ABSTRACT
In the gold of a Japanese early October in 1887, with the orange of persimmons dotting the garden trees, Nannie Bett Gaines, age twenty-seven, arrived by a small, crowded Inland Sea boat in the old castle town of Hiroshima to take up the call from the Southern Methodist Board of Missions to teach in their newly developing girls' classes. In the port cities of Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki, where by the 1890s most foreigners perforce congregated, the hundreds of missionaries paid little heed to Westerners who were not missionaries. The young Japanese modernists, such as Mori Arinori and Fukuzawa Yukichi who propelled the steps of Meiji progress, labeled their time as an "era of civilization and enlightenment." The outpouring of western missionary zeal in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century coincided with a historic receptivity to new learning in Japan.
