Agnes Alexander's Letter from Tokyo

The *Star of the West* of June 5, 1916, printed under the heading "The Glad Tidings in Japan" a letter from Agnes B. Alexander, then living in Tokyo.

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The editors first told how she had come there. When the war broke out on the first of August, 1914, Miss Alexander was in Switzerland. She had left her home in Honolulu the previous October and had been, in her own words, "a wanderer ever since, guided alone by Him." She had hoped to visit the Holy Land.

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Instead, on the twenty-first of August, she received in Geneva a Tablet from 'Abdu'l-Bahá telling her that it was now more advisable for her to go directly to Japan and to spread the fragrances of God there. Teaching the Cause, He wrote, was the greatest of all divine bestowals. "Still thou art perfectly free," He added. She set out for Japan.

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Her letter is dated Tokyo, March 10, 1916. Her weekly Friday Bahá'í meeting had just closed, and new souls came every week. One visitor that day had first heard of the Faith from a woman journalist who had spoken at the Y.M.C.A.; Agnes told him that this was Martha Root.

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"I do not seek the people out," she wrote, "but they continually come to me." Four university students who could not come on Fridays arranged to come on their one free afternoon. She lent one of them *Talks in Paris*, and he sent it back with a note quoting a line that had delighted him: "Strive that your actions day by day may be beautiful prayers."

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Books had been sent from America to be placed in libraries, and Fukuta San, whom she called the first Japanese Bahá'í in Japan, had placed some of them. She was reading *Some Answered Questions* aloud to Vasily Eroshenko, a blind young Russian, who said it ought to be translated into Russian and above all into Esperanto. She herself was going to speak at an Esperanto meeting in Yokohama.

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A well-known Japanese writer, who had taken up Esperanto after meeting Eroshenko, had published the twelve Bahá'í principles in a magazine, each given first in Esperanto and then in Japanese. The pastor of the one Unitarian church in Japan had invited her to speak there.

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In the same letter she wrote:

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> There is a rich vineyard to work in here in Japan, and many, many > workers might be laboring in it.

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Agnes Alexander gave much of the rest of her life to the Faith in Japan. In 1957 Shoghi Effendi appointed her a Hand of the Cause of God.

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*A retelling based on **Star of the West**, vol. 7, no. 5 (June 5, 1916), "The Glad Tidings in Japan." For the fuller account, see the original.*

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