Are there Hutterites in Japan?

Question:

Answer:

Yes.

The New Hutterian Brethren church of Owa (Japan), is a group of about thirty souls living in a single colony in the central portion of Honshu about 120 miles northeast of Tokyo. The colony was established 1972 by Reverend Isomi Izeki,and has led to close ties and mutual visits with the Dariusleut in Alberta in order bring their practices into strict conformity with the traditional Hutterian pattern of life. There are differences in the five styles of Hutterian living...
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In the early 1970's a group of Japanese Christians established a Hutterite settlement north of Tokyo. In the summer of 1975, I visited several Huttertte settlements, called colonies, in southern Alberta, Canada, and, surprisingly, met five Japanese “Hutterites.” They had been visiting the Wrison and West Raley colonies for several months. Since then, I have been corresponding with the Japanese group and, in1976, 1980, 1994, and 1998, I visited their colony in Japan. The emergence of the Japanese Hutterite colony, whtch has strong ties with Canadian Hutterites, is a curious phenomenon.

OWA COLONY
By this time membership in the colony had settled at nineteen, including four men, eleven women, and four children. Among the adults were several farmers, a truck drlver, an electrician, a typist, and a teacher. The group adopted the name Christian Communal Settlement New Hutterlan Brethren Owa Colony. The name Owa was taken from the name of the nearest village in the same manner as the Canadian colonles are named.

Owa colony members constructed ten structures: a church, three houses, a kitchen and dining hall, a workshop, a storage building, a laundry, a chickenbarn, and a goat shelter. In Canadian colonres there are many buildings, and their spatial arrangement is similar from one colony to the next (Fig. 7). Forming the colony’s core are residential structures, the communal dining hall and kitchen, the school, and the church (though often the school or dining hall doubles as the church), while farm buildings are located on the periphery. At the Owa colony, the arrangement of the buildings is determined by the available terrain. Electricity was put into the Owa colony in 1974. The water supply came from a natural spring, which the group called Jacob’s Well after Jacob Hutter. The mechanical equipment they initially acquired included a jeep, a pickup truck, a motorcycle, two bicycles, a threshing machine, a washing machine, and a refrigerator.
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