The Faith Reaches Japan: Tokyo and the First Believers

In the spring 1915 issue of the *Star of the West* the American Bahá'í readership received the first detailed report of the small but significant entry of the Faith into Japan — through the patient teaching work of Agnes B. Alexander, the first American believer to take up permanent residence in Tokyo as a teacher of the Cause.

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Agnes Alexander, the *Star's* report records, had come to Tokyo in 1914 in fulfilment of a teaching commission given to her in person by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. She was a Hawaiian-born American believer of Scottish descent. She had embraced the Faith in Rome in 1900 and had been one of the first Americans, in subsequent years, to recognise the Cause as having a destiny in the Pacific basin.

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The Master, when she had visited Him at 'Akká in 1913, had spoken to her of Japan. He had told her, in language she preserved verbatim in her own letters, that *the Cause of God will become established in Japan, and the small beginnings will in time become great.* He had asked her whether she would consider undertaking the small beginning. She had accepted.

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She arrived in Tokyo with no Japanese, a small reading knowledge of Esperanto, and a strong letter of introduction to several individuals in the Tokyo educational community. She rented a small apartment in the Bunkyo district. She began, almost immediately, the patient work of being present.

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The *Star's* report describes the first small Tokyo gatherings. They were held in Agnes Alexander's apartment. Four or five Japanese inquirers would attend on most evenings. The conversation was conducted with the help of a translator who bridged Japanese, English, and the small Esperanto that several of the early Japanese inquirers had themselves learned in their interest in international languages.

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Within a year, the first Japanese declarations of belief had taken place. The names of those first Japanese Bahá'ís — Mr. Yamamoto, Mr. Fukuta, Miss Otsuka — were printed in the *Star* with the brief biographical notes that the correspondent could supply. Each of the new believers was a person of educated background — a teacher, a journalist, a student. Each was a person who had been preparing, in the particular form of his or her own intellectual life, for the vocabulary of the new Faith.

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The Master, on hearing of the first declarations, sent a brief Tablet to the new Tokyo believers welcoming them into the world community of the Faith. The Tablet — published by the *Star* in a subsequent issue — addressed them in their distinct national identity and gave them a particular charge regarding the spread of the Cause through the Pacific islands.

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Agnes Alexander would remain in Japan for most of the next sixty years. The small Tokyo community whose first gatherings the *Star* had reported in 1915 would, in the decades that followed, become the cradle of the Japanese Bahá'í community that today numbers in the thousands.

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