Smyser family

Martin Mosser Smyser (1875-1955), and Atta Carme Hostetter Smyser (1869-1945) were teachers and missionaries in Japan. They were affiliated at various times with the YMCA, the Disciples of Christ Church, and the faith mission or direct-support missionary movement.

M. M. Smyser was born on January 19, 1875 near Lisburn, Pennsylvania. He attended Pennsylvania State Normal School at Millersville and graduated from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1900. Smyser was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran faith and while at Dickinson developed an interest in preaching and missionary work. He attended student YMCA conferences at the home of Dwight L. Moody in 1897 and 1899 and the Student Volunteer Conference in Cleveland in 1899. After one year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Smyser took a position as assistant secretary of the Orange, New Jersey, YMCA. In 1902 he became general secretary of the Norristown, Pennsylvania YMCA.

In 1903 Smyser joined a YMCA mission to Japan. He was sent to the city of Hagi as a school teacher, but soon began offering bible classes for his fellow teachers and students. He spent the summer of 1903 traveling in China and Korea. Smyser met Carme Hostetter at the missionary summer resort at Karuiazawa, Japan in 1904. They were married in 1905.

Atta Carme Hostetter had first gone to Japan in 1892 with a mission headed by W.K. Azbill. Hostetter was born on February 6, 1869 on a farm near Minerva, Ohio. Her family belonged to the Disciples of Christ denomination. Hostetter completed a business course at Hiram College and worked for a time as a stenographer in Cleveland before enlisting with Azbill's mission in March 1892.

The five-member Azbill group was one of the first of the "direct-support missions" to be established in Japan. They rejected the support of the institutionalized mission societies, preferring to trust that God would provide for them through the voluntary contributions of individual believers. Azbill settled his mission in Tokyo where Hostetter and Lucia Scott established a charity school for children in the city's slum area.

Hostetter remained in Japan until 1897. On her return to the U.S. she enrolled in the Nashville Bible School and took some additional courses at Hiram College. In 1900 she returned to Japan as a missionary under the auspices of the Foreign Christian Mission Society. She was sent to the city of Sendai where Milton Madden had established a mission. In Sendai Hostetter conducted Sunday school and other classes for women and children.

Following her marriage, Hostetter joined Smyser in Hagi where they lived for two years. A daughter, Lois, was born in l906. In 1907 M.M. Smyser accepted a position teaching English at the YMCA school in Osaka. Carme and Lois returned to the U.S. in 1908. Smyser joined them in 1909. He enrolled in White's Bible College in New York City, supporting the family by selling kitchen utensils. Smyser was ordained to the ministry in 1910. He served briefly at a church in Edgewater, New Jersey and then accepted a position in Masardis, Maine with the Home Mission Society, ministering to several Congregational parishes.

In 1914 the Smysers returned to Japan to establish the Smyser Faith Mission in Yokote, Akita Prefecture. Yokote had been the site of the first Disciples of Christ mission in Japan. M.M. Smyser remained in Yokote for the rest of his life, making only two visits to the U.S. He was one of the few Americans permitted to remain in Japan during World War II.

Carme and Lois Smyser had returned to the U.S. in 1918 and settled in San Jose, California. Carme Smyser died July 16, 1945. Lois graduated from the University of California--Berkeley and married Gordon A. Sutherland, composer and music educator.

M.M. Smyser married Nellie Ethel Hoag, a missionary at the Yokote mission, in 1950. After three years the Smysers separated and Nellie returned to California. M.M. Smyser died in Yokote on March 24, 1955.

From the guide to the Smyser family papers, 1889-1984, 1902-1955, (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)