Bishop Honda Yoichi (Honda Yoitsu)

Image of Bishop Honda Yoichi (Honda Yoitsu), circa 1910.

Honda Yoichi (1848–1912) was born into a samurai family of high rank. He became a Christian in 1872 and prepared for the ministry at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, in the late 1880s. Returning to Japan, Honda became the first Japanese Chancellor of Aoyama Gakuin, a Methodist boys school in Tokyo. Largely due to Honda’s influence, the Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Canadian Methodist missions in Japan united in 1907, forming the autonomous Japan Methodist Church and electing Honda to the episcopacy. Bishop Honda later served as a delegate to the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference (1910) and as the first president of the Japan Federation of Christian Churches (1911). He died in Nagasaki at the age of sixty-four on March 26,1912.