Kagawa's Christmas in the Kobe Slums

On Christmas Day, 1909, a twenty-one-year-old seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa walked into the Shinkawa slums of Kobe, Japan — six square blocks where fifteen thousand people lived in crushing poverty. He did not come to survey conditions or write a report. He came to stay. Kagawa moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack and immediately gave away his quilts, his shirts, even his shoes.…