6. MATSUYE
6.
MATSUYE
Amy arrived in Matsuye on May 1, 1893.
The town of about one hundred thousand people was buffered from the sea by a lagoon and an outer peninsula, although the gentle Sea of Japan was almost tideless anyway. Barclay Buxton and his family, though well intentioned, were unimpressed by Hudson Taylor’s philosophy of missionary work and chose to live like colonialists. They resided in one of the town’s largest houses, fully staffed by servants. The children had an English governess. They dressed in British clothing, and they ate potted meat and bread. They drank tea, but certainly not the weak Japanese variety.
“Must have proper tea,” sniffed the Reverend Mr. Buxton.
When Amy first arrived and took up residence in the Buxtons’ home, she, too, wore a proper English wardrobe. When the summer temperatures climbed into the nineties, she wore her cotton dresses. As fall approached and the air cooled, she wore warmer clothing like her blue serge dress. When the winter air had a bite in it, she added a light coat. And if January was especially bitter, her tweed coat and fur gloves were available.
Buxton had converted a Shinto temple into his Christian church. In spite of its promotion by the imperial government, Shintoism was not popular among the common Japanese. Buddhism was. But except for honoring the tradition of removing shoes, Buxton’s church was undefiled by “foreignizing elements.” But the charm of the Japanese way enthralled Amy. Their homes were all wood and paper with large sliding doors. Visible from all over the interior of the house was a spacious backyard, replete with dwarf trees, sparkling pools, and elaborate rock work. Cultivated all around Matsuye were trees of mulberry, cypress, yew, box, holly, myrtle, peach, pear, and orange. Above the town was a remnant of old feudal days: a walled castle of pagoda design in blues, greens, purples, and browns. The hills were forested with beeches, willows, chestnuts, and conifers. Matsuye was so beautiful, one was tempted to lead a life of contemplation.
MATSUYE WAS SO BEAUTIFUL, ONE WAS TEMPTED TO LEAD A LIFE OF CONTEMPLATION.
“Go forth,” Amy scolded herself one day.
She moved into another part of Matsuye to live with two other missionaries and began to venture out among the Japanese. She loved the Buxtons and regarded Barclay Buxton as a man of Christ, but she could not agree with his aloofness from the Japanese. She was enchanted by Japan. From the very first day, she wrote page after page of dialogue on thin rice paper for her family, occasionally intended for the newsletter they still called Scraps. Her letters were often adorned with exquisite drawings. Once, Amy sketched a kimonoed geisha girl strumming a stringed instrument like a guitar. The girl played only two notes but so gracefully it was mesmerizing. In many ways, Japanese customs proved the adage that less is more.
“But not so the elaborate complexity of their language,” admitted Amy. “It so stumps my ‘won’t-work’ brain I must resort to hiring an interpreter!”
The young woman Misaki San became her interpreter. Misaki was a Christian and very affectionate, but this use of an interpreter seemed a real defeat for Amy. She had been inspired by stories about how the great, irrepressible Dr. Livingstone had run off to isolate himself with the Africans until he was fluent in Bechuana. But, for some reason, hiring an interpreter seemed to Amy what God wanted her to do. One of the most difficult features of the Japanese vocabulary was the enormous number of respectful words—“honorifics”—indicating status. Their proper use was absolutely necessary. Misaki San guided Amy through the endless maze of honorifics.
To “go slowly” was in Japanese to “augustly leisurely go, deign to be.” Occasionally, the convoluted politeness could be amusing. Once, on her rice paper, after describing a woman’s silkworms, Amy began sketching them.
“You are deigning to do our honorable worms!” exclaimed the woman.
