Japanese Buddhist denominations launched their foreign propagation [kaikyō] programmes [opening the (Buddhist) teachings] in the late nineteenth century, and Japanese priests subsequently crossed the Pacific to Hawaii and mainland United States to conduct kaikyō. The word kaikyō was coined in the Meiji period (1868-1912) to describe the spreading of the teachings of Buddhism to non-Buddhist local residents in a foreign country. Early on, one critical view actually held that the word should be tsuikyō [teachings following (immigrants)] because the priests were following the Japanese immigrants (Kojima and Kiba 1992). The latter term denotes the clear contrast between this propagation of Buddhism by Japanese Buddhist denominations and the enthusiastic proselytization by Christians missionaries which had converted a significant number of non-Christians in Asia and Africa. One kaikyōshi [missionary priest] who had served in pre-war North America for eighteen years admitted that he had conducted mainly traditional propagation to Buddhist immigrants from Japan, while maintaining his desire to disseminate something more than just the ‘extension of Japanese Buddhism’ or ‘religion affiliated with immigrants’ (Uchida 1930: 20). This statement reflects the situation at that time, in which the Buddhist missionaries actually preached mostly among the Japanese immigrants, although a proportion of priests held out the ideal of spreading Buddhism to the local people in the New World in the manner of the Christian missionaries.