PBA Galleries

Includes:

• Unsigned Manuscript. “How Japan was opened for the gospel”. 14pp. 5 x 8.5” With original mailing envelope from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, addressed to Rev. Daniel Wight, Natick, Mass. Undated, ca. 1890 (1888 stamp on the envelope and reference in text to 9 missionary stations in Japan in 1890.
• Marion R. Draper. Autograph Letter Signed. Kagoshima, Japan, Feb. 12, 1915. 7pp. To an American woman friend.

The unsigned manuscript, written in an aged hand, details Christian missionary efforts in Japan, from medieval “heathenism” through the Perry’s “opening” of the country and the influx of American missionaries – including the parents of Marion Romer Draper, who were working with the blind in Tokyo and Yokohama, while she, unmarried and 24, was “buried in the depths of the interior”, teaching Sunday School at a seaside city in southernmost Japan.

A little bored, awed by the “beautiful sight” of 24 Japanese warships anchored in the harbor while lamenting the “awful” World War of “cruelty and folly” – in which Japan was allied with Britain against Germany – Draper sympathized both with “troubled” British expatriates who had no current news of European battles and “despairing” Germans who were treated as enemy aliens Herself “charmed” by Japanese culture and a “social ideal and tradition that is so entirely different” from her own,  Draper remained in Japan for 25 years, later becoming  English translator of a famed Christian Socialist-Pacifist  imprisoned by his country’s militarists.