That summer her determination was tested. A man near her residence was said to be possessed by six “fox spirits.” Amy had Misaki San take her to the man. The family resisted. They were strict Buddhists. They had no need of this Englishwoman’s foreign superstition. Amy persisted. What was the harm? After all, the whole neighborhood had heard that the man was nearly dead. The man’s wife agonized then shrugged. She led Amy up a ladder to an attic room, where an old man was bound with cords to the crossbeams. Little mounds of powder smoldered on his chest, designed to drive off the spirits. Several had burned him badly. The Lord’s words came to Amy, “In my name shall they cast out devils.” The words could have been etched in stone. Amy felt enormous power.
She had Misaki San translate, “In the name of the Lord Jesus we will cast out the fox spirits!”
With that announcement, the man writhed and began to rage. He cursed and screamed and struggled to get loose. Oh, how he wanted to kill these intruders! This disturbed the man’s wife and the other Japanese so much that they quickly ushered Amy and her interpreter downstairs. Amy was mortified. What had she done? Had she humiliated her Savior? But suddenly she was seized by courage.
Calmly she asked Misaki San to translate to the man’s wife, “We are returning to our house to pray to our Lord Jesus, the Living God. Our God will conquer. Please let us know when the fox spirits are gone.”
And pray Amy did.
One hour later, a man arrived at the house. With a smile that seemed a mile wide, Misaki San said, “He says the old man is well. The fox spirits are gone.”
Hallelujah!
Amy had to contain herself:
I think I was taken to that upper room…to learn in such a way that I could never forget, that nothing was impossible to the God of the Impossible…[and when a man] was saved from the strong man’s house, by a Stronger than he, my heart’s word would always be Joseph’s to the Pharaoh: “It is not of me.”1
When Amy and Misaki San visited the house, the old man was tranquil. In complete control again, he presented Amy with a branch of pomegranate in flower. Did the old man know this orange-red was the hue of the fox? Perhaps not, but Japan seemed to flower for Amy now. Japan was a bouquet: blossoms of cherry, plum, azalea, peony, lotus, and yet to come were the chrysanthemums.
Because Amy had a substantial history with mill girls back in Ireland, she decided to approach the factory girls of Matsuye. Boys taunted her as she strolled the poorer part of Matsuye to invite girls to a meeting. “What is the foreign devil doing here?” jeered the youths. Will the girls come? wondered Amy. They toiled from five o’clock in the morning until six at night, with one day off every ten. To her astonishment, she drew eighty girls to a meeting! They were hungry for something different; she gave them Christ.
BECAUSE AMY HAD A SUBSTANTIAL HISTORY WITH MILL GIRLS BACK IN IRELAND, SHE DECIDED TO APPROACH THE FACTORY GIRLS OF MATSUYE.
In August, Amy went up into the mountains. The missionaries were holding a consecration meeting at Mount Arima. Amy needed such a meeting. She had met a young Christian man who did not disguise his matrimonial interests in her. It was not the first time for Amy. After all, she was literate and perky and not homely at all. A few serious men had eyed her as a wife. But somehow she did not feel the need for a husband. She consoled herself with words of Thomas à Kempis: “True peace of heart can be found only by resisting the passions, not by yielding to them.” At Arima she slipped inside a cave to pray for many hours. Years later she recalled:
The devil kept on whispering, “It’s all right now, but what about afterwards? You are going to be very lonely.” And he painted pictures of loneliness—I can see them still. And I turned to my God in a kind of desperation and said, “Lord, what can I do? How can I go on to the end?” And He said, “None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate.”2
Newly consecrated, Amy returned to Matsuye determined to evangelize. She was more and more uncomfortable remaining so English. She began to eat more of the Japanese food. At first it was repugnant to her. Much of what they ate was raw fish; various, unidentified eggs; seaweed; sea slugs; and a very challenging-to-the-palate paste of fish. Nevertheless, Amy persisted. It was not all alien. Rice and chicken seemed dear old friends after eating a slurry that reeked of too-ripe fish.
Her English clothing began to bother her, too. One late fall day dawned unseasonably cold, and Amy wore her tweed coat and fur gloves. That morning, through her translator, Misaki San, Amy explained the Gospel to an old lady who was very ill:
So I spoke and Misaki San translated, and our hearts prayed most earnestly. “Lord Jesus, help her. O help her to understand and open her heart to Thee now.”
