chapter one
By Robert Schildgen
ON CHRISTMAS EVE IN 1909, a brilliant 21-year-old student packed some books and clothes into a bamboo box, put it on a hand cart and trudged off to one of Japan’s most notorious slums, the Shinkawa district in the city of Kobe.
The slender young man checked into a run-down, stucco-covered house with two dark little rooms and a common toilet, a water hydrant
and a kitchen in the back shared among a few dozen impoverished neighbors, including ragpickers, pimps, prostitutes,
rickshaw pullers and the chronically ill or unemployed.
Among his first roommates were an alcoholic suffering from malnutrition and acute dermatitis, a syphilitic, and a
murderer released from prison. The place had been unoccupied for some time because the previous tenant had been
murdered, and it was feared that his ghost was lurking about the gloomy premises. As if one evil spirit weren’t enough for the
cramped quarters, the young student had to hold the hand of the murderer to calm him down when the ghost of his victim
paid a visit in the man’s nightmares.
Such was the bizarre beginning of the career of Toyohiko Kagawa, who went on to become one of the most
influential social reformers and religious leaders in Japan and perhaps the most famous and revered Japanese figure in the
rest of the world during the 1930s. A convert to Christianity, he was one of those rare and troublesome Christians who
decided to live the Gospel quite literally, dedicating himself to the poor by giving all he owned, whether material or emotional
resources. He fed, sheltered, nursed, educated and preached in the slums at tremendous risk to his own health, contracting
the painful eye disease, trachoma, which plagued him through his life, and risking a recurrence of tuberculosis which had
almost killed him twice before he plunged into the slums.
He was heckled, beaten, robbed and menaced by knife-wielding gangsters. When he gave away his last clothing,
he was forced to wear a woman’s kimono borrowed from a destitute neighbor. But he stayed on, fearless and seemingly
invincible, even making converts to the new religion. Those who first thought him insane began to believe he had
supernatural powers. Those who laughed would come to call him Kagawa Sensei, the Japanese term for teacher which
commands considerably more respect than its English counterpart.
Kagawa. The name alone was magic in the West, once evoking the kind of reverence many people now feel at the
mention of a Martin Luther King or a Mother Teresa. Like them, this Japanese minister was seen as a Christlike model of
selfless dedication to the poor and a peacemaker consumed with a hunger and thirst for justice. He was, in fact, variously
hailed as “the Japanese Gandhi,” “Japan’s Albert Schweitzer,” “the Saint Francis of Japan,” or more comprehensively
canonized as the “Saint of Japan.” He was also named “Christ’s Samurai” and, in Teutonic fashion, was dubbed by one
German writer as an example of “Christian Knighthood.” In 1940, when he was jailed on suspicion of publishing articles
which violated Japan’s military code, the New York Times headline announced “GANDHI OF JAPAN PUT UNDER
ARREST.”
His life and works were chronicled in books with dramatic titles such as Three Trumpets Sound: Kagawa-
Gandhi-Schweitzer and Whither Asia?, while hundreds of articles in many languages detailed his tireless activities as
minister to the poor and social activist. His own voluminous essays, fiction and poetry were translated into German, Dutch,
Spanish, Czech, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, and the Scandinavian tongues, to name a few. The translations were regularly
reviewed in major newspapers and journals in the United States and England. In 1936 alone, over 750,000 attended his
lectures in the United States and Canada. In reviewing one of Kagawa’s novels, A Grain of Wheat, the noted critic Alfred
Kazin wrote:
Kagawa is the greatest Christian leader in the Orient today, and being a missionary whose labors are confined to
his own country, he makes much the same use of the novel that Bunyan and the later Tolstoy did… It is significant
that Kagawa’s book has had a success in Japan comparable to that of Pilgrim’s Progress in seventeenth-century
England and Resurrection in late nineteenth-century Russia.
Kagawa’s work was not confined to his own land. His admirers among peace activists in the West were deeply moved by the
anti-war refrain in his lectures and writings, as well as by pacifist actions like his refusal to participate in school military
exercises when he was a mere 15-year-old. Yet many became disenchanted with him after World War II, when reports from
Japan accused him of capitulating to the Japanese government and collaborating with the “enemy.” These reports may have
cost him the Nobel Prize when he was nominated for it in 1955.
These are a few glimpses into one of the most fascinating and complex lives of modern times. Kagawa was a
prophet with abundant honor in his own land and abroad, but the way he burst into national prominence forms perhaps the
most intriguing chapter in his long life. For a golden period in the early 1920s, Kagawa was a Mother Teresa, Upton Sinclair,
Thorstein Veblen, Samuel Gompers and Jane Addams combined into one prodigiously versatile, energetic and disciplined
personality. He became almost simultaneously a minister to the slums, the author of a best-selling novel, a trail-blazing
sociologist, a leader in Japan’s fledgling labor movement, and organizer of farmer and consumer co-ops.
