Toyohiko Kagawa

On Christmas Eve 1909, a twenty-one-year-old theology student moved to Shinkawa, the poorest district of the Japanese port city of Kobe. Shortly before, he had been seriously ill. He had preached until he collapsed, with pneumonia brought on by tuberculosis. He had recovered, and now he went to live where no one chose to live.

His lodging was a small shed. He shared it with people who had nowhere else to go, and he fed them from the small allowance he received as a student. According to a later biographer, some 7,500 people lived in the district. It became his home for years.

That student’s name was Toyohiko Kagawa. He became the best-known Japanese Christian of his century. He wrote bestsellers, founded labor unions and cooperatives, went to prison and spoke to packed halls in America. American churches named him in the same breath as Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer. After his death he was given a statue in the cathedral in Washington.

He also left words behind that later shocked his own followers. This chapter tells both. It begins with a boy without parents.

A SON OF THE CONCUBINE

Toyohiko Kagawa was born on July 10, 1888, in Kobe. His father, Junichi Kagawa, was a wealthy businessman. His mother, Kame, was not his father’s wife. She was a concubine. By the time Toyohiko was four, his father and mother had both died.

In those years Japan was a country in a hurry. After centuries of isolation it had opened itself to the West in 1868, under Emperor Meiji. The country built factories, railways and a navy. Christianity had only been permitted again since 1873, after almost three centuries of persecution. Anyone who became a Christian was choosing what many Japanese saw as a Western religion.

The boy grew up with relatives, under an uncle who was in charge. His biographers describe the years after his parents’ death as lonely.

A BIBLE CLASS TO LEARN ENGLISH

As a teenager, Toyohiko went to a Bible class run by two American missionaries of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Harry W. Myers and Charles A. Logan. He came mainly to learn English. They took him into their home. According to Plough, he later said that it was there he first woke up to the feeling that he was alive.

He also told what drew him to faith. He had read in a book, he said, that a man called Christ went around doing good. That picture comes from the Bible, from Peter’s sermon in the house of Cornelius, about Jesus, who went about doing good (Acts 10:38). It would become the thread running through his life.

On February 14, 1904, Myers baptized him in the church at Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku. He was fifteen. When he made it known that he wanted to become a minister, his uncle cast him out of the family. From then on, the missionaries supported him.

I pause here for a moment, because the story grows so large later on. At the beginning stands a fifteen-year-old boy who loses his family and his inheritance over a baptism. What would you have done, if believing cost you your family?

AMONG THE HOMELESS OF SHINKAWA

Toyohiko studied at Meiji Gakuin in Tokyo, a Presbyterian college, and then at the theological seminary in Kobe. In 1909 he fell ill. After his recovery came the move to Shinkawa, that Christmas Eve.

Kagawa did not live in Shinkawa as a visitor. He took people into his home and preached in the streets. There he caught trachoma, a contagious eye disease that troubled him for the rest of his life. Around 1910 he started a small group, which he called Kyūrei Dan, the Salvation Band.

In 1913 he married Haru Shiba. She shared his work wholeheartedly, Plough writes. The sources I read say little about her own life, and I will not fill it in.

WHAT HE WROTE ABOUT HIS NEIGHBORS

In the summer of 1914 Kagawa left for the United States. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and also took classes there in biology and genetics. He wanted to understand where poverty came from. According to Fukada he stayed until May 1917; other sources give 1916.

Around those years his study Hinmin shinri no kenkyū appeared, an investigation into the psychology of the poor. The book described life in the slums, a world unknown to the Japanese middle class. It also contained something else. Next to Shinkawa lay a Buraku neighborhood. The Buraku are Japanese who had been excluded for centuries, because their ancestors did work that was considered unclean, such as slaughtering animals and tanning leather. In that book Kagawa described them as a separate and degenerate race, attributed to them a tendency toward crime and spoke of racial improvement. So writes the Japanese historian Fujino Yutaka. A 2023 study by Hiroshi Sekiguchi shows how Kagawa at that time adopted the accepted science that linked poverty, crime and disease to heredity.

