Japan's Relations with Communist China’, Asian Survey 4: 10 (October 1964), pp. 1085-1092, p. 1085.
54 Ryozo Kurai describes the evolution of Sino-Japanese relations between 1955 and 1960 in ‘Present Status of Japan-Communist China Relations’, The Japan Annual of International Affairs 1 (1961), pp. 91-157.
55 For details of the deterioration of Sino-Japanese relations under Kishi Nobusuke, see Kurai, ‘Present Status of Japan-Communist China Relations’, pp. 93-99.
56 Hellman, ‘Japan's Relations with Communist China’, p. 1086.
57 Caroline Rose, Sino-Japanese Relations, Facing the past, looking to the future? (Routledge, 2005), p. 31.
58 See this link (accessed 1 March 2011).
59 Takeda Kiyoko, ‘Taheiyō no heiwa—Nichū kokkō kaifuku no ki ni omou—‘, Sekai 324 (November 1972), p. 94.
60 Takeda did not adduce any specific evidence of this, but may have been referring to the tendency of Japanese governments in the 1950s and 1960s to emulate American anti-China rhetoric and policy.
61 Takeda, ‘Taheiyō no heiwa—‘, p. 96.
62 For a list of ‘issues in Sino-Japanese relations’ (including official acts, statements, and meetings) between 1982 and 2002, see Caroline Rose, Sino-Japanese Relations, p. 3.
63 In the 1950s, to remind Japan of its past mistakes was a standard tactic of Chinese negotiators; the powerful implication of insincerity would put the Japanese side on the defensive and turn the discussion in their favour (Kazuo Ogura, ‘How the “Inscrutables” Negotiate with the “Inscrutables”‘, The China Quarterly 79 (1979), pp. 529-552, p. 533).
64 Akira Iriye, ‘Chinese-Japanese Relations, 1945–90‘, The China Quarterly 124 (December 1990), pp. 624-638, p. 635.
65 The resulting publication was a reader that contained detailed information about Japan's aggressive war in East Asia (Caroline Rose, ‘Sino-Japanese relations after Koizumi and the limits of ‘new era' diplomacy', in Christopher Dent, China, Japan and Regional Leadership in East Asia (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008), pp. 52-64, p. 62 (fn. 8)). This successful outcome was perhaps the result of the sustained effort of organised civil society actors without state interference. Other collaborations that receive state support, such as the China-Japan Joint History Committee have been less productive. — President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō agreed upon the research agenda in October 2006, but when the final report was released early in 2010, it was clear that the Committee was unable to resolve several key issues. See ‘Japan, China still at odds over Nanjing’, The Japan Times (1 February 2010).
66 Despite an apparent thaw in Sino-Japanese relations in 2006 and 2007 (Rose, 2008), the staging in September 2010 of anti-Japan protests at the detention of the Chinese skipper of a fishing boat that collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels near the long-contested Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on the 79th anniversary of the Mukden incident, suggest that “the history problem” still plagues diplomatic relations between Japan and China.
67 For a discussion of the constructive role of Japanese non-government organisations, including the Asian Network for History Education, in maintaining relations at the substate level, see Utpal Vyas, ‘Japan's international NGOs: a small but growing presence in Japan-China relations’, Japan Forum 22: 3-4 (2010), pp. 467-490.
68 Sōkeirei is the romanised transliteration of the Japanese correlate word for Soong Ching Ling. After the death of her husband Sun Yatsen, Soong Ching Ling dedicated herself to working for world peace and improving the welfare of Chinese children and youth. The China Soong Ching Fund was established in December 1985 to continue her work and, in addition to the Sōkeirei Japan Fund, independent organisations were established in her honour in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong. For further details on Soong Ching Ling, the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation and its global network, see this link(accessed 1 March 2011).
