JAPAN

The trip lasted ten weeks. After a month at Caux, Katayama's party was received by the German, French and British governments and Socialist parties. At an official lunch given by Christopher Mayhew in London Entwistle sat next to Denis Healey.* 'Moral Re-Armament must be an extremely powerful world organisation,' said Healey. 'It has succeeded in doing what the British Labour Party has failed to do in the last two years - secure permission for Japanese Socialists to visit Britain.'3

(* Mayhew at that time was an Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Healey was Secretary of the International Department of the Labour Party.)

In January 1950, back in America, Entwistle received a cable from Buchman asking him to go to Japan to stand by some of the Japanese who had been at Riverside and Caux. 'Take Ken with you,' the cable added. 'Ken Twitchell was even more startled than I was,' writes Entwistle. 'Neither of us considered for a moment not responding, although I was loath to leave my family for what looked like a long period.'4

Their only commission from Buchman had been to give thought and care to particular Japanese families. They had also heard from the Mitsuis and Sohmas that there was a division in the ranks of Moral Re-Armament in Tokyo. Some were determined to confine Moral Re-Armament to a narrow Christian practice which stressed moral standards and the need for the guidance of God, but only as they applied to personal matters, and demanded immediate acceptance by all of particular doctrines. Others, like the Mitsuis, Sohmas and Horinouchis, saw it as a moral and spiritual force to reshape Japan into a united, democratic, responsible nation.

The travellers realised they were entering a non-Christian nation, and one whose conception of Christianity was shaped by the long-experienced superiority and doctrinaire theology of some Christians in Japan, as well as by what many felt were hostile policies of the 'Christian' countries of the West. Buchman had said from the beginning that 'the outstretched arms of Christ are for everyone', Christian and non-Christian alike. Thus he had taught his team to talk about moral and spiritual change in terms which the non- or anti-Christian - the Communists in the British coalfields and the Ruhr, for example - could understand, and not to place any doctrinal obstacle in their way.

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