The Glad Tidings in Japan: Agnes Alexander Writes from Tokyo

In Issue 5 of Volume 7 of the *Star of the West,* dated the fifth of June, 1916, the editors printed a letter from Agnes B. Alexander, then five years into her residence in Tokyo. An early call in the *Star of the West* — *American Bahá'ís are needed in Japan* — had borne, by Alexander's arrival in 1914, its first real fruit. She was the first American Bahá'í to settle in the country.

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The letter she sent to Chicago in 1916 reported on the slow, patient work of the previous spring.

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She had been holding informal meetings with Japanese university students who had heard of the Bahá'í teachings and come to her small Tokyo rooms for conversation. She had been placing copies of Bahá'í books in the libraries of universities and educational institutions in Tokyo and Yokohama, so that the seekers of the next generation might find on their library shelves what their own elders had not yet provided.

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She had also been teaching through the Esperanto societies of Tokyo. Esperanto — Dr. Zamenhof's constructed international language — was, in 1916, the great hope of internationalist movements across the world; 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself had encouraged its study as a step toward the auxiliary universal language He had foretold. Japanese intellectuals interested in Esperanto were often interested also in the broader vision of human unity underneath it. Alexander was using the Esperanto societies as a natural bridge into conversations about the Bahá'í Cause.

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> University students, library placements, and Esperanto > activities — the glad tidings in Japan.

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The work was small. The Tokyo Bahá'í community in 1916 numbered only a handful. But Alexander was, by her presence and patience, holding open a door that had only first been knocked on six years earlier. She would remain in Japan, with intervals of travel, for the next forty years. By the time she finally returned home, in the late 1960s, she had been named a Hand of the Cause by Shoghi Effendi and had become the indispensable figure in the Faith's establishment across the whole of East Asia.

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The Star of the West letter of 1916 was an early dispatch from that long campaign. It carried, into the American Bahá'í parlours of Boston and Chicago and Washington, the sound of one woman in a Tokyo apartment patiently making the world smaller.

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