Evangelization Efforts in Northeast Asia
By Justin LongNortheast Asia is home to fifty-five people group clusters. Of these, just eighteen are larger than one million people in size. These clusters include:
| People Clusters | Population (in millions) |
| Bouyei | 3.0 |
| Chinese | 1,218.7 |
| Hui | 17.2 |
| Hani | 1.8 |
| Japanese | 127.6 |
| Kazakh | 1.8 |
| Korean | 72.3 |
| Li | 1.8 |
| Miao | 9.1 |
| Mongolian | 10.9 |
| Mon-Khmer | 1.1 |
| Nosu | 2.9 |
| Tai | 6.0 |
| Tibetan | 5.7 |
| Uighur | 10.7 |
| Lolo | 20.1 |
| Yao-Mien | 5.8 |
| Zhuang | 20.0 |
Largest Cluster Groups
The biggest cluster, by far, is the Chinese cluster. According to Joshua Project data, this cluster is made up of fifty-one distinct groups totaling some 1.2 billion people. Half of these groups are the Han Chinese peoples, broken out by specific languages (e.g., Cantonese, Chaozhou, Dan, Gan, Hainanese, and so on). These groups are considered mostly reached due to the massive numbers of Chinese believers. Their job is by no means complete; however, if you want to work with Chinese you probably won't be working in an exclusively pioneer setting. Most of the other Chinese groups, however, are very unreached. An illustrative example would be the Subei (Jiangbei), a socially outcast group who have migrated throughout the region. There are tens of thousands of Subei believers in Shanghai; however, this huge number amounts to less than two percent of the total population of the group. Many cross-cultural pioneer teams are needed both to aid in the completion of the evangelization of the Chinese groups, and to penetrate smaller, lesser-known, socially-isolated groups like the Subei.
With 130 million people, the Japanese cluster is the second largest in northeast Asia. It is a mostly homogenous cluster: 126 million people are found within the Japanese group itself. The other two large peoples are the 2.5 million Hisabetsu Burakumin and the one million Central Ryukyuan. There are fourteen other small groups, like the ten thousand Northern Amami-Oshima. These groups are small pockets within specific islands of Japan itself. The vast majority (122 million) of Japanese are found within Japan itself; however, some 4.2 million are found in other countries. The largest minorities are in the United States (1.2 million), South Korea (0.9 million) and Brazil (over 1.5 million). "To be Japanese is to be Buddhist," and Japan is anecdotally known to be a hard field. Nevertheless, there are large numbers of Japanese groups that are reached. Brazil's Japanese, for example, are sixty-three percent Christian (fifteen percent evangelical). Likewise, some 1.5% of the Japanese in the United States are Christian: a small percentage, but a large number of believers. While over one thousand cross-cultural teams are still needed to reach the Japanese, it is possible that many of these teams could find fruitful ministry by raising up Japanese believers outside Japan to go into Japan as home-culture evangelists.
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Justin Long manages strategicnetwork.org and is senior editor for Momentum, a magazine devoted to unreached peoples. He can be reached at justinlong@gmail.com. |