She seemed to be just about to turn to Him in faith when she suddenly noticed my hands.…“What are these?” she asked, stretching out her hand and touching mine.
She was old and ill and easily distracted.…I went home, took off my English clothes, put on my Japanese kimono, and never again, I trust, risked so very much for the sake of so little.…3
The color of Amy’s kimono was, of course, blue. The elegant dress was trimmed in green, and down the left lapel she sewed in Japanese symbols “God is Love.”
In November, the month of the chrysanthemums, she and Misaki San visited from house to house, a venture that steeled the nerves. One could never be sure of a warm reception. Once, an old lady stunned Amy by saying, “You have come here all alone, and we understand why very well.”4 It made Amy’s heart sing; the old lady, so unreadable, suddenly revealed herself as a sage!
Another time, she and Misaki San virtually barged in on a man who was in his Buddhist devotions. Yet he was polite. After all, this honorable young woman was dressed as a Japanese. She was said to eat raw fish and sea slugs, too. But he was cautious.
“If what you say is true,” he said to Amy after she presented the Good News, “then you are an angel from heaven to us. But that is all preaching. Can you show us you live in Christ?”
So there was the challenge for evangelizing: Could the evangelist show that she was living in Christ? She became less and less privileged, more and more like the common Japanese. She traveled in third class. She stayed in their hotels, sleeping on the floor in their communal bedrooms under blankets. This lifestyle obligated her to a great loss of privacy. Emboldened by her submission to their ways, many people on the street stared at her. They would even try to touch her. It was innocent enough. “No oil?” said one woman after testing Amy’s hair. “Is that why it is so frizzy?” The Japanese loved to bathe communally, virtually boiling themselves in large tubs.
SHE BECAME LESS AND LESS PRIVILEGED, MORE AND MORE LIKE THE COMMON JAPANESE.
“That I refuse to do,” Amy told Misaki San.
Each time before she left Matsuye, Amy prayed fervently for the Lord to guide her. In November, she decided to visit the village of Hirose up in the nearby hills. On her first venture, she converted a young woman, a silk weaver. By this time, Amy had learned that converts in Japan were not ostracized as they were in some other countries. If a young woman was converted, she could still remain with her family. In December, Amy saved two more in Hirose. Two weeks later, four were saved, the last on Amy’s twenty-sixth birthday, December 16, 1893.
In January 1894, Amy converted eight on a trip to Hirose. By this time, all the missionaries in Matsuye were praying with her. It had escaped no one’s attention that, on each trip, the number of converts doubled. But the miraculous expansion soon ended. Perhaps the missionaries assumed too much. Or perhaps it was Amy’s health. By January, she was suffering agonizing headaches. In fact, during the conversion of the eight, she wrote her mother, she could scarcely think from the pain. After she returned to Matsuye she was in bed for a week. Sometimes her eyes refused to see!
“‘Japanese head,’” pronounced Mr. Buxton.
“What is ‘Japanese head’?” asked Amy in alarm.
“I don’t think anyone really knows,” he said in a puzzled voice, then added brightly, “but it’s not permanent. That is, if you leave Japan.”
“Leave Japan!”
“Don’t be upset, Miss Carmichael. Perhaps it will go away on its own,” he said unconvincingly.
Amy was depressed. She had given up on the Japanese language. She recorded with exasperation in her notes that the translation for the English expression “I like fine weather better than wet” was constructed in Japanese as “rain of coming down bad honorable weather than even good honorable weather of days of side good is.”5 How could she ever learn it? And now she had “Japanese head,” a malady untreatable except by flight!