It was the language of his time, in Europe and America too. That does not make it any less painful for the people he wrote about. In the 1980s an open debate arose in Japan over these passages, which became known as the Kagawa problem. It has never entirely died down.

I find it hard to read this about a man who spent his life among the poorest of the poor. Yet it belongs to the story. A person can live closer to the outcasts than anyone else, and still look at them through the wrong lens.

ACROSS THE DEATH LINE

Back in Kobe, Kagawa wrote a novel about his years in the slums. It was called Shisen o koete, across the death line. In Dutch the title has been rendered as Voorbij de grens van de dood, and in English as Before the Dawn. The book appeared in 1920 and became a bestseller. The sources differ on exactly how it came about: Britannica writes that he wrote his first novels in prison in 1921 and 1922. An article in Japan Harvest speaks of a million copies sold; I have not found that figure confirmed anywhere else.

What is certain: after this novel, all of Japan knew his name. In his lifetime he would write more than a hundred and fifty books, novels, poems, sociology and theology.

THIRTY THOUSAND MEN AT THE SHIPYARDS

In 1921 about thirty thousand workers walked off the job at the Kawasaki and Mitsubishi shipyards in Kobe. It became the largest labor dispute in Japan between the two world wars. In those years Kagawa was one of the leaders of the young labor movement. In 1921 he was briefly imprisoned for his union work, and again in 1922.

He believed that the gospel was also about wages, housing and food. According to the Christian History Institute, he said he was a socialist because he was a Christian. Plough sums up his conviction like this: because God cares for every person, we must too. In 1921 he and others started a cooperative in Kobe, a shop owned by its own members. From that beginning grew what later became Co-op Kobe, one of the largest cooperatives in the world. He helped build the Japanese federation of labor unions and campaigned for the vote for all men, which came in 1925.

He also saw how other leaders in the labor movement moved toward Marxism and class struggle. According to Loucky, he concluded from this that more was needed than organization. He returned to what he called a spiritual renewal.

THE FRIENDS OF JESUS

On October 5, 1921, Kagawa, Haru and thirteen ministers founded the Friends of Jesus. It was a brotherhood made up mostly of young people, who committed themselves to prayer and discipline, to caring for the poor and to bearing witness to Christ. Biographers compare the group to the followers of Francis of Assisi. According to Loucky there were more than five hundred members within a year, a figure that comes from the movement’s own circle.

Two years later that brotherhood was put to the test. On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama. The Friends of Jesus helped with the emergency relief, and Kagawa shifted the center of his work to Tokyo. The Ministry of Home Affairs later gave him an award for that work.

A MILLION SOULS

In August 1925 Kagawa proposed a national evangelistic campaign. The goal was a million converts. In November 1925 the campaign began in Sendai. At a conference in Karuizawa in 1927 the plan even spoke of fully Christianizing Japan.

It did not succeed. In 1929 the campaign was named the Kingdom of God Movement, and the goal was scaled back to four hundred thousand converts in ten years. For years Kagawa spoke in cities across the whole country. There was also tension with Western missionaries within the movement; in 1933 the American magazine The Christian Century wrote about it. In 1934 the committee brought it to an end. The money had run out, and the climate in Japan had grown harsher.

The historian George Bikle pointed to something else. For many Japanese, Christianity counted as the religion of Western colonialism in Asia. An evangelist who proclaimed the Kingdom of God in Japan carried that image with him, whether he wanted to or not.

AN APOLOGY TO CHINA

In 1931 Japan conquered Manchuria, in the northeast of China, and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo there. Kagawa had founded the National Anti-War League in 1928. In 1934 he publicly apologized to the Chinese people for what Japan was doing in China.

In America he became a hero in those years. His tour from December 1935 to June 1936 was organized by American church leaders. On arrival in San Francisco he was first held on Angel Island because of his eye disease. President Franklin Roosevelt took a personal interest, and Kagawa was allowed to continue, on condition that a doctor or nurse traveled with him. In May 1936 he spoke to a large crowd in St. Louis.

