Agnes Alexander's Call to Japan

When war broke out at the beginning of August 1914, Agnes B. Alexander, a Bahá'í from Honolulu, was in Switzerland. She had left her home 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 and see 'Abdu'l-Bahá. On the twenty-first of August, in Geneva, she received a Tablet from Him, dated the fourth of August at Mount Carmel:

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> It is now more advisable for thee to depart directly to Japan > and while there be engaged in the diffusion of the fragrances > of God. . . .

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Teaching the Cause, the Tablet continued, was today the greatest of all divine bestowals. He hoped she might be "like unto a realm-conquering army and a farmer." And He left the choice with her: "Therefore, thy voyage to Japan is preferred to everything else. Still thou art perfectly free."

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On receiving it she set out for Japan. In its issue of June 5, 1916, under the heading "The Glad Tidings in Japan," the *Star of the West* printed the Tablet together with a letter she had written from Tokyo on the tenth of March, 1916.

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Her letter described a weekly Friday Bahá'í meeting. "Every week new souls come and hear the Message," she wrote. One newcomer said he had heard of the Faith once before, from a journalist lady who had spoken at the Y.M.C.A.; she told him it was Martha Root. "I do not seek the people out, but they continually come to me." Four university students who could not come on Fridays were coming on their only free afternoon.

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She wrote of Fukuta San, "the first Japanese Bahai in Japan," who had placed Bahá'í books in a library near his home. She was reading *Some Answered Questions* aloud to Mr. Eroshenko, a blind young Russian. A Japanese magazine, *New Tide*, had printed the twelve Bahá'í principles, each given first in Esperanto and then in Japanese.

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She quoted, in his own translation, a letter Fukuta San had written to a believer in India. The meeting, he said, had been held on Fridays for nearly a year and a half:

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> As the spring rain comes softly and noiselessly, but its > message is so great that all the trees and grasses become > awakened from their wintery sleeping and restore their > freshness, so there have come here the messengers sent by him > to awake us.

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That afternoon she was going to Yokohama to speak at a public Esperanto meeting, reading some of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words on Esperanto that she had translated with Mr. Eroshenko's help. "Of course, I shall be the only lady and perhaps foreigner," she wrote, "but I go for his sake."

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The same pages carried a note from one of the Japanese young men who attended her gatherings, and the news that Dr. and Mrs. Augur of Hawaii had also gone to Japan to spread the Bahá'í teachings.

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

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