Background
Danjo Ebina was born in 1856 in the province of Chikugo, present-day Fukuoka Prefecture in Kyushu, the son of a samurai of the domain of Yanagawa.
Danjo Ebina was born in 1856 in the province of Chikugo, present-day Fukuoka Prefecture in Kyushu, the son of a samurai of the domain of Yanagawa.
He attended the official school of the domain, studying Chinese, but in 1872 entered the Kumamoto Western School. There he came under the influence of a foreign instructor named L. L. Janes and was converted to Christianity, joining with Kozaki Hiromichi, Yokoi Tokio, Kanamori Tsurin, and others in the group of thirty-five converts known as the Kumamoto Band.
In 1876, upon completing the course of the Kumamoto Western School, he enrolled in Doshisha, a Christian school recently founded in Kyoto by Niijima Jo. In 1879 he graduated from Doshisha and became pastor of the Annaka Church in Gumma Prefecture, also traveling about to different areas of Japan to spread the message of Christianity.
In 1887 he founded the Kumamoto English School and Kumamoto Girls School, and in 1890 set up the Japan Missionary Society in Kyoto. In 1897 he became pastor of the Hongo Church in Tokyo, a position that he held for the following twenty-four years. For eight years beginning in 1920, he served as president of Doshisha College.
In 1900 he founded a magazine called Shinjin, which dealt with philosophical, cultural, and political issues from a Christian point of view and exercised an important influence upon the cultural and social movements of the time.
His Christianity included within it elements suggestive of the code of the Japanese warrior and of nationalistic thinking, which led him to be attacked by representatives of orthodoxy such as Uemura Masahisa.