YMCA presence in Asia in the early 1900s

While working on the blog post series on the Louisiana Trio, I found myself getting constantly sidetracked by the YMCA history, which was very intriguing. So I thought I should introduce some of my discoveries in this short separate post.

In 1888, YMCA of Canada and the United States began their “foreign work” programmes with special emphasis on Asian countries². They built outposts throughout India, China, Japan, Korea, The Philippines, as well as Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements, and operated with a “civilising” mission that introduced protestant work ethics, with a focus on physical health training and character growth.

You can see the growth of YMCA’s presence in Korea through the two pictures below³, taken from a newspaper article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Seoul YMCA.

Along with concerts, such as the one that invited the Louisiana Trio, the YMCA ran workshops for practical skills training, and held many sporting events, such as baseball and basketball. De Ceuster, in his article⁴ on the YMCA sports programmes in Korea, calls it “the disciplining of bodies through an elaborate sports programme” (p. 56). The mission to nurture a generation of vital, young Christian men, morally, physically, and culturally comparable to their counterparts in the West, was inextricably linked to conceptions of citizenship and projects of nation-building – and YMCA’s ‘foreign work’ of fostering “Christian citizenship” in non-Christian nations was enthusiastically supported by the likes of Rockefeller and Wanamaker⁵. (See more in “muscular Christianity“.)

Sports being sports, however, it soon became much more than just a training regime, and was “increasingly turned into a form of entertainment, controlled and driven by market forces” (p. 56). At some point, the sports agenda became so influential that it is said that 80% of its members joined YMCA just to gain access to the sports facilities.

If you want to read more about YMCA’s activities in Asia during and after the First World War, here’s a list of references I used, that are interesting to read:

1. ‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.’s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920) by Harald Fischer-Tiné which talks about YMCA’s presence in colonial India.
2. ‘Wholesome Education and Sound Leisure: The YMCA Sports Programme in Colonial Korea.’ by Koen de Ceuster, which focuses on the sports programme of the YMCA and its influence in the making of social and public life in colonial Korea.
3. ‘Christian Citizenship and the Foreign Work of the YMCA‘ by Rebecca Ann Hodges is a whole PhD thesis dedicated to this topic.

Footnotes

1. “YMCA Harbin, Manchuria.” Card. [ca. 1900–1980]. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/vm417462p
2. Harald Fischer-Tiné (2018): ‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.’s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920), The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, doi: 10.1080/03086534.2018.1511245
3. “中央基督靑年會舘(중앙기독청년회관) 廿五週年(입오주년)돌마지紀念(기념)”, Dong-a Ilbo, October 20th, 1928, p.3.
4. de Ceuster, Koen. “Wholesome Education and Sound Leisure: The YMCA Sports Programme in Colonial Korea.” European Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Brill, 2003, pp. 53–88, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23615540.
5. Hodges, R. A. (2017). Christian Citizenship and the Foreign Work of the YMCA. UC Berkeley. ProQuest ID: Hodges_berkeley_0028E_17232. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m52854jg. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89w0m4h1