172 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 37/1 (2010)

The fiftieth and one hundredth anniversaries of Protestant missions in Japan were accompanied by commemorative conferences and notable publications on Chris-tian missions in Japan. Perhaps the most significant work to be added to the corpus on the and hundred and fiftieth anniversary is Hamish Ion’s latest work American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan, 1859–73. The works produced on the former anniversaries provided largely uncritical views of the early missions using primarily Western sources. Ion’s book, however, is one of the first works which criti-cally evaluates this formative period by incorporating a variety of sources, includ-ing missionary biographies and correspondence, studies on the oyatoi (“foreign employees”), Japanese scholarship on Meiji Christianity, materials on diplomacy, and recent literature on women missionaries and education. Much of the literature on early Meiji Christianity has focused either on the foreign missionaries or their reviews | 173 denominations, or on the impact of the early Japanese converts on the development of Christianity in modern Japan. Though Ion deals primarily with the former, h