69 According to Kubota Hiroko, its board members are card-holding members of the Chinese Communist Party. (Interview with Kubota Hiroko, 24 January 2011, at the Hachioji offices of the Joint Japan-China Project Committee for the Sōkeirei Fund (Sōkeirei kikinkai Nitchū purojekuto i'inkai (JCC), Tokyo.)
70 Its core projects were continued by the JCC under the leadership of Kubota Hiroko, a scholar of Sun Yat-sen and Takeda's associate at SJF. The JCC added maternal health to educational support, and became a certified non-profit organisation in 2002. It operates in a more modest manner than SJF with the support of interested local citizens.
71 Utsunomiya Tokuma, an Liberal Democratic Diet member who supported the strengthening of Sino-Japanese relations, and led official delegations to China before normalisation, served as President of the SJF from its establishment until his death, and donated office facilities.
72 Interview with Kubota Hiroko, 24 January 2011.
73 Interview with Kubota Hiroko. ODA figures are detailed on a chronology of the JCC prepared by Kubota (in the author's possession).
74 For example, with support of electronics companies Toshiba and Sony, SJF arranged the installation of lighting and communication system in the Children's Science and Technology Pavilion at the Soong Ching Ling Children's Science Park in 1986. It also organised for Japanese experts in science education to be sent to China to oversee the development and implementation of practical science instruction.
75 The one exception was the Japanese Communist Party. Kubota states that the fact that the JCP was not involved encouraged other parties to engage with the SJF (Interview with Kubota Hiroko, 24 January 2011).
76 The themes of these sessions, edited versions of the lectures given at the first seven sessions, and Takeda's own questions about Chinese democracy, are compiled in Takeda Kiyoko, ‘Jo ni kaete’ in Takeda Kiyoko (ed.), Chūgoku no kirihiraku michi, Nihon yori miru (Keisō shobō, 1992).
77 Takeda Kiyoko, ‘Jo ni kaete’, p. i. For an account of Sun Yat-sen's many Japanese friends and Japanese support for Chinese Republicanism's and its struggle against Western imperialism, see Marius Jansen, The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
78 A plea issued in the course of an address on the emancipation of woman before approximately one thousand women at Kobe Prefectural Girls' School, in November 1924, when Sun Yat-sen delivered his famous “Greater Asianism” speech in which he urged Japan, as the most modernised East Asian country, to assist China as an older brother would a younger brother.
79 The anonymous author of a profile of Takeda Kiyoko in the May 1950 issue of Chūō kōron described her as the ‘first reporter on postwar India’ (p. 96). For examples of Takeda's journalistic writing about her early postwar travels, see her account of meeting with other Asian Christian youth in Sri Lanka in which she reflects on Asia's painful fight for independence, ‘Atarashī Ajia e no michi’ [The path towards the new Asia], Fujin kōron (May 1949); her essay on her interview with Nehru, ‘Indo no chichi: Nēru kaikenki’ [Record of Interview with Nehru, India's father], Sekai hyōron 4-5 (May 1949); and her encounter with the legacy of Japanese aggression in the Philippines, ‘Firippin ni nokotta sensō no kizuato’ [The scars of war in the Philippines], Fujin gahō 569 (February 1952). On her travels in the new China and meetings with Chinese Christians, see, for example, ‘Chūgoku kirisutokyō ni jiyū' [The freedom of Christianity in China], Mainichi shinbun (15 June 1956), and ‘Atarashï shakai ni jiritsu suru kyōkai' [Independent church in a new society], Fukuin to sekai (August 1956), pp. 35, 46-53.
80 Thomas Risse, ‘Transnational Actors and World Politics’, Handbook of International Relations (Sage Publications, 2002), pp. 255-274.
81 Richard Langhorne, ‘The Diplomacy of Nonstate Actors’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 16 (2005), pp. 331-339, p. 333.
82 See, for example, Langhorne, ‘The Diplomacy of Non-state Actors’.
83 See, for example, the works referred to in footnote 20 infra., none of which consider the role of such organisations and their individual members in unofficial diplomacy.
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