Biography
Juji Nakada was born on October 21, 1870, in Hirosaki, in the north of Japan, in a family of samurai. His father was a retainer of the local lord. The samurai class was in decline after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and the family lost its income and status. Juji grew up in poverty and in a time of great change. He received a good education in the Confucian classics. As a young man, he was influenced by the Christian missionaries who had come to northern Japan, and in 1880, he was baptized in a Methodist church.
He was a restless and ambitious youth. After a time of study, he left Japan to seek his fortune in the United States. He worked at a number of jobs, including as a farm laborer and a servant. In 1892, in Chicago, he enrolled at the Moody Bible Institute, where he studied the Bible and prepared for the ministry. He came into contact with the holiness movement, and in 1895, he had an experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. He said that it changed his life. He returned to Japan in 1897 as an evangelist.
He worked for a time as a pastor of a Methodist church in Japan, and he began to preach in the open air. He was a vigorous speaker, and he drew crowds. He preached a message of holiness and the second coming of Christ. In 1901, he met Charles Cowman and Ernest Kilbourne, two American missionaries who had come to Tokyo to start a mission. The three men became friends and coworkers. They formed the Oriental Missionary Society, and Nakada became an evangelist for the new mission.
He helped to found a Bible school in Tokyo, where he taught. He worked as an evangelist and trained workers. He took part in a number of campaigns. The mission spread throughout Japan, and a church was formed called the Japan Holiness Church, which was separate from the mission. It was the first Japanese denomination of the holiness type. In 1917, the Japan Holiness Church became independent and formally elected Nakada as its first bishop. He was the leader of the church until his death. The church grew to about a hundred thousand members in the 1930s.
He also visited the United States and Europe, where he preached in churches and conferences. He took a strong stand on the doctrines of holiness and of the return of Christ, and he was drawn into the movement of prophetic study. He held that the return of Christ was near and that the people of Israel had a place in God's plan. He also was concerned for the welfare of the Jewish people. In the 1930s, he made a journey to Palestine. He spoke on these themes with great conviction.
His later years were marked by hardships. He suffered the strain of the political situation in Japan, as the government grew more nationalistic and demanded loyalty from the churches. He faced pressure to compromise, and his church was under constraint. He also was burdened by the pressure of the work. He suffered from ill health and heart trouble. He died on September 24, 1939, in Tokyo, at the age of sixty-nine. He did not live to see the war that would bring suffering to the Japanese church.
His life shows how a man from a fallen warrior family may be turned into a servant of Christ. He remains a founding figure in the history of the Japanese church.