Kagawa and the Shinkawa Slums

On Christmas Day, 1909, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums of Kobe. The neighborhood reeked of open sewage. Tuberculosis moved from house to house like a landlord collecting rent. Kagawa had been raised in wealth, educated in prestigious schools, and could have pastored a comfortable congregation. Instead, he gave away his possessions — his clothes, his blankets, his food — until he himself fell ill.

Neighbors thought he was mad. But Kagawa had read the prophets, and he understood something his comfortable peers had missed: worship that ignores the suffering next door is not worship at all. He organized labor unions for exploited workers. He built credit cooperatives so families could escape predatory lenders. He established schools, clinics, and churches — not as charity projects, but as acts of repentance for a society that had looked away.

Over the next four decades, Kagawa's work transformed communities across Japan. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice.

Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line. The Almighty tells His people their fasting means nothing while the oppressed remain in chains. But to those who share their bread, who bring the homeless poor into their house, who clothe the naked — God promises, "Your light will break forth like the dawn." Kagawa staked his life on that promise, and the dawn came.