Fathoming Japanese Culture, History and Religion: Three Meiji Period British Missionaries, Henry Faulds, Walter Dening and Arthur Lloyd

how they viewed, interpreted and understood Japanese culture, religion, and history.It also investigates the narrower research question of how the evolving understanding of these three above aspects of Japanese civilization influenced the three missionaries' understanding of their own cultural and religious beliefs?It brings into the limelight the question of the effect on the missionary of the religious and intellectual climate in Japan, especially that of the mid-1880s when traditional Japanese religious thought and Western scepticism in regards Christianity posed major challenges to Christian evangelism.The three missionaries which this research note studies represented a broad diversity of British Christianity: Scottish Presbyterianism, Low-Church and High-Church Anglicanism, and were engaged in literary work in areas of study (customs and manners, history and religion) that came to be of common interest to other later British missionaries of literary bent and thus helped to form the foundations of a literary oeuvre about Japan 260 which is one of the major legacy of the British missionary endeavour in Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (4)