ABSTRACT
Frank Coaldrake arrived in Japan on June 11, 1947. He was thirty-five years of age. The only surviving photograph of his first day in Japan shows a grimly and clerically garbed Frank Coaldrake flanked by Australian military personnel, sitting below a sculpture of the seated Buddha. This is an appropriate metaphor for Frank Coaldrake's first period of two and a half years in Japan, a priest caught between the Allied Occupation forces on the one hand and the apparently immovable strength of traditional Japanese beliefs and institutions on the other. The first document in this chapter, a letter written on the ship Merkur just three days before his arrival in Japan, provides information about the final preparations for the mission in Japan and an assessment of his studies in Sydney. The chapter covers Frank Coaldrake's epic first years in Japan. It was “epic” in the classical sense of an odyssey.
