Lost Leader

A tuberculous, half-blind Japanese who used to be a Manhattan butler is not only Japan's greatest Christian but one revered all over the Christian world. He is Toyohiko Kagawa, founder of a Kingdom of God movement which was to Christianize 1,000,000 Japanese by this year and bring Japan's Christian churches together in a powerful campaign for social justice. Last week U. S. churchmen were discussing reports from Japan that the Kingdom of God is functioning none too well, that its leader has left it.

Born 44 years ago to a Privy Councillor and his concubine, Toyohiko Kagawa was registered as legitimate, brought up in luxury, educated for a political career. When the child was n his father died and a rich uncle took him in. A Buddhist, Kagawa studied English in a Presbyterian English Bible Class. At 15 he became a Christian, was promptly disinherited. His health failing, he lived for a time in a poor fishing village, then for four years in the slums of Kobe. He went to the U. S., studied at Princeton Theological Seminary, earned expenses at odd times as a butler to various Manhattan families. Author of some 40 best-selling novels and devotional works, Toyohiko Kagawa earns $10,000 a year of which he spends $40 a month for himself and gives the rest to his work. He runs three social settlements, aids a leper colony, maintains a research bureau, heads a great organization of consumers', producers' and credit cooperatives. Many a Japanese, including himself, wears a "Kagawa suit" which costs $3 (winter model) or $1.35 (summer). Kagawa founded the Farmer-Peasant Party, has sat in the Japanese Diet as its only outspoken radical. The Government used to put him in jail for helping strikers and stirring up the populace. He would smile amiably, preach to anyone who listened, continue writing books. Like the Mahatma Gandhi, Kagawa keeps a day of silence every week. He too has foreign followers. His Madeline Slade is a Miss Helen Topping, who notes down everything he says. Rare is the Kagawa day that does not begin with prayers long before dawn, continue 18 or 20 hours. He speaks nearly every night, fills auditoriums with paying listeners. Never in good health, he contracted tuberculosis several years ago. Forced to rest, he nevertheless dictated three books. His partial blindness comes from trachoma contracted in the slums. One eye is gone. To read he must use a powerful magnifying glass. Eleven years ago Kagawa founded the Friends of Jesus, an order resembling the Franciscans which now has 1,300 members. In 1929 he started the Kingdom of God and two years later a Christian Internationale dedicated to "world awakening" through small local prayer groups. Japan's churches, with 250,000 members, took to the Kingdom of God inasmuch as it aimed to expand and unify their work. Even Buddhists and Shintoists admired it. This year when the first trial period was over, the Kingdom of God leaders voted to continue the same program for two years more. But henceforth Toyohiko Kagawa will no longer lead the Kingdom of God. In his plans the social and economic duties of the churches loomed large. He would build a backfire against Communism, which like many another churchman he believes is Christianity's most dangerous enemy. But Kagawa discovered that economics did not interest his colleagues so much as multitudinous conversions which would look well upon paper. Kagawa announced he would go it alone.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.