As president of the Kansai Labor Federation in 1919, he captured the nation’s attention by leading the largest
strike in its history up to that point and heading a demonstration in 1922 of 30,000 workers protesting the policies of the giant
Kawasaki and Mitsubishi corporations in the Kobe dockyards. Merely leading marches, negotiating the demands of
dispossessed, and making speeches was not enough to satisfy a man of his talents; he also wrote songs to inspire the
workers and edited the union’s official newspaper.
When his pacifism led to a break with the urban labor movement, whose syndicalist wing was agitating for violent
action, he turned his energies to the plight of the rural poor, helping found the Japanese Farmers Union, and organizing a
peasantry in many respects more miserable than the urban proletariat. He founded a number of consumer cooperatives, one
of which became a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, and he left a pacifist legacy to the Japanese cooperative movement, now
one of the strongest voices for peace in contemporary Japan.
Though the government jailed him for union activities, his organizing skills and reputation were such that it
appointed him to a leadership position in relief work after the devastating 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Kagawa maintained a
high profile both in Japan and abroad before World War II, making tours of the United States in 1924, 1931, 1935 and 1941
and visiting many countries in Asia and Europe. This international stature and his influence on the Japanese people led to
consideration of Kagawa as prime minister of the new government after the war, and he continued to use his reputation to
foster the moral and physical reconstruction of Japan. He backed social democratic candidates and encouraged the many
reforms which converted Japan into a modern, pluralistic democracy.
His theology linking faith to social action and the fact that his complex life reveals so much about modern Japan
are compelling reasons for a reassessment of Kagawa. Yet another reason for reassessment is that Kagawa has been the
victim of biographers who portrayed him as such an idealized holy man that the eventual appearance of human flaws led to
disillusion. He was transformed into a kind of Protestant saint, only to suffer a fate similar to some of the Catholic saints
when their lives were exposed to the cold light of demythologizing research. His strongest admirers diminished his
achievements by oversimplification. In venerating him as one of the elect, chosen from above to bear a cross for the
suffering poor of Japan, they denied him his other cross, the cross of a complex, often contradictory and tormented
personality.
The tragic irony is that the war which darkened his life precipitated the very reforms he had fought for with such
dedication. The framers of the postwar Japanese constitution and the Allied Occupation fulfilled some of the fondest dreams
of the aging Kagawa. Labor unions were granted full freedom a quarter of a century after he led them in defiance of the
government. Women were guaranteed the rights he advocated. Massive land and agrarian reforms were enacted and the
oppressive power of the huge business monopolies was diminished, though some may argue not enough nor long enough.
Religious freedom was guaranteed, and the famous Article 9 of the new constitution, forbidding the use of war as an
instrument of policy, became the law of the land.
Reformers of the prewar era were soon upstaged by the rush of postwar events. A decade after Kagawa’s death, a
colleague and biographer Shiro Kuroda in 1970 lamented:
Kagawa was tremendously famous. While I traveled all over Japan as Kagawa’s companion for five years, among
the numerous people we met, there was only a single person who did not know who he was. However, nowadays
virtually no one of the younger generation knows Kagawa’s name.
We would paint too solemn a portrait, however, if we ignored the everyday side of his life–his biting humor, his
sense of wonder at the slightest things, his eye for details, his personal quirks. Of the immense nuclear problem he could
say “We must understand atomic science from the religious standpoint. I am interested in the wonderful construction of the
atom.” Riding past the United Nations building in 1950, the now-stocky man in the shabby black suit squinted through his
thick glasses and remarked: “It is too rectangular and it has no symbolism of what the United Nations should stand for.”
He was a sardonic cartoonist who illustrated some of his own works, including satires on environmental pollution in
Japan. He was an accomplished calligrapher who bragged to his children about his skill. A compulsive writer, he managed a
fair amount of his correspondence by dictating letters while enthroned on the toilet in protracted duels with hemorrhoids.
Within the family he insisted with patriarchic authority that the children practice his brand of austerity rather than buy new
clothes, and he cajoled his wife into writing a book because of his fervent belief in women’s liberation. The upstairs rooms of
his house were such a weighty clutter of books that the floors had to be reinforced to prevent their caving in. At times he
launched into his favorite hymns in a voice that could be annoyingly loud and off key.
One would not expect to find all these symptoms of reckless vigor in a rather frail man who could spend hours in
silent meditation. But then Kagawa was a master of the unexpected, a sort of “miracle,” he acknowledged, while rattling off
the list of near fatal diseases he had suffered or the perilous situations he had escaped. Kagawa called himself “God’s
Gambler” and experienced the Biblical injunction that one must lose his life to gain the life abundant. He crossed the death
line and was resurrected a hero. The absorbing details of his struggles, their consequences and how they bear upon our
own struggles in our time–these we are exploring in 1988, the centennial year of his birth.
Chapter 1
Making of a Mystic Rebel
THE MAN WHOSE WORLD-WIDE REPUTATION was based on Christlike service to the poor was emphatically not born in
the poverty of a stable or laid down in a manger. He spent his earliest years in a mansion owned by his father, who was a
merchant, politician, and wealthy scion of a prominent samurai family. But when adverse circumstances came, they hit hard.
