Tour's End

Up & down the land for the past six months, crossing and recrossing his path, has gone Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa, No. 1 Christian of Japan. Nearly turned away from the U. S. by Federal immigration authorities in California because his eyes are infected with trachoma (TIME, Dec. 30), this soft-faced, gold-toothed Japanese scrupulously obeyed special Public Health Service regulations laid down for his evangelistic tour. He traveled with a doctor, declined to shake hands with anyone, never entered a private home, made sure that linen and table utensils were sterilized after he used them. Last week Kagawa was in good health after a grueling itinerary during which he spoke before an estimated 750,000 people in 150 cities. About to sail for Oslo, Norway and the annual convention of the World Sunday School Association, he was to speak this week on a nationwide NBC hookup. His message: "I have learned to love the American people. . . . You have a wonderful future. . . . I ask your prayers for the maintenance of peace between this country and Japan. I bid farewell to you and I pray God's blessing upon you."

Many an observer who recalled that Kagawa visited the U. S. in 1931 without causing inordinate excitement credited much of the success of his latest tour to his sponsors, mostly liberal evangelical churchmen, who did able advance work in stirring up church interest wherever the little yellow man was booked. Before Kagawa had traveled very far, many people heard that his messages, mostly about "the love principle of Christ," were almost incomprehensible, delivered with a squeaky voice in a heavy Japanese accent. Nevertheless, out of sheer curiosity many a citizen obtained a free ticket to see the man who had been allowed in the U. S. through the intervention of President Roosevelt. Likewise ministers, whom he was in the habit of scolding because they do nothing but "preach, preach, preach," were eager to meet a man of God who had performed such practical miracles as marketing Japanese three-piece men's suits for $1.35. And some genuinely religious folk saw in Dr. Kagawa, who was converted from Buddhism by Southern Presbyterians and is a minister in the Union Church of Christ in Japan, a living example of the worth of foreign missions.

Chief ministerial antagonist of Dr. Kagawa was Dr. J. Frank Norris, blatant Baptist who called him a Communist, held rival meetings when the gentle Japanese was in Rochester last April, tried to get the Southern Baptist Convention to scratch him as a guest speaker last month (TIME, June i). Because Dr. Kagawa has sponsored seven kinds of successful cooperative movements in Japan and because he expounded them wherever he found listeners in the U. S., some businessmen professed to be alarmed. Warned Tide, advertising monthly: "What Dr. Kagawa and his cohorts mean to advertising in the long view is more serious by a good deal than anything Dr. Schlink of Consumers' Research and his cohorts mean." Referring to Dr. Kagawa as "the Jap," the Ohio Agency Bulletin told insurance agents that co-operatives "would put you out of business."

Toyohiko Kagawa leaves in his wake in the U. S. a National Coordinating Advisory Committee, to attempt to carry on his work, and a committee to raise 1,000,000 yen ($300,000) in ten years to build 1,000 rural Christian churches in Japan.

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