How I Became a Christian

How I Became a Christian (1895), subtitled "Out of My Diary," is the spiritual autobiography of Kanzo Uchimura, written by him in English. Drawn from his own diaries, it traces his path from a traditional Japanese upbringing through his encounter with Christianity to the convictions that would shape the rest of his life and thought.

Uchimura describes the religious world of his youth and his early, somewhat reluctant exposure to Christianity as a student at the Sapporo Agricultural College, where the influence of the American educator William S. Clark's legacy was still strong. He records his struggles of conscience, his time studying in the United States, and his effort to make sense of the new faith in a way that was honest and personal rather than merely imported.

The book is candid about doubt, disappointment, and the gap he felt between Christianity as he met it and the institutions that carried it. That tension foreshadows the movement he would later found. Written for an English-speaking audience, it became one of the better-known accounts of a Japanese convert wrestling with faith in the Meiji era.

Uchimura Kanzo (1861–1930) was a Japanese author, evangelist, and thinker of the Meiji and Taisho periods. He was raised in Japan in a samurai-class family and came to Christianity as a student at the Sapporo Agricultural College, where he and classmates were drawn into the faith in the wake of William S. Clark's earlier influence there. He later traveled to the United States and earned a second degree at Amherst College.

His was a conversion of a thoughtful, independent mind rather than a single ecstatic moment, and over time he grew critical of denominational and institutional church structures. Out of that conviction he founded the Mukyokai, or "Non-church" movement, which stressed the Bible and the individual conscience and held that an organized church and its sacraments were not necessary for genuine faith. How I Became a Christian is his own telling of how that journey began.