They hammered out a person with an incredible ability to bear suffering and to feel it in others, to be mystical and pragmatic,
to attend to the dirtiest details of a suffering beggar and in the same day write ecstatic poems to the God he encountered
behind this complex drama.
Toyohiko Kagawa, Japanese Apostle of the slums was active in Shinkawa Kobe’s slums
To begin to understand Kagawa, one must look at his unusual childhood, his ancestry and the social contradictions
into which he was born. Somewhat puzzling to a Westerner is that he was not only not a Kagawa, but an illegitimate
Kagawa, who nevertheless enjoyed, while they lasted, the privileges of an elite family name.
Kagawa’s father, Denjiro, was born March 17, 1847, in Awa, near the eastern tip of Shikoku, the smallest of the
four main islands in the hundreds of the Japanese archipelago stretching almost from the tropics to the tundra. Nestled in
the southwestern curve of the largest island Honshu, Shikoku is separated from it by the straits known as the Inland Sea.
Denjiro, one of nine sons of sake manufacturer Yanogoro Isobe, became a Kagawa through the Japanese custom of
adoption. In this male-dominated society which placed strong emphasis on the perpetuation of the family name, a clan
without a male to carry on the lineage would often adopt a son, bestow the family name on him and marry him to an eligible
daughter.
This is precisely what happened to Deroiro, who was adopted at age 15 by Seibei Kagawa, head of one of the
most prominent samurai families in the area. The Kagawa family was “nobility” in the Western sense, landholders who had
been in the region for centuries. The very name “Kagawa,” which means “happy river,” derives from their home environs
watered by the Yoshino River just a dozen miles from the ocean. By the Genroku period (1688-1703), the family head had
become the chief of 19 villages, firmly ensconced in the feudal system. On the plains along the river they raised rice, fruit
and silkworms, and were among the first to produce indigo, a major cash crop in the area. Toyohiko himself was eventually
dubbed the “fourteenth heir” of the family. Upon adoption, Denjiro was renamed Junichi, and a marriage was promptly
arranged with a Kagawa daughter, Michi, seven years younger than he. Further evidence of nobility is the fact that the
adoption was arranged at the suggestion of the daimyo (feudal lord) of Awa.
Clinging to such traditional customs contrasted sharply with other aspects of the senior Kagawa’s career. He was
also the product of that turbulent period when Japan leapt from feudalism straight into the “modern” world. By the middle of
the 17th century, Japan had sealed itself off from the world by expelling almost all foreigners, forbidding Japanese to travel
outside the country, banning the import of books from the West, and limiting contact with China. It was the mysterious land of
the samurai and the Tokugawa shoguns.
This meant that the nation had been cut off from the momentous technological and political developments taking
place the world over. Two hundred years later, when the United States opened up Japan with “gunboat diplomacy” and
Commodore Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1854, Japan would change forever. The jolt of seeing the power of the West
convinced the Japanese that they had to adapt rapidly or be conquered. Thus began that combination, often bewildering to
the West, of Japan’s eager adoption of Western ways mixed with its thoroughgoing traditionalism.
Rising discontent within the feudal system itself, feeding upon exposure to new ideas, led to a revolution which
culminated in the emperor’s “restoration” in 1868 and laid the foundations for a constitutional monarchy. What emerged was
not a genuine constitutional monarchy, however, because the emperor was considered a god and vested with divine
authority. Japan was left with a strange mixture of a theocratic state and a constitution which opened the way for democracy.
The emperor served as an anchor of stability, a link with the past, and a focus of unity, backed by a cult of nationalism and
compulsory military service, borrowed from French and German models.
Tremendous strains occurred in the attempt to achieve a sudden transformation from a feudal-agrarian to an
industrialized society, strains that became a factor in driving Japan to totalitarianism in the period between World Wars I and
II. In a single generation, the legendary gowned samurai, swords strapped to their belts, hair in topknots, were replaced by
soldiers carrying guns and dressed in western uniform, and sailors piloting state-of-the-art warships. By the end of a second
generation, the isolated land which walled out all intruders had begun to set forth on its own imperialist course, entering
Korea and engaging in war with China. Millions of peasants moved off the land to the cities which were in the throes of an
industrial revolution.
In the end, the nation was unable to reconcile the ancient paternalistic society with the new demands of an urban
proletariat, an aroused peasantry and a rising middle class emboldened by adoption of customs and ideas from the West.
Modern capitalism, socialism, parliamentary democracy, Christianity, totally new styles of art and literature, and discoveries
of modern science, followed by trade-unionism and Marxism created a tornado of change–a kind of hyper-stimulation the
likes of which the world has rarely seen. Junichi’s career began in this turbulent atmosphere and Toyohiko’s entire life can be
seen as an effort to cope with such staggering diversity and conflict.
