Imagine trading a comfortable home for a shack of just a few square meters, without windows, in the middle of the city’s worst slum. That was the choice young seminary student Toyohiko Kagawa made on Christmas Eve of 1909, in Kobe, and it would shape the rest of his life.
Born on July 10, 1888, Kagawa lost his parents as a child and was raised by relatives who rejected him after his conversion to the gospel as a teenager, through the Presbyterian missionaries Harry Myers and Charles Logan. Baptized on February 14, 1904, he found in the Christian faith a new family.
He studied theology in Tokyo and at Kobe Seminary, then at Princeton Theological Seminary, in the United States, between 1914 and 1917. There he also deepened his studies in biology, an interest that would later feed his advocacy for sustainable agriculture and reforestation in Japan.
Back in Japan, he moved to the poor neighborhood of Shinkawa, in Kobe, sharing his shack with beggars and the sick he found on the streets. He contracted tuberculosis and a serious eye disease, but remained there for years, preaching and serving the residents.
Convinced that the gospel also needed economic structure, he founded in 1921 the Kobe consumer cooperative and the Friends of Jesus group, dedicated to spiritual discipline and mutual aid among the slum’s residents. That same year, he was arrested during labor strikes he helped organize.
His first book, published in 1915 from his life in the slum, exposed Japanese urban poverty, but also advanced eugenicist ideas about criminality and went so far as to attribute the origin of poor city dwellers to the Buraku minority, treating both as inferior. Historians point to this racist and discriminatory trait as a real stain alongside his dedication to the poorest.
Kagawa also became a voice against Japanese militarism. He founded the National Anti-War League in 1928 and, in 1940, was arrested after publicly apologizing to China for the Japanese invasion, an act of courage amid state repression.
He died in Tokyo on April 23, 1960, after decades of tireless work, the author of more than a hundred books and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize. His name remains linked to Christian cooperativism around the world.