The American interest had a history. In 1931 he had already given lectures at the Yale divinity school. In 1932 a biography by the missionary William Axling appeared in America. During the 1936 tour he gave lectures in Rochester and spoke in Cleveland and Los Angeles. That same year his book Brotherhood Economics appeared, about an economy of brotherhood. In the years of the Depression, many Americans were looking for a way between capitalism and communism, and his cooperatives seemed to offer one. The historian David King shows that American church leaders also saw themselves in Kagawa. He became a hero seen through Western eyes, King writes. The Japanese knew a more complicated man.

In the 1920s he had signed an appeal, together with Gandhi and Einstein among others, to abolish military conscription. According to an article by The Nonviolence Project of the University of Wisconsin, he had a meeting with Gandhi in India in 1939 that went awkwardly, because the conversation turned to the Japanese war in China.

In August 1940 he was briefly imprisoned in Japan because of that apology from six years earlier. The New York Times reported it as news. In 1941 he traveled with a Japanese Christian peace delegation to the United States, to try to avert the looming war. Three months after his return, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

THE VOICE ON RADIO TOKYO

What he did next does not fit the picture of the pacifist. During the war in the Pacific, Kagawa spoke on Radio Tokyo. He defended his country and condemned what he called American barbarism. About Japanese atrocities in Asia he said nothing comparable, Plough writes. American services listened in and recorded the broadcasts.

The historian Bo Tao has researched these years in the archives, including those of the FBI and the American occupation. In his 2025 book he describes how, from the late 1930s, Kagawa increasingly sided with the Japanese government, hesitated to condemn its aggression and during the war became a voice that defended the state. Another researcher points to a Christian pioneer settlement that Kagawa led in Manchukuo, part of the Japanese colonization there.

After the war an American journalist wrote in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes that Kagawa had supported the war under a Christian cover. Others came to his defense. The debate went on for years.

I will not pass a final judgment on that. He lived in a dictatorship in wartime, where anyone who kept silent was suspect and anyone who spoke out went to prison. He had already experienced that himself. What exactly he was thinking as he sat at that microphone, we do not know. The broadcasts themselves have been preserved, though, and they belong to his story.

BEFORE THE EMPEROR

Japan surrendered in August 1945. In February 1946 Kagawa was summoned to Emperor Hirohito. According to Plough, he quoted there the words of Jesus that whoever wants to be great must become the servant of all. He became an adviser in the reconstruction and was a member of the House of Peers from 1946 to 1947.

He campaigned for women’s suffrage and worked for a world federation, one government for all nations to prevent war. In those postwar writings the old thinking returned too. The historian Konrad Lawson shows that Kagawa was still arguing for eugenics, as a path toward a better and more peaceful people.

Meanwhile his name lived on internationally. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and 1948, and several times for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1950s. He made further journeys to the United States, where Japanese American congregations welcomed him warmly.

In March 1955 Kagawa collapsed in Osaka. His heart was worn out. He was bedridden for two weeks. Four years later he spent three months in the hospital in Takamatsu. On April 23, 1960, he died in Tokyo, seventy-one years old.

According to tradition, at the end he asked those around him to give everything for world peace and for the church in Japan. I have found those words only in a reference work that gives no source of its own. After his death the Japanese state awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure.

A FACE OF STONE

Fukada, who wrote his biography for a reference work on missions, put it this way: inside and outside Japan, Kagawa was known mainly as a social reformer, but all his life he was first and foremost an evangelist. He preached, he wrote and he built. His cooperatives still exist. His words about the Buraku and his voice on Radio Tokyo have been preserved as well.

Perhaps you know Christians you admire, and you also know things about them you would rather not have known. Then you are standing roughly where I stood while writing this chapter.

In 1970 a sculptor was commissioned to carve Kagawa in stone for the Washington National Cathedral, in the capital of the country where his voice had come over the radio during the war. The commission came from a memorial fund set up by the family of an American naval officer who had been at Pearl Harbor and later worked in occupied Japan. On a decorative corbel beneath the statue a chrysanthemum was carved, the flower of the Japanese imperial house. Bo Tao calls the statue a mirror of the rise and fading of twentieth-century Christian internationalism.

There he still stands, among saints and reformers, with the face of the student who walked into the slums of Shinkawa with his belongings on Christmas Eve.