One of the co ops Kagawa helped establish
The senior Kagawa was an excellent student, a trait inherited by Toyohiko. He became a partisan in the
Jiyuminken, a “freedom and rights” movement which agitated for governmental reforms and demanded a broader popular
voice. His presidency of the Jidosha (Self-help Society) later caused him political problems. Among his associates were a
number of young activists who later achieved national prominence like Yukio Ozaki, the premier elder statesman in Japan,
who served in public office well into the post World War Il era. Junichi moved to Tokyo in 1875 and was appointed secretary
of the senate, the advisory body to the emperor, but when the Jidosha became critical of an imperial rescript, he was exiled
back to Awa. The Awa governor Takaaki Tomioka, however, appointed him sub-prefect of Tokushima. Junichi finally wearied
of politics, resigned from government, and moved to the port city of Yokohama. Assisted by Heihachi Tanaka, a banker and
entrepreneur, he started a brokerage business exchanging dollars, and subsequently founded a shipping company with
offices at strategic locations.
Junichi’s marriage was unsuccessful, and he was drawn to other women, which was not unusual in a country with
a tradition of concubinage in the upper classes. The system amounted to polygamy, an arrangement which the serious and
sometimes puritanical young Toyohiko strongly condemned. Finally, Junichi left his childless wife Michi and her mother back
on the estate in Awa. He fell in love with a geisha named Kame, who bore him five children, beginning with a son Tanichi
born in 1873. A daughter followed, then Toyohiko on July 10, 1888, after Kame had moved to Junichi’s mansion in the port
and industrial city of Kobe, across the channel from the island home. To legitimize these children of his mistress, the elder
Kagawa had them adopted into the family, an acceptable procedure for maintaining the lineage.
Seven days after birth, the baby was named after the god, Toyouke Daijin, the deity of the Osahiko shrine near the
estate in Awa. He was undoubtedly given the usual ceremonies for newborn babies. After the first month, he would be
dressed in an ornately embroidered black silk kimono and carried into the temple to be blessed. At four months he would
receive his first solid food, dressed in a bright kimono and placed in front of an enameled tray with a small bowl and tiny
chopsticks. He would be carried around on the back of his nurse or mother, as was the custom in Japan.
The child’s first few years were happy, as he was by all accounts a pampered younger sibling in a culture famed for
pampering children. He was said to be bright, gregarious, fun-loving, and privy to all the delights which a wealthy family
could furnish. He apparently charmed the apprentices in his father’s company, and must have shown flashes of the wit and
verbal agility which he later displayed as a speaker and writer.
Then disaster struck, and struck again. Junichi died at age 44 in November 1892 of complications from influenza or
dysentery, although drinking and high living may have been contributing factors. While a parent’s death can obviously have a
shocking effect on a child of four, a chance event made it even more stunning for Kagawa. He had been quarreling with a
playmate and, in a fit of anger, ran and grabbed the wooden lock bar from a door to strike the child. Fortunately, he was
intercepted by a servant, who told him to put the bar down and follow along. Coming up the steps to the room where Junichi
lay, the boy apparently sensed the tension and sorrow in the people around the dying man and began to cry. Kagawa’s
strong aversion to violence in later life may have resulted from the association of his childhood anger with the passing away
of his father.
A few months later on January 10, 1893, Kagawa’s mother also died, just eight days after the birth of her fourth
son, Masuyoshi. Besides the new born baby, she also left behind a two-year-old boy, Yoshinori and an eight-year-olddaughter, Ei.
After a conference of the clan, the 19-year-old Tanichi was designated as head of the family, and little Toyohiko and
his older sister Ei were sent back to the family estate in Awa to live with the widowed Michi and her mother, Sei. This
traumatic change stamped Kagawa for life, as can be seen from his frequent references to it in his later writings and
conversations. He recalled the sadness of departure, of waving to family and friends from the boat as it sailed from Kobe to
Awa, heading for what he later called “a big house without love.”
Though “without love,” it was certainly an interesting piece of real estate. The house was a large structure with
thatched roof, big rooms, latticed windows, doors and screens of tissue paper, and soft straw mats on the wooden floor.
There were numerous outbuildings for the estate’s operations.
While the physical surroundings were comfortable, a harsher and more foolish way to handle children can scarcely
be imagined. The neglected wife, clearly bitter over having foisted on her the children of her husband’s concubine, made
them a target of pent-up anger through scolding, pitiless scorn and in the girl’s case, constant beatings. It was impossible for
her to find a way to display affection for the little intruders, whom she sometimes even taunted for being the children of her
husband’s mistress.
Psychologically, this was a tormenting situation for a gifted and sensitive child who already had been devastated by
the death of both parents and removal from his secure home. Almost as soon as he became conscious of himself, Kagawa
felt like an outsider, an alien, unwanted, unloved. This feeling stayed with him and was the basis for his attraction to
Christianity, for both in its ideals and in the friendly Christians he encountered, he found a home for the homeless. It is
understandable that a physically and emotionally orphaned person would identify with the child in the Nativity who had no
place to stay and the Son of Man who had not a stone on which to rest his head.
The family were members of the Shingon sect of Buddhism, and displayed the typical “god-shelf” in the home as a
domestic altar. On this shelf memorial tablets bore the names of various ancestors inscribed on them. From the time he was
six or seven, Kagawa had to place an offering of food in front of the tablets every morning before he had his own breakfast.
He would enter the dark room, light candles, and strike the little bell. Though the boy’s dominant religious emotion at this
time was fear, he credited this and other Japanese rituals with helping to develop his sense of piety and spiritual presence.
