The Servant Master

One morning the Japanese Emperor summoned a man named Kagawa to the royal palace and asked him to set forth for him the plans he should follow so that it might be said of him that he was a man of the people. After the talk on this subject had lasted exactly an hour and a half, Kagawa drew from his pocket an old Bible and read from it the following: "Whoever among you would be great, let him be servant of all."

Then he turned to the Emperor and said to him: "Your people, Your Majesty the Emperor, bear you sincere love and respect; yet a man becomes godlike only by serving the whole!" And this counsel, which Kagawa uttered before the Emperor, was the very one he himself took as his model in his teaching and his preaching throughout the forty years of his life — which has led millions of people to acknowledge him as the emblem of true Christianity in the world.

This man has headed several vital projects and by his efforts has changed the Japanese social order in several respects. He said that Communism is an incurable disease past healing, and that it condemns the social order to extinction.

At the beginning of his life Kagawa tasted the bitterness of insult and torment, for his father's wife and her mother used to beat him without mercy; and he did not learn that there is love and tenderness in the hearts of men until he was sent to the Americans' school, where he tasted the sweetness of love, kindness, and virtue from the teachers who took him into their care, brought him to their home, and taught him that God is love and has created all men equal, and that he who devotes his life to the service of others can change many things from the side of evil to the side of good. This inspired in Kagawa the concern to raise up the fallen outcast, to love the unloved, and to serve the wronged.

So Kagawa prepared himself for Christian service with utter diligence at the Christian college in Tokyo. But the tremendous efforts he put forth in his studies weakened his constitution, so that in his second year he was stricken with tuberculosis. His friends sent him to the seashore to recover, and there he passed his time composing a novel which he called "Across the Death-Line."

When he returned to Tokyo he enrolled at the theological school in Kobe, and his one concern was to hasten into missionary work, taking the example of the Good Samaritan as his motto. So he went preaching and proclaiming the Gospel in the filthiest quarters of Shinkawa, heedless of his health. Those filthy, pestilent places, swarming with insects and worms, were the dwelling of eleven thousand beggars, gamblers, thieves, and wretched outcasts of their kind.

One evening in the year 1900 Kagawa took up his few belongings and made his way to Shinkawa, and there he remained, teaching and preaching, for some fifteen years.

During that period he published his sound thoughts and views in more than a hundred books; whereupon the inhabitants of that city shunned him. But when they came to know for certain that his aim was to serve them freely, without recompense, most of them warmed to him and respected him.

And when Kagawa had spent the five dollars he had received from the school as a reward for his diligence and application, he went and worked at cleaning chimneys at a monthly wage of five dollars, which he would spend on buying rice as food for the poor; and he used to call his "parish" "my little kingdom"!

Before long, poor people in great numbers attached themselves to him. One of them asked him for his shirt and he gave it to him; then he asked him for his cloak, and he did not begrudge him that either. But one day a certain ruffian asked him for some money, and as he had nothing to give, that ruffian struck him with his fist upon the mouth, and his front teeth fell out. He would not answer the cruel blow in kind, for he was certain that beneath those filthy, tattered garments was a soul that God had created, and that his companions were capable of renewal if the chance were given them. And so it came to pass, for they began to come to him with the problems of their wretched lives. They made their children attend the Sunday schools he held for them, and they even used to gather their few coins to help their poor kin.

It happened one day, during his absence, that a journalist came to his hut, and as he was searching through his effects his eye fell on a file

of manuscript papers. On reading them he found them to be the novel Kagawa had written during his stay at the seashore, the one he had called "Across the Death-Line." When he returned to his hut in the evening, he found a sum of money on his table as the price of that novel. And what he did was to build with that money a room in his hut, which he made a hospital for the sick. To this very day he spends out of his income of fifty thousand dollars on charitable projects, keeping only a little of it to provide for his own living.

And seeing among the people an ever greater eagerness to buy his novels, he set about showing the world, in his many useful writings, the harms of filthy places.

It was his habit to write at night, when everyone was sunk in sleep, until the break of dawn.

Through this great diligence of his, in 1924 his gifts and his sound opinions came to light, and the Japanese people adopted them; they had a telling effect and won the desired acceptance in its society — among other things, the government wiped out from six great Japanese cities all the filthy, pestilent quarters.

The change that came over Kagawa's life, raising him from an ordinary servant of the poor to a great social reformer, took place in 1914, when his friends asked him to leave the country and go to the theological seminary at Princeton to complete his studies there. When he returned again to Kobe he joined the society of the (Labor Movement); but the times were hard, and the workman toiled the whole span of his day and received only a meager wage.

So Kagawa wrote at that time criticizing the treatment of the workers, and proclaimed: the workers are not commodities to be bought and sold; they are persons in their own right, and they must be granted their full rights. Thereupon the workers went on strike, and they compelled Kagawa, their champion, to march with them in a demonstration whose result was that the police seized him, beat him, and threw him into prison for thirteen days. On coming out of prison he found that the Communists had spread word of him among the strikers that he was a foolish man and a tool in the hands of the workers. And they agreed in saying that the best way to break the power of the men of money was to break the machines. So there gathered about

1,500 men, all armed with iron implements and the like, and they drew near a great yard without meeting opposition from anyone, for there were no guards there — only one person standing on a narrow bridge. Scarcely had that throng reached him when it halted in its march and was overcome with shame, for they saw him kneeling in prayer; and it turned back at once the way it had come.

In 1925 Kagawa, by the force of his influence, abolished the unjust law that forbade the assembly of trade unions, for the farmlands of Japan at that time had become open ground for the Communist bands. In the novels he wrote he said a great deal about the farmers' project, besides the fiery speeches he addressed to the thousands of the people the length and breadth of the country. And when the farmers' delegates accepted his counsels, he made them the nucleus of the movement concerned with the orderly division of estates. Then he brought out a new magazine entitled "Land and Liberty," and the result was that the first spark was struck for a congress of the peasants of all Japan, and the Union of the Peasants of Japan was founded. Thus his projects went on advancing from good to better, until the war came and destroyed all that he had built — schools, orphanages, and churches — with the bombs of the air raids. When the war laid down its burdens, weariness had worn out Kagawa's strength; even so, he spared no effort in serving those of his flock who remained, in holding them together and watching over them. He pitched tents and built orphanages for the refugees of the war, and went about from street to street preaching the Gospel, feeling that that time was a fitting opportunity for the guidance of the Japanese. And we see that this intrepid man has, to this hour, lost not an atom of his resolve and his energy, though he is afflicted with trachoma and other tormenting diseases. We see too that his books sell by the thousands, and that all who work with him possess great strength. He directs three factories and has founded many schools for the workers. And we see him now preaching to the millions of the people, spreading among them the message of love and brotherhood, and proclaiming to them his single program: Serve all.