Seija Jalagin

Negotiating for Space and Autonomy: Strategies of Finnish Missionary Women in Japan, 1900-1941

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the strategies Finnish women used to influence their status and the missionary practices in the Japan mission of the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland during the early part of the 20th century. Women had a head-start in the mission compared to men but lost this later as the organization developed. However, the early years demonstrate how women were able to gain a foothold simply by exceptional circumstances, such as a political turmoil. The crisis years of the Finnish mission in the early 1910s illustrate how organizational rigidity was created at the cost of womens status, but also that everyday work carried out separately from the mens work offered women satisfactory roles regardless of the patriarchal structure. An additional strategy is introduced by the career of one missionary, Siiri Uusitalo. A lifelong career in the mission and a pioneers status enabled Siiri Uusitalo to carve out an independent position inside the Finnish mission which can be defined as matriarchal. Through the Finnish female missionaries, the contested male control of the mission in the Japanese context is discussed. The article presents one historically unique case that nevertheless points to certain patterns in contesting and redefining the gendered hierarchy in a religious community amidst a foreign culture.

A Nordic Hebrew Christian centre in Jerusalem

Alarmed by the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust, a Finnish female missionary in relatively peaceful Jerusalem developed an idea for an ecumenical Hebrew Christian centre that would care for refugee Jewish children, and, which through education and a scientific centre, would advance the evangelization of the Jews in Palestine. Using the archival and published materials of Aili Havas and the Finnish mission, this paper studies the evolution and eventual failure of the plan. It also discusses the difficulties of cooperation between Protestant missions and their shifting theological opinions about missionizing the persecuted Jews, as well as the combination of Christianity, gender, relief and development as a powerful motivator for action, particularly during turbulent historical moments.

Intersections of Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity in Christian Missions

The frustrated and direct words that Finnish woman missionary Tyyne Niemi (1901–91) expressed in a letter to the mission director in 1936 in the middle of a labor-intensive project of establishing a mission kindergarten in Sapporo, Japan, demonstrate how gender, religion, and ethnicity intertwined in the everyday realities of missions. This chapter addresses gender and ethnicity in missions as intersecting factors that generated mutually conflicting outcomes, particularly in terms of power relationships. In some cases, gender and ethnicity produced and helped maintain hierarchies, whereas in others they enabled the contesting and in some instances also the crossing of ethnic boundaries and gendered hierarchies.2