Toyohiko Kagawa and the Shinkawa Slums

In December 1909, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa walked into the Shinkawa slums of Kobe — a six-block stretch of open sewers, gambling dens, and desperate poverty — and refused to leave. He rented a tiny room, barely six feet square, and began sharing it with anyone who knocked.

Kagawa had been raised in wealth. His family expected a respectable career. Instead, he gave away his clothes, his food, his blankets. When a man with trachoma needed a place to sleep, Kagawa shared his mat and contracted the disease himself, nearly losing his sight. He organized labor unions, started cooperatives, built schools, and campaigned for the rights of workers crushed under industrial greed.

His fellow seminarians were puzzled. They fasted and prayed faithfully. Kagawa did too — but he insisted that worship divorced from justice was empty performance. He believed the prophets meant exactly what they said.

This is precisely the fast the Almighty chooses: not pious ritual performed in comfortable sanctuaries, but the willingness to loose the chains of injustice, to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the wandering poor into your own home. When Kagawa emptied himself for the forgotten people of Shinkawa, Isaiah's ancient promise proved true — his light broke forth like the dawn, and healing followed wherever he went.