The last ten or eleven years since the end of the war with Japan have shown some fascinating problems for the Catholics and other Christians in the Far East. I cannot claim to be an authority on them, but I have watched them as best I can and would just like to tell here something of what I have seen and to hope that others may answer my doubts with far greater knowledge and experience.

To begin with, I went back to Japan ten years ago in 1947 and saw the air of expectation in the Catholic world, which I now feel seems to have been unjustified.

At that time, General MacArthur and the U.S.A. held complete control. The Japanese had been ordered to cease to believe in their religion (if you can call it a religion), Shinto. To this day, Catholics have been unable to decide whether Shinto was really a religion or a sort of political cult. If the latter, then Catholics could still practise it; if the former, then obviously not. At any rate, Shinto was now dead and every Catholic missionary wondered if Catholicism could not take its place; and the Protestants of course thought the same.