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“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 19:14 (KJV)

Christian Academy in Japan — the Telios Investigation (2021)

Telios Law's investigation for Christian Academy in Japan and four sponsoring missions corroborated abuse allegations against nine adult offenders across 1957–2001 — 18 of the 25 substantiated sexual-abuse cases by a single 1960s fourth-grade teacher — and concluded that leadership repeatedly failed to act. Its public summary withholds every name, of survivors and of the culpable alike, and so does this page.

Subject
Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ), Tokyo — a school for missionaries' children, founded 1950
Issuing body
Telios Law PLLC — five independent professional investigators; coordinator Theresa Sidebotham. A 386-page Master Report (not public) stands behind the 50-page public summary
Sponsors
CAJ with four of its six founding missions: Resonate Global Mission, ECC–Serve Globally (Evangelical Covenant Church), TEAM, and WorldVenture. One Mission Society and SEND International did not sponsor this investigation
Scope
Historic allegations from CAJ's founding in 1950 to its revised child-protection policies in 2002; more than 3,000 investigative hours from March 2019. Findings by a preponderance of the evidence. The public summary carries no internal date line; it was released in late 2021, and the sponsors' apologies followed on January 10–14, 2022
Posture
Commissioned independent findings (Tier 2). The public summary withholds the names of survivors AND of the culpable by policy; offenders appear by role and era only, and no name is supplied here from any other source

The investigation

Christian Academy in Japan educates missionaries’ children in Tokyo. In the fall of 2017 an alumnus’s post in a school Facebook group opened a reckoning; a survivors’ support group formed; the head of school apologized to alumni in January 2019; and that spring CAJ and four of its sponsoring missions engaged Telios Law PLLC to investigate historic abuse from the school’s founding in 1950 to its adoption of revised child-protection policies in 2002. The investigators worked more than 3,000 hours and produced a 386-page master report; what is public is a 50-page summary, and this page is built on the summary — on nothing behind it.

The summary states its naming rule in terms this page adopts as its own:

"Due to the standards governing a private historical investigation, names of victim/survivors (V/S) and those culpable are not shared in this document."

The findings

The headline is the report’s: “The Investigative Team investigated seventy-two cases of alleged abuse of fifty-eight CAJ alumni by eighteen adult CAJ personnel as well as several other child-on-child offenders. The allegations of abuse spanned a forty-three-year period from 1957 to 2001.” It “found evidence to corroborate forty-six allegations of abuse against nine adult offenders and one child-on-child offender.” The summary’s own table totals 73 cases investigated and 39 corroborated, and cautions that its units — cases, allegations, victims, offenders — “do not always correlate well” because of overlap. Both figures are printed here as the report prints them; neither is “corrected” into the other.

Sexual abuse. Of the substantiated cases, twenty-five were of child sexual abuse, against four adult offenders, all former teachers and administrators:

Physical abuse. Eight corroborated cases against three offenders: a 1950s dorm father whose beatings left a child “covered with welts and bruises” until his parents withdrew him; a 1960s dorm mother who beat at least three students with a rubber hose, leaving “welts, bruises, and scarring”; a 1960s headmaster who slapped at least four students and scratched a student’s face with a pin. One corroborated emotional-abuse allegation (against the same dorm mother) is recorded with the report’s caveat that emotional abuse ran through many of the other cases and was not rare.

Child-on-child abuse. Eleven cases inquired into; one corroborated — a group sexual assault. The report withholds its details, and so does this page.

What leadership did

The investigators’ conclusion is capitalized in the original, and it is quoted as written: “INVESTIGATORS CONCLUDED THAT IN SOME CASES, LEADERSHIP FAILED TO ADEQUATELY REPORT OR ACT ON CREDIBLE ACCOUNTS OF ABUSE.” In the case of the 1960s fourth-grade teacher, “the Headmaster and Board of Directors agreed to allow him to resign amidst credible, though not numerous, allegations of gross sexual misconduct. However, the missionary parents were never informed of the reason he left.” In other cases, leaders acted personally but never informed the Board, the missions, or “most importantly, the missionary parents of the child in their care.” The report adds the era’s context and refuses to let it excuse: “EVEN IF THIS REFLECTS THE ERA, IT RESULTED IN EXTENSIVE HARM TO CHILDREN.”

Its contributing factors name the system plainly: no guidelines at all for teacher–student conduct (“CAJ had no guidelines… We had nothing,” a headmaster of the period said); children “to be seen and not heard,” with “no voice and no credibility”; poor responses to reports; and a “pervasive code of silence” in which “the priorities of ‘mission’ and ‘ministry’ were sometimes placed higher than the welfare of children.” The school’s board had voted in 1976 that corporal punishment not be employed; its first formal child-protection policy was not adopted until June 11, 2002.

The apologies

The sponsoring organizations published apologies with the summary. CAJ’s head of school, Anda Foxwell (January 14, 2022): “I sincerely ask forgiveness for the failure of leaders in the past to recognize mistreatment and abuse of children in our care.” The Evangelical Covenant Church “is deeply grieved and laments the perpetual abuse that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s,” noting also that no Covenant personnel were found to be perpetrators within the investigation’s scope. Resonate Global Mission: “we confess that we are guilty of walking in darkness… We were wrong.” TEAM’s board: “deeply sorry… fully accountable before God for former staff and missionaries’ treatment of students under their care.” WorldVenture’s president: “I apologize and desire your forgiveness for the historic abuses and injustices committed against you as missionary kids at CAJ.” The Review Panel’s recommendations included a counseling trust fund, commemorative work with alumni, and independent review of the sponsors’ child-safety policies every other year.

A boundary note: SEND International — a founding mission that did not sponsor this investigation — commissioned a separate, narrower investigation of its own personnel, whose public report was released June 27, 2021. It is a different record, not covered here.

In this archive

No names, and therefore no directory entries, arise from this page: the culpable are identified in the public record only by role and era, and this archive does not identify them from any other source. What stands here is the institution’s own commissioned account of itself — corroborated findings, leadership failure in the investigators’ words, and five organizations’ apologies — at exactly the strength the public document supports.

Sources

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