Anglican Episcopal Church of Japan

This entry makes use of Japanese characters and will require Japanese language support to be installed on your computer in order to avoid the characters being replaced by question marks, or blanked out.

The Anglican Episcopal Church of Japan (日本聖公会 Nippon Sei Kō Kai, or NSKK), is a division of the Anglican Church, falling within the Province of Japan (日本管区 Nippon Kanku) of the Anglican Communion. It currently has a congregation of some 58,000.

History

The church was founded in 1859, with the arrivals of the first missionaries of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA in the country, closely followed by missionaries from the Anglican Church in England and Canada. It was legally established as a Church in 1887, during the Meiji era and the first Japanese bishops were consecrated in 1923. The Church was accepted as an official province of the Anglican Church in 1930.

World War II forced the church to go underground, although it remained active and returned to prominence after the war, serving the spiritual needs of members of the occupying forces. Since 1978 it has been financially self-supporting and continues to exchange missionaries with overseas partner churches. All the current bishops and other church leaders are Japanese, and the current Primate of the NSKK is the The Most Reverend Nathaniel Makoto Uematsu, the Bishop of the Diocese of Hokkaidō

The church is the third largest Christian community in the country, after the Roman Catholic Church and the United Church of Christ.

The first Japanese translation of the Anglican prayer book was published in 1959, to commemorate the centenary of Anglican missionary work in Japan, and the latest edition of the hymn book, published in 2006, contains over 600 hymns. Among these are original Japanese hymns, especially written for the Church, translations of common Anglican hymns, as well as original language versions. The latest edition of the Japanese-language Bible (経典 Kyouten) was also published in 2006, under the auspices of the Japan Bible Society and the Church's Common Bible Translation Executive Committee.

Diocese

The Church is widely distributed within Japan, with a total of 11 diocese, serving 315 parishes in and around 46 cities. The diocese cover almost all of Japan, from Hokkaidō in the north, to Okinawa in the south.

The 11 dioceses of the Nippon Sei Kō Kai, and the major cities each serves are:

• Hokkaidō (北海道) - Hokkaido
• Tōhoku (東北 - Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Akita, Yamagata, Fukushima
• Kita-Kanto (北関東 north-eastern Japan) - Ibaragi, Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama
• Tōkyō (東京)
• Yokohama (横浜) - Kanagawa, Chiba, Shizuoka, Yamanashi
• Chūbu (中部 south-west of Tōkyō) - Niigata, Nagano, Gifu, Aichi
• Kyōto (京都) - Kyōto, Toyama, Ishikawa, Fukui, Shiga, Mie, Nara, Wakayama
• Ōsaka (大阪) - Ōsaka, Hyogo
• Kōbe (神戸) - Okayama, Hiroshima, Tottori, Shimane, Yamaguchi, Shikoku
• Kyushu (九州) - Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, Oita
• Okinawa (沖縄) - Okinawa City

Anglican Youth Network in Japan

In 1992, first the Nippon Sei Kō Kai Youth Assembly was held in Izu, Shizuoka Prefecture and was attended by one hundred members of the NSKK youth, representing all the dioceses of Japan. The program lasted for four days and three nights and discussed such topics as worship, the history of the NSKK, Church music, discrimination, Asia, environmental issues, the death penalty, Church schools and children.

This gathering led to the formation of the Anglican Youth Network of Japan (AYN-J), based in the Diocese of Kyōto, with Alice Kanae Tanaka (アリス叶え田中) serving as its founder-president. Its purpose was to encourage NSKK youth solidarity at a national level.

In 1995, a strong earthquake struck the Hanshin-Awaji area, killing about 5,000 people. The AYN-J provided volunteers, assisting victims of the earthquake.

In 1996, the second NSKK Youth Assembly was held in Kobe, with 150 young people attending. The main speaker was Father Hiroshi Kanda from the Takatori Catholic Church. The conference discussed what the church's role should be in society, as well ongoing relief support for earthquake victims, worship, education at church, the death penalty, Okinawa, environmental issues, Asia, sexuality, discrimination, church music, and life and death in Christianity.

In 1997, the AYN-J moved to a permanent home at the Nagoya Youth Center and began printing and distributing the bi-annual NSKK Youth Network News, in order to promote the exchange of NSKK youth information at a national level. An Internet mailing list service and a "Youth Activity Material Postal Request Service" were also established, in order to exchange information at an ecumenical and international level. The Youth Facilitator Training Program was also created, focusing on the idea that the center of youth activity is at local church and community level.

The head office's main task is supporting NSKK youth activity in all parts of Japan through networking and it receives funding from the NSKK General Synod through the NSKK Provincial Youth Supporting Committee.

Schools

A total of 18 private schools, colleges and theological colleges are run by the various diocese. These are all currently located within the Kanto and Kansai areas, with the majority of the schools being located in Tōkyō and Ōsaka. They cover the entire educational spectrum, including elementary-, middle- and high school, as well as several post-graduate theology colleges and the St. Barnabas Medical School.

External Links

• Homepage of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai
• NSKK Diocese of Tōkyō (English) - with a full list of Tōkyō parishes
• St Alban's Church, Tōkyō (an English-language church)
• NSKK Newsletter, on anglicancommunion.org