Yutaka Morishima is a professor and university chaplain at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan and visiting scholar at OMSC in Princeton Theological Seminary(2023-2024). The subject of his Ph.D. dissertation was the Atonement Theology of P.T. Forsyth. He has served as a Protestant church pastor in Nagasaki, where the atomic bomb was dropped. His recent research is on the ideological history of human rights, especially the formation process of a unique human rights concept in Asia. In particular, the use of terms such as “human rights” and “peace state” in political documents is demonstrated to support the concept of Japan’s national polity, shedding new light on the formation of modern imperial ideology.
From the perspective of Christianity, he has discerned overlooked aspects in the study of Japan’s national polity and State Shinto, specifically, the differences between Western and Japanese ideologies, gaining attention.
In 2015, he received the prestigious Ruikotsu Award for Excellence from the Chugai Nippo Press for his paper titled “The Influence and Challenges of Christian Human Rights Thought in Japan.” Furthermore, in 2021, he was awarded the Aoyama Gakuin Academic Prize for his work “The History of Thought on Resistance Rights and Human Rights: A Clash of the Western and Tenno(Japanese) Type.”
He has published widely for both academic and general readers in Japanese. He also studies why the Christianity is not spreading in Japan and, in his ministry, he makes various efforts to preach the gospel to young souls. The publication is planned for the English-speaking audience in the future.
