Kagawa's Six-Foot Room

In 1909, a young Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa did something his professors could not understand. He left his comfortable dormitory in Kobe and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums, one of the most desperate neighborhoods in all of Japan. Raw sewage ran through the alleys. Tuberculosis claimed lives weekly. Kagawa had already survived the disease himself.…