In May, Barclay Buxton suggested sending Amy to a China Inland Mission doctor in Shanghai. Perhaps the doctor there could help Amy. But Amy resisted. She had been in Japan only one year. A worried Mr. Buxton left Amy to her own devices when he departed Japan to take his family on leave. Almost immediately, Amy heard that the missionary in Imaichi was ill and needed assistance. She rushed to help. Imaichi was a village north of Tokyo on the other side of the great island of Honshu. Perhaps the different climate would improve her health. Amy decided to travel by ship. On board, a gust off the Pacific Ocean whipped the umbrella from her weak hands into the waves. She finally arrived in Imaichi but in worse shape than the missionary she had come to replace:
On Sunday I collapsed…a terrible comedown, for I always declared nothing could make me faint.…But this time over I went and before I came back all the humiliating attentions attendant upon such departures had been showered upon me…and I find myself environed by wet towels, doleful faces, and a general sense of blurs.…This Imaichi work ended Japan for me.…6
When she was well enough again to travel, she returned to Matsuye, aware that now she must go to China. She had the joy of attending the baptism of some of her converts before she left. But that entailed posing in a photograph with them, which she hated because she did not like her own image. Her dislike seemed almost pathological, but it was a manifestation not of vanity but humility. How could she subdue the self while posing vainly for pictures?
“Must I be embalmed in this way?” she grumbled to herself but pursed her lips into a weak smile for the photographer. After all, this was something her converts wanted. No one needed to know that later on she would scratch her image out of her copy of the photograph! Nor did they know their catechist had a splitting headache. She did indeed need a change of scene.
In the meantime, she lamented her outcome in Japan:
WILL NOT THE END EXPLAIN
The crossed endeavour, earnest purpose foiled,
The strange bewilderment of good work spoiled,
The clinging weariness, the inward strain,
Will not the End explain?7
In July, she bought a round-trip ticket and sailed for Shanghai. The parting was painful. Everyone pretended she would be back in six weeks. But who believed it? Amy felt as tragically temporary as a butterfly. On board, she opened a note from Misaki San. “I know you will miss me,” Misaki San wrote bluntly, “but Christ is sitting by you now, so please talk with Him to forget me.”8 It was a brave note, but Amy knew that Misaki loved her like a sister and never wanted her to forget her.
The doctor in Shanghai recommended that Amy go to Chefoo in northeast China. His reason was that Chefoo was not only cooler but had a dry winter. But suitable accommodations at Chefoo didn’t materialize. Meanwhile, Amy had an overwhelming desire to go to Ceylon! Was such a detour possible? She prayed that this was not God’s will. People would think her erratic wanderings those of a madwoman. She went to the senior missionary in Shanghai, William Cooper. He did not discourage her at all but prayed with her. But her doubts remained.
AMY HAD AN OVERWHELMING DESIRE TO GO TO CEYLON! PEOPLE WOULD THINK HER ERRATIC WANDERINGS THOSE OF A MADWOMAN.
What will people say? How strange it will look! Nobody will understand. And then home thoughts that I cannot write down—fears as to unsettlement of all your minds. Then like a swarm of mosquitoes the unkind misjudging remarks that many would make, and then, hardest of all, again and again fears about those nearest and dearest. Through them all came calmingly the assurance that, as to what hurt most, He would take care of that, and as to other, one must be content to be misjudged.9
Amy wrote to a very young missionary friend at the mission the Lieschings ran in Ceylon. In the meantime, she discovered that passage to Ceylon was actually cheaper than traveling to Chefoo. That startling fact was a great relief to her. At least the trip didn’t seem so crazy. Psalm 77:19 expressed her feeling so perfectly that she wrote it in the flyleaf of her Bible: “Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.” She wouldn’t wait for a response. On July 28, she was aboard ship and on her way to Ceylon.
“And only heaven is sweeter than to walk with Christ at midnight over moonless seas,”10 she wrote in her Bible.
Her health was still shaky. Battling a fever, she arrived in Colombo on August 17. Her young friend was there to meet her. Amy found to her utter amazement that the Lieschings had both succumbed to malaria. They were dead! The three rudderless young women remaining in the mission prayed fervently for help. The date they had beseeched God for a leader was July 14.
