Toyohiko Kagawa
| Toyohiko Kagawa | |
|---|---|
c. 1920
|
|
| Born |
July 10, 1888 Kobe, Japan |
| Died | April 23, 1960 (aged 71) |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Occupation | Social reformer, peace activist, labor activist, evangelist, author |
| Spouse(s) | Haru |
Toyohiko Kagawa (賀川 豊彦 Kagawa Toyohiko?, 10 July 1888 – 23 April 1960) was a Japanese Christian pacifist, Christian reformer, and labour activist. Kagawa wrote, spoke, and worked at length on ways to employ Christian principles in the ordering of society and in cooperatives. His vocation to help the poor led him to live among them. He established schools, hospitals, and churches.
Kagawa was born in Kobe, Japan to a philandering businessman and a concubine. Both parents died while he was young. He was sent away to school, where he learned from two American missionary teachers, Drs. Harry W. Myers and Charles A. Logan, who took him into their homes.
Kagawa learned English from these missionaries and converted to Christianity after taking a Bible class in his youth, which led to his being disowned by his remaining extended family. Kagawa studied at Tokyo Presbyterian College, and later enrolled in Kobe Theological Seminary. While studying there, Kagawa was troubled by the seminarians' concern for technicalities of doctrine. He believed that Christianity in action was the truth behind Christian doctrines. Impatiently, he would point to the parable of the Good Samaritan. From 1914 to 1916 he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. In addition to theology, through the university's curricular exchange program he also studied embryology, genetics, comparative anatomy, and paleontology while at Princeton.
In 1909 Kagawa moved into a Kobe slum with the intention of acting as a missionary, social worker, and sociologist. In 1914 he went to the United States to study ways of combating the sources of poverty. In 1916 he published Researches in the Psychology of the Poor based on this experience in which he recorded many aspects of slum society that were previously unknown to middle-class Japanese. Among these were the practices of illicit prostitution (i.e., outside of Japan's legal prostitution regime), informal marriages (which often overlapped with the previous category), and the practice of accepting money to care for children and then killing them.
...
Wikipedia