Learning was an early consolation in his life. The family succeeded in enrolling him in the local primary school at
age four years and nine months, when the minimum age was six. This precocious student did extremely well. He was eager
to attend school because of a hunger for learning and a desire to escape from the depressing home atmosphere. His
teachers were impressed with the little prodigy who, besides being a gifted scholar, had unusual talent in calligraphy and
painting. Not surprisingly books became a refuge for him to the end of his life.
Toyohiko spent much time alone and was easily given to crying and self-pity. The enormous compassion he would
later express for the poor and the outcast probably arose from these early feelings and his discovery of “Christian love” as
anything but theoretical. Having been wounded as a child, he was able to respond to the suffering of others with a rare
intensity. He described the scene this way:
We had many rooms in the house and many servants. Our ancestors ruled over nineteen villages in the feudal
system, and we were the wealthiest family in the village. We owned a factory and manufactured indigo, and we
also manufactured some wine and had many fields.
My stepmother and her mother, who also lived with us, did not seem pleased to have me there. They always acted
as if I were an intruder, an interloper. I lived in a big house without any love. So I always pretended I wasn’t there. I
would go out among the flowers and the bamboo trees in the garden, or out to the fields to work with the men, or
into the storeroom to study all the relics–suits of armor and swords and shields–that my ancestors used in the
feudal system. But I was very lonely as a child.
The treasure room was in a cool, dark building with only a small window to let in the light. Its foot-thick mud walls and tile
roof were designed to protect the valuables from fire. It served as an ideal refuge in which to indulge a melancholy sense of
the past and present. Toyohiko actually played with the armor of samurai ancestors, toyed with relics like ornate saddles and
pored over ancient sagas in books and scrolls.
He found small consolation in his sister, who had little relation to him even as a playmate, much less in the area of
emotional support. She was withdrawn and depressed as the result of being beaten often and forced by the stepmother and
grandmother to labor at hard tasks on the farm. Later Kagawa portrayed her in his autobiographical fiction as a pathetic and
half-insane character, a hapless creature for whom he could only express a mixture of pity and scorn.
This is not to say that Kagawa’s character was wholly determined by his early experience. Many people have
suffered similar rejection and loss as children. The difference is that for an exceptionally sensitive child, certain incidents cut
more deeply than usual and are more vividly recollected and dwelt upon.
Such incidents are also used in later life as emotional referents, as means of explaining one’s personality to others.
Kagawa never tired of writing and telling about the misery and loneliness of his childhood. It is poured into his big novel
Shisen o koete (Crossing the Death Line) and appears in other works with titles such as Attitude toward Affliction (1924),
Thorns that Remain (1926), and God and Victory over Suffering (1932).
Again and again he refers back to this sense of alienation and melancholy which becomes a metaphor for the
human condition. The home, the place to belong for such a youth, could not be in the family, but was found in meditation, in
service to others, in participation in the religious community, in Christ.
As if the problems described here were not difficult enough, there were other serious events that emerged as
touchstones for an introspective child. When Kagawa was ten years old, he was falsely accused of causing the death of a
school custodian’s daughter. The little girl had fallen into a ditch, seriously injuring herself, after which she contracted
pleurisy and died. Local children accused young Toyohiko of attacking her and pushing her into the ditch. The community
believed them, and the girl’s father demanded a hundred yen from Kagawa as an obituary gift. In order to make amends,
Kagawa took all the money he had earned selling the eggs from chickens he raised himself and gave it to the child’s
parents. Like other dismal episodes of his childhood, this incident cut deeply enough to affect his emotional life for years to
come. He even wrote about it just six months before his death in 1960: “The saddest event in my entire life was confessing
to the sins which I had not committed and spending my savings for medical expenses for her.”
It was not until much later that Toyohiko found out the girl was injured when she accidently fell while working on an
irrigation treadmill, a device that moved water in buckets. The village children may have accused him because the Kagawa
family was itself becoming the target of resentment among their increasingly disgruntled tenants. His upper class position
was attracting more attention because he had taken on such aristocratic duties as collecting rents, conducting religious
ceremonies, and appearing at social functions. There may also have been envy of his ability in school. Village gossip
undoubtedly contributed to the resentment, because Kagawa was often taunted by the local children for being the “son of a
concubine,” according to his brother Masuyoshi.
In addition to books and the ancient storehouse, he found refuge and solace in nature, spending time along the
river, in the bamboo groves, under towering pine trees on the family grounds, watching birds as he wandered through
mulberry fields. He carried on conversations with the snails and crabs he encountered in sand bars and reeds along the
river. An ancient imperial mausoleum about a mile from the house became one of his favorite sites for contemplation.
Young Toyohiko was also immersed in nature because he was expected to work in the field and take
responsibilities. He had to stand in mud and transplant the young green rice plants, tend animals, help harvest, weave straw
for mats and other household equipment and participate in the operation of the farms. The sense of wonder at creation often
expressed in his poetry and meditations is not some romantic affectation, as is too often the case with “nature poets,” but a
sense of union with nature that was grounded in these childhood experiences. If communication with schoolmates and
family was lacking, then one could commune with the universe, losing oneself in the changes of seasons, growth of crops
and all the rhythms of nature. From this background also developed his later interest in agriculture and condemnation of the
environmental pollution pouring from the factories of Japan’s growing industrial cities.