Amy gasped, “Why, I had my overpowering urge to go to Ceylon just after that!”
Though as a green missionary she scarcely regarded herself as a leader, Amy went happily to the mission, pushing aside the worry that she was not likely to recover her health in a malarial jungle. Ceylon was ancient like Japan but less populated. Although local cultivation had driven elephants and tigers back into the deeper jungle, leopards had a nasty habit of adapting to civilization. Snakes, too, stubbornly abounded. Amy chose to see the rose among the thorns:
There, in the bright sunshine like a bit of blue flame among white flowers, the tiny chirping thing [a hummingbird] flitted to and fro. Now poising itself on a spray of shining blossom, diving its curved beak deep into each fragrant flower, never marring a petal, now fluttering in and out of the bush on which they grow, its clear electric tinting showing well against the green, and now for a moment motionless, half hidden in the whiteness, a little living jewel in a snowdrift of white flowers.…11
The Ceylonese people near the mission practiced Buddhism and spoke Sinhalese. The three young missionary women were of a mixed descent called “Burgher.” Their ancestors were both Dutch and Ceylonese. Of course, the young women were perfectly fluent in Sinhalese. The tenor of their lives was revealed to Amy one day when a man barged into the mission house. He was the husband of a woman who had recently been converted. He waved a murderous-looking machete. Two of the young women knelt on the floor, closed their eyes, and prayed. Amy followed suit. What faith! At last she could not resist. She had to steal a glance. There he still stood—with the machete overhead!
THERE HE STILL STOOD—WITH THE MACHETE OVERHEAD!
She squeezed her eyes closed and implored God, “Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast.”
When Amy next looked up, the man was gone!
Only Christ gave her the courage to seek out such volatile people:
You go to a hut and find nobody in, you go to the next and find nobody wants you, you go to the next and find an old woman who says yes, you may talk if you like, and she listens in an aimless sort of way and perhaps one or two more drift in, and you go on, a prayer behind each sentence…sometimes, just when you think you have got a bit of the glorious Truth wedged in, when the heart seems touched by the wonderful story of Calvary, some little triviality comes up, and some question about pigs or eggs sends you back to the very beginning. But there are bright bits, too, times when a flash of Heaven’s own sunshine lights up the darkness of the darkest mud hut, and one such moment is worth a lifetime’s plod.…12
Letters from outside unsettled her. First, there were letters from Misaki San, whose courage had broken down. How she missed Amy! It was heartbreaking to read her letters. Then there was a letter from Barclay Buxton. Imagine his shock to hear that Amy had left Japan while he was on leave! “What a void you left!” he lamented. Mr. Buxton’s consternation paled in comparison to the sentiments expressed in a letter she received from Robert Wilson. He was much disturbed by Amy’s detour to Ceylon. After all, she was a missionary of the Keswick Mission Committee. He warned her not to officially join any mission house. This upset Amy more than anything. And she wrote him and her mother again that this effort in Ceylon was of Him. She had only followed His calling.
When Amy learned that Eva—her closest sister—was preparing to be a missionary in South Africa, she thought aloud, “Have her practice balancing herself on a pinpoint. It will be most useful!”
She wrote that very advice to Eva.
In all the muddle of activity—some upsetting, some uplifting—Amy had scarcely noticed how much her health had improved. But hadn’t she been “Sent of the King” as she recorded in the flyleaf of her Bible? She saw a doctor. He warned her that under no circumstances should she try to return to Japan. She had just about resolved to write Matsuye to request that the rest of her belongings be sent to Heneratgoda, although it broke her heart to think of how Misaki San would receive the news. Perhaps the D.O.M. didn’t want her to officially attach herself with this mission, but Amy was quite pleased with Ceylon. Even the Sinhalese language was coming to her. Surely the Lord wanted her there.
So the letter that she received November 27, 1894, hit her very hard.