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Book Review: Bauern-Sensei: The Story of Susan Bauernfeind Pioneer Missionary to Japan

Bauern-Sensei: The Story of Susan Bauernfeind Pioneer Missionary to Japan By Lowell Messerschmidt Lima, OH: Fairway Press 1991, 153 pp., cloth, no price Reviewed by Charles H Germany It was a joy to read this informative and well-organized small biography of Susan Bauernfeind, one of the early, towering missionaries to Japan (18901945). It is well designed for clergy, lay readers, and students of mission. Bauern Sensei (Bauern-honorable "Born Before," as her long name was adapted by the Japanese) was the first single woman missionary sent overseas by the former Evangelical Church (which in 1946 became part of the Evangelical United Brethren Church and in 1968 of The United Methodist Church). The book provides a comprehensive picture of a gifted early missionary to Japan. The productive service of this remarkable woman included the interwoven lines of ground-breaking industrial ministry in the spinning mills, the organizing of the Koishikawa Hakusan and other churches, the founding of the early and influential Aisenryo Orphanage, the founding of a Bible Women's Training School, the organizing of Women's Societies, leading student Bible classes, joining in ministry with persons afflicted with leprosy, and temperance work. Her broad vision of ministry was never bound by the community of the church and Christian institutions, but continually looked beyond to unreached arenas or need in Japanese society. The book provides interesting and informative insight into Japan at the tum of the century, during the Meiji, Taisho, and into the Showa eras. Place is given to the social conditions surrounding orphans, industrial workers, wives and women, soldiers and their families in the rise of militarism, and the poor. The reader is introduced to Japan's struggle for its own identity in the midst of forces of Westernization, a theme persistently relevant to Japanese social reality to this day. The one shortcoming of the book is that in its concentration on presenting Susan Bauernfeind and the Japan mission of the Evangelical Church with as much detail as possible in a small biography, it fails to place adequately her life, her endeavors, and her church within the larger context of Japanese Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity of her time. One misses the wider drama of the struggle of Japan's Christian community with emerging militarism in the 1930s and 194Os, and of the agonizing within the missionary community as to whether one stays or leaves in the shadows of the clouds of war.