Kagawa's Six-Foot Room in the Shinkawa Slums

In 1909, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa walked out of his comfortable dormitory in Kobe and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums — the most desperate district in the city. Beggars slept on his floor. He gave away his clothes, his blankets, his food, until he contracted trachoma from a man he had taken in and nearly lost his eyesight.…