Besides religious ceremonies in the home and temple, another important early influence was the training in
Confucianism and Buddhism which Toyohiko began to receive at the age of nine at the Daienji Zen Temple in Ohtsu village.
This study of ancient texts would later impel him to write about the synthesis of Asian philosophy and religion with
Christianity in works such as Rethinking Asian Philosophy (Toyo shiso no saiginmi) and Christ and Japan, the latter of which
was written specifically for the English-speaking world.
The Confucian and Buddhist texts he studied tended to compound the boy’s melancholy, because they held up an
ideal of human behavior to which, as far as he could see, no one around him was living up. The ideas of Confucius,
Mencius, and the Chinese classics were easy enough to grasp, but he lamented:
When it comes to putting these ideas into practice it is a truly different matter. And the standards in my home were
certainly far different from these ideas. Every room in the house and the storeroom besides was filled with licentious books, and that was true also of the houses of my relatives. The Buddhist temple alone stood out in contrast as a place where the atmosphere was clean and pure.
Later, he expressed exactly the same attitude toward Christianity, refusing to tolerate a gulf between Christian theory and
practice, and demanding that human deeds match the sacred text. He created enemies in the church establishment with his
scathing criticism of the hypocrisy of Christians who talked mightily of doctrine on Sunday but ignored the poor at the church
steps.
Toyohiko’s youthful impatience with the corruption of the world sometimes spilled over into self-contempt. He
brooded:
My father had transgressed, and as a result I was born. My older brother too had gotten off the track and ruined the
family.
Seeing this, my one prayer was that somehow I might escape from this contaminated atmosphere and might not
have to follow their wicked ways.
Several times, when family business made it necessary for him to take a message to his brother Tanichi, Toyohiko was
appalled to find him drunk and carousing with women in a geisha house.
The women of his house reinforced this fear, often lecturing the child about his father’s dissipation, so that the
horror of squandering his life became an early fixation. In reaction to this, he set up austere regimens of discipline in school.
He puritanically avoided the usual adolescent vulgarity, causing other boys to consider him an eccentric bookworm. When
he encountered popular Darwinian ideas about the inheritance of moral traits, his fears of evil were intensified because he
thought he had inherited this propensity to vice. His phobia of evil at the tender age of eleven was portrayed rather luridly:
I realized that if I were the least bit careless, I myself might be easily drawn into the whirlpool of vice, and that I
would be led away into a future of which no one could predict the outcome. But while I felt this keenly, I could not
see clearly at that time how I was going to rise victorious over this danger.
After the traumatic incident with the custodian’s daughter, it is fair to say that Toyohiko was close to suffering the
kind of mental illness which today would be treated by a counselor or therapist. He was depressed, frequently in tears, and
he spent more of his time alone reading to escape. He persuaded his brother Tanichi to permit him to attend Tokushima
Middle School in Tokushima, the port city at the tip of Shikoku. Tanichi could see that it made sense to get the boy out of his
painful situation and into a boarding school. His birthdate was apparently falsified in order to gain admission, because he
was a year younger than the minimum age. He passed the entrance exams with distinction and enrolled in April 1900. The
prospect of getting away from the village to a new place and receiving a chance to expand overjoyed him. “There was hardly
a happier time in my life, than when I found out I was accepted by the school,” he commented years later.
Toyohiko moved into the dormitory at the Katayama-juku, a private school operated by Sokichi Katayama, a
Christian and English language teacher who also taught at the middle school. The youth was far more comfortable here than
he had ever been at home. Some of his cousins were among the boarders who shared quarters with him. His intense
reading gave him a reputation as a bookworm without necessarily isolating him from the others. Following the lead of the
boys who were attending church, mainly out of curiosity or the desire to learn English, he made his first contacts with foreign
Christians when he attended church with his cousin Itaru Nii.
The school not only led him to Christians, but furnished the troubled boy with two sets of badly-needed surrogate
parents. Dr. Charles A. Logan, a 28-year-old Southern Presbyterian missionary from Kentucky, gave weekly lectures on the
life of Christ for the students, which Toyohiko attended from the time of Logan’s arrival in 1902. He soon met another
Southern Presbyterian missionary at Katayama’s house, Logan’s brother-in-law, Dr. Harry W. Myers from Virginia. Myers
was impressed when Toyohiko recited a story in English to show off his proficiency. The bright-eyed, slender student so
charmed the missionary that he was soon invited to enjoy the hospitality of the minister and his wife, Grace Field Myers. He
was heartened by the kindness of the missionaries and pleased to find people living up to the prescriptions of their sacred
text, in contrast to the corruption that had so disturbed him. Kagawa movingly described his admiration for these
missionaries:
It was in the third term of my third year in Middle School that Dr. Logan, who had just arrived from America, began
a series of lectures on the life of Christ for us students. The lectures were given in English to help us in our study of
that language. It was teh first time I had ever heard English spoken by a foreigner and also the first time I had
heard anything like Christian teaching. I had seen Dr. and Mrs. Myers, but I had never spoken with them.
