He was born in Kobe, Hyogo, son of the shipping agent Kagawa Junichi. His mother had been a geisha in Tokushima, and he was not the child of his father's lawful wife. He would devote his life to the poor and become known worldwide as the saint of the slums.
As a small child he lost his father and mother one after another and was taken in with his sister by the main family in Tokushima. Raised by his father's lawful wife and grandmother, with no blood ties, and gossiped about by those around him, he had a lonely childhood. Later his brother's extravagance bankrupted the family, and he moved to his uncle's home.
While at Tokushima Middle School he was baptized by the American missionary H. W. Myers and became a Christian. Reading Abe Isoo and Kinoshita Naoe drew him to Christian socialism, and influenced by Tolstoy's antiwar thought he once refused the school's military drill.
Aspiring to be a Christian evangelist, he entered the preparatory theology course of Meiji Gakuin in Tokyo. While there he wrote an essay on world peace that ran in a Tokushima newspaper. He later transferred to the new Kobe Theological School, but suffered from tuberculosis and doubts about his faith.
Resolving to express the spirit of Jesus through the problems of the poor, he moved into the Shinkawa slum in Kobe and began street preaching. He cared for people suffering from illness and hunger and later opened a cheap eatery. This work became the start of the later Iesu-dan.
He married Shiba Haru, whom he had met in the slum, in a simple ceremony at a Kobe church. He invited his slum neighbors to the reception and introduced his wife, telling them to come to her whenever they were in need. Haru devoted herself to relief work with him and became a social activist herself.
He went to the United States, studying at Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary while observing American social work and labor movements. The next year his study of the psychology of the poor, based on his slum experience, was published. He came to believe labor unions were key to ending poverty.
After returning he began free medical rounds in the Kobe slum and, allying with Suzuki Bunji's Yuaikai, founded its Kansai labor federation and became its chairman. This year he also qualified as a pastor of the Church of Christ in Japan, widening his work in both religion and social movements.
His autobiographical novel Shisen o Koete sold over a million copies in a year, and translations into English and other languages made his name known worldwide. Most of his royalties went to social causes. This year he founded the Kobe purchasing cooperative, starting the consumer cooperative movement that led to today's Co-op Kobe.
He led the major labor dispute at the Mitsubishi and Kawasaki shipyards in Kobe, heading large worker demonstrations. But after clashes with police, he and many other leaders were arrested, and the dispute ended in the workers' defeat. His nonviolent approach was fiercely criticized by radicals.
With Sugiyama Motojiro he founded the Japan Farmers' Union, committing himself to the farmers' movement to protect tenant farmers. The union spread rapidly, passing 70,000 members three years later. As radicals took over the labor movement, he shifted the center of his work to the countryside.
When the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, he hurried to Tokyo and began relief for the victims. Based in Honjo, he ran a wide range of religious, medical and childcare work and set up consumer and credit cooperatives. This work is still carried on today by the Honjo Kagawa Memorial Hall in Tokyo.
As the war widened, his peace views were deemed dangerous, and the military police took him in for questioning. Interrogations continued, and in the later war years he, like many religious figures, took a cooperative stance toward the war, said by some to have been to protect his colleagues and projects.
After the war he formed a liberal discussion group to begin political activity and took part in founding the Japan Socialist Party. In later years he devoted himself to the world federalist movement to end war by uniting the world, and was nominated for both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize.
He died at his home in Kamikitazawa, Setagaya, Tokyo. The critic Oya Soichi praised him, saying most movements rooted in people's lives could be said to have begun with Kagawa. A statue of him stands in Washington National Cathedral in the United States, alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and others.
Hagiwara SakutarōTanizaki Jun'ichirōNakayama ShinpeiKikuchi KanKishida RyūseiKanakuri ShisōAkutagawa RyūnosukeIchikawa Fusae
People of the Taishō period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.