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.…