The student Kagawa was attracted to Logan’s “mild and shining face” and appreciated Logan’s careful preparation
for the class, which included lecture outlines mimeographed with green ink from the missionaries’ old-fashioned machines.
He later reminisced:
His careful preparation for the class drew my heart to him. … It was a time when my thirst for knowledge was deep
and sometimes I felt as though I could ill spare the time to go to Dr. Logan’s home, yet because I liked him so well,
I was a frequent visitor there. To tell the truth, I was the loneliest person in the world just at that time and as I was
searching for someone who would treat me kindly I was naturally drawn to this man, who was so gentle and kindly,
who taught us English without charge and told us the fascinating stories of Genesis with consummate skill.
So excited was Toyohiko about these sessions that he spent far more time studying Logan’s notes than in
preparing for the English classes in the regular school course. He confessed the extent of his need for this type of person: “I
was just fifteen when I heard Dr. Logan’s lecture on Genesis, and for the first time in my life I really began to awake to a
sense of being alive, a human being.”
The American missionaries’ examples of Christianity in action had a lasting impact on the impressionable young
man:
Two homes which have taught me what love means, are the homes of Dr. Logan and Dr. Myers. It is not the Bible
alone which has taught me what Christianity means but the love of these two homes. When tired of the battle and
with no place to go, these two homes were open to me and a welcome always awaited me. These people brought
me up as one of their own children.
While they recognized his brilliance, they could not have predicted the extent of his future success. Mrs. Logan
once remarked, “If we’d known he was going to become so famous, we’d have taught him better pronunciation.” Kagawa
was extremely well-read in English, but his English speech remained heavily accented throughout his life, which was not
necessarily a disadvantage. If anything, it added an exotic touch that captivated audiences in the United States and
reinforced confidence in the universality of the Christian faith.
He was fortunate to encounter these Presbyterian ministers. Not only were they dedicated but they possessed the
intellectual tools to stimulate Kagawa’s eager adolescent mind. They were evangelists–one of Kagawa’s early encounters
with Logan was at a tent-meeting-but they definitely were not the narrow-minded, Bible-pounding zealots commonly
associated with evangelism today. They regarded preaching as a duty rather than a sanctimonious performance for a paying
audience. Their evangelizing message was obedience to the Biblical command to go forth and teach all nations, using the
apostle Paul as their model.
Sensitive to Japanese culture, they would speak, read and publish in both Japanese and English. Though nurtured
in a strictly fundamentalist tradition, they were broad-minded, well-read and unafraid of doctrinal pollution from either avant
garde theologians or secular agnostics. This is evident from the variety of texts they fed the intellectually hungry young
Kagawa. These teachers were far from the stereotype of the missionary as an ethnocentric alien, ignorant of foreign culture,
who inflicted both his religion and an inferiority complex on the natives. Because of the Myers and Logan families, Kagawa
experienced intellectual growth while picking up the fervor of evangelism. Myers recalled him as a “slender, precocious boy
of fourteen,” with a prodigious memory.
Building a fruitful relationship with the missionaries did not eliminate Toyohiko’s troubles. When he was twelve or
thirteen, he was already experiencing the coughing of blood and other alarming symptoms of tuberculosis–the first of many
illnesses that would torment him throughout his life. Worries about health were compounded by serious financial trouble. The
ancient Kagawa estate went bankrupt in April, 1903, because of bad investments, poor management and Tanichi’s high
living, all subsidized by loans against the family property and heir-looms. Much of the property had to be sold to settle debts.
Even the family home had to be vacated.
This financial disaster cut off Toyohiko’s money for tuition, room and board, forcing him to leave the dormitory. He
then moved in with his wealthy uncle, Rokubei Mori, who agreed to pay the tuition. Mori was the president of the Tokushima
railway and politically influential. The uncle was willing to help, but he had no intention of spoiling Kagawa with a free ride
because he was convinced that pampered male children needed a rather harsh introduction to reality and responsibility
when they reach adolescence. In exchange for room and board, the sensitive young scholar was expected to do household
chores and practice his intellectual skills by tutoring his cousin Kanzo.
Uncle Mori was a thoroughly secular man with little use for religion, much less for the alien Christianity. He
objected to Kagawa’s spending time with Christians, studying their bible and showing interest in the church. The strained
relationship broke down into constant arguments. As is often the case when adolescents are lectured by adults, Mori’s
harangues had the opposite effect of driving Toyohiko closer to the dreaded Christians. In the middle of these overwhelming
financial and family troubles, he was dealt yet another blow when his brother Tanichi died on a trip to Korea less than a year
after the family lost most of its wealth.
Myers and Logan recognized that they had a potential convert, but their interest in Kagawa went beyond collecting
a Japanese trophy for the Christian cause. They knew he was brilliant and they saw that he was deeply disturbed by
physical, emotional and financial problems. Myers once consoled him, “Dry your tears with the sun.” This was the Biblical
message of the need to let go of anxiety. Toyohiko continued to be not only welcomed into the missionaries’ homes where
he could dine at any time, but he had free run of Myers’ extensive library.
