This Japanese New Testament was published in 1896 by The Bible Societies’ Committee for Japan. Although Christianity first arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century, it was officially proscribed and persecuted during the Edo period (1603–1868). After the Meiji restoration of the nineteenth century, missionary societies began working on a Japanese translation of the Bible. Japanese writing was so complex that the first printed Bibles in Japan, such as this New Testament, were printed using woodblocks.