John Batchelor (missionary)

John Batchelor OBE (20 March 1855 – 2 April 1944) was an English archdeacon and missionary to the Ainu people of Japan until 1941. First sent under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England, Batchelor lived from 1877 to 1941 among the indigenous Ainu communities in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. He was a charismatic and iconoclastic missionary for the Anglican Church in Japan and published highly regarded work on the language and culture of the Ainu people. Batchelor only reluctantly left Japan at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific in 1941.