Intense reader that he was, Toyohiko pillaged the library, and was especially attracted to Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Kant.
Myers recalled him dipping into such works as Christlieb’s Modern Doubt and Belief and Fairbairn’s Philosophy of Religion.
Kagawa began writing for the school paper, and by the time he was seventeen had already published his translation of
Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies in Tokushima’s daily paper. He came under the influence of Tolstoy’s pacifism and the Christian
socialist ideas of Japanese writers like Isoo Abe (1865-1949) and Naoe Kinoshita (1869-1937). The riot of reading that
began at this time and continued through his teen years is portrayed vividly in Crossing the Death Line.
But it was the study of the Bible which had the deepest emotional effect on him. The boy who had no father was
attracted to and soothed by the idea of a loving father in heaven, a deity with whom one could be intimate, and yet, as the
missionaries explained, who permeated the universe. The surrogate parents had introduced him to the cosmic parent.
Devout as they were, Logan and Myers probably didn’t realize the grip that the Bible would come to have on Kagawa,
because an aptitude for religious experience is somewhat hard to detect. Myers first noticed it late in 1903, when the boy
Kagawa came to him sobbing late in 1903, saying that he “read the story of the Cross of Christ, and, like the Apostle Paul,
the love of Christ constrained him.”
Back in the previous summer, when the missionary went on vacation, he had assigned the students some biblical
passages to memorize, one of which was the Sermon on the Mount. While reading and memorizing this passage in Luke,
Kagawa had an intense experience. He was struck by the image of the lilies of the field. It seemed to speak from eternity
straight to his own misery when Christ said: “Consider the lilies how they grow; they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto
you, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothes the grass, how much more will he
clothe you, oh ye of little faith.”
The comfort these lines gave young Kagawa was enormous–an adolescent beset with psychological problems,
alienated, at odds with his family, worried about money, and worried about sheer physical survival. He was suddenly gripped
by the message not to be concerned, to let his worries go, and to exist as nature exists. He would describe this intense
spiritual experience in different ways at different times.
“When I memorized those simple verses,” he said in 1931, “it was an inspiration to me. Through Christ I found the
truth; I found the Life; I found the way to become holy, to be godly.” The episode involved a sense of the presence of God, a
feeling of cleansing from care and fear of corruption. Kagawa felt God asking him “If you want to cleanse your corrupt soul,
and go into a life of purity, look at heaven and earth again with the spirit of the lilies of the field.”’ In trying to describe this
ineffable moment he also said simply: “I discovered my Father in heaven and in me.'”
Toyohiko began to pray to the Father at this time, pulling the futon (quilt) over his face and saying simple prayers
like “O God, make me a good boy! Amen.” God was no longer an abstraction or a theological proposition, but experienced
as an intimate reality. It was apparently so intimate that paternal imagery wasn’t adequate, for he would use maternal
references to describe religious experience, saying that his prayer was like a baby sucking at a mother’s breast or that
people live in God the way a baby lives in its mother’s womb.
Kagawa was not totally “born again,” as his own writings clearly demonstrate. Despite certain intense religious
experiences, he was not transformed overnight. But the consolation of the Bible opened him up to the possibilities of
Christianity and of finding a home in this new faith. His spiritual growth was visibly clear to his minister-teachers.
Finally, in late January of 1904, the usually gentle missionary Myers hurled a challenge to Toyohiko, who had
stopped by to borrow more books. He began interrogating the young man, asking if he believed in Christ. When Kagawa
replied affirmatively and added that he was praying, Myers continued, “Why don’t you come to church?” His reply was that
his uncle would throw him out of the house if he did. Uncle Mori disliked Christians partly because Catholic converts were
responsible for promoting the 16th century revolts. Myers countered that the early Christians had not seen eye-to-eye with
the Roman Empire.
“You’re a coward,” Myers shouted.
“What?” the stunned disciple asked.
“You’re a coward,” Myers repeated.
This stung Toyohiko. It was not only a shocking thing to hear from the beloved minister, but a challenge to his
manhood. To be called a coward in a land with a samurai history and a strong military cult was a brutal blow, even to a boy
as unconventional as Toyohiko. A real man, Myers had implied, would stand up for his beliefs, regardless of the
consequences. Young Kagawa accepted the challenge, and began attending church on Sunday.
Toyohiko was baptized on February 14, 1904, by Dr. Myers at the Tokushima Japanese Christian Church. He was
15 years old. This was the official beginning of a religious life that would encompass a variety of religious experiences, from
the dark night of the soul when the total absence of God drove him to despair, to mystical experiences when he felt himself
immersed in a divine presence. He would suffer many twists and turns in his personal development over the next few years
before he became more deeply confirmed in the Christian faith. It was a period of rapid intellectual growth, severe illness,
and intense soul-searching.
Copyright © Robert Schildgen 1988
All rights reserved
Published by Centenary Books
