KAGAWA OF JAPAN

A very short book about a rather remarkable Japanese who is probably not as well known to the general American public as he ought to be. This is an unpretentious book, of no great style, but Toyohiko Kagawa is worth reading about. A Christian minister, scholar, novelist, social worker, government adviser, Kagawa might easily be called the Gandhi of Japan. Indeed, the author compares him to St. Francis of Assisi. One of the five illegitimate children of a wealthy Japanese industrialist and a geisha, Kagawa became a Christian as a young man and went into the dreadful slums of Kobe to live and to care for the poor and the sick. Indeed, through sharing his hut with a beggar, he contracted the disease which was to half blind him before his death at 72 last year. A forthright pacifist, Kagawa risked imprisonment and ostracism in his opposition to Japanese military ventures from the war with Russia on. Yet he generally managed to emerge relatively unscathed. He also showed amazing organizational ability and played an active role in labor and in other social action groups.... His record is the book.