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Appendix IV
From a Travel Dairy
By Frank
Engel
The BOAC Argonaut
put down on the big US military airstrip
on Okinawa. As mere foreign civilians, we are only allowed to
walk as far as the cafe. A Japanese waitress brought afternoon tea, and I found
myself endeavoring to converse with fellow passengers, an Indonesian couple.
They had learnt Japanese during the occupation of Indonesia and offered to
speak in that language, but had to resort to broken English to cope with an
ignorant Australian. I glimpsed how close we had been to Japanese becoming the lingua
franca of Eastern Asia and Australia! They spoke of the
sufferings of their country under the Japanese and I sensed how Japan has united us with
Asia in suffering. And then "Mrs. Java" said,
"But, if it had not been for the Japanese, our country would not have
become free."
Later, in Tokyo, I mentioned this
to Kiyo Takeda of the Japanese SCM as we talked about the anti-Japanese feeling
in East Asia and Australasia. She had been
expressing sorrow at the injury and destruction caused by her country. Now she
commented, "Somewhere Reinhold Niebuhr talks of good coming riding on an
evil horse".
These two
impressions of that strange unity which Japan had given us in
this part of the world (the unity of common hatred) and of good coming on the
back of evil was intensified in Korea. And so I found
myself thinking and speaking much of Christian forgiveness - God's forgiveness
of us and our responsibility to forgive one another - and seeing this, in a new
way, as the great creative factor in the whole area. And yet how little Asia knows of Christ
the Reconciler; and how little Australian Christians are committed to the sheer
hard work and sacrifice of preaching the good news and carrying on the ministry
of reconciliation.
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On the other hand,
I slowly became aware that God works whether His Church does or not. But the
less it works, then the longer it is that Dutch, Japanese, French or British
resist His purpose, and the more evil is the horse on which good comes riding
at last. And, although the horse departs riderless, the germs of new evils in
its hoof – marks.
There is a
tremendous Christian responsibility and opportunity. Asia today - and there is
not a lifetime in which to think about acting. Nowhere is this truer than in Korea and Japan.
Bitterness and Healing
When I spoke with Kiyo
Takeda and Makoto Fujita of the legacy of hatred against the Japanese and
especially of that left in Korea by 35 years of
occupation, she asked me to say to Korean students "Japanese Christian
students are very sorry for the past bad relationships between our two
countries and hope for a better one in future. We should like to do something
to help you at the present time. Would you please tell us in what ways we might
help?" She also asked whether I could take a parcel of books from her own
congregation to a church in Pusan. So the next
morning I flew to Korea with a message and
a parcel.
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