Christmas letter 1994

Christmas, 1994; New Year, 1995

Dear Friends,

We wish you and your loved ones a blessed Christmas and a joyous New Year. May the next year bring you good health and assure you of God’s love.

We have all been well this past year. Mina and Noah traveled to Japan by themselves to spend June and July with their grandparents in Tokyo. They enjoyed attending the local public school until it let out for vacation in mid-July. When they returned in August, we took our family vacation as a camping trip in Yellowstone National Park. It was thrilling to see the splendid natural wonders and to hike in the majestic country. Ema was excited to start kindergarten here in the fall. Mina is busy in 7th grade and Noah is in 3rd grade. All three children have Japanese school on Saturday which requires much extra study for the older ones. Mina still takes piano and Noah takes violin. Ema likes her keyboard, but is not taking lessons yet. Ikuko is teaching in the Japanese school in addition to her Bible study and helping at Ema’s school. Rick is still a pediatrician at the Kaiser-Permanente clinic in Antioch. Rick and Ikuko, jointly accepted the job as deacons representing the local parish of our church. We are seeing more closely the problems of people around us.

The important family event this year was the death of Ikuko’s grandmother in Tokyo. She was 101 years old. She had been a sharp, strong, dynamic woman all her life until recent years. It is amazing to think of the changes she had seen throughout her lifetime. She was born in 1893. That was only 39 years after Commodore Perry with a U.S. Navy squadron concluded a treaty which opened Japan to the outside world . Japan had been isolated for over 250 years. At the time Japan closed its doors in 1638, the Thirty Years War stemming from the Protestant Reformation was in full force in Northern Europe, Europeans were just beginning to settle in North America and the Taj Mahal was being built in India. Some aspects of Japanese culture changed little during the isolation period, but then changed dramatically since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Industrial Revolution came to Japan. Her lifetime saw the First Sino-Japanese war from 1894, the Russo-Japanese war from 1904, the annexation of Korea in 1910, World War I (as an Allied power) from 1914, the increased democratization of the government from 1919, the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, the start of the Showa reign (Emperor Hirohito) in 1926, the trend toward a totalitarian government from 1932, the Second Sino-Japanese war from 1937, World War II (as an Axis power) from 1941, the atomic bombings of 1945, the post-war poverty and rebuilding, the new constitution of 1947, return of sovereignty from 1951, the emergence as a world economic power and the demonstrations and riots of the 1960’s, the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, the Japan World Exposition of 1970 and the end of the Showa reign in 1989. This year, the family is observing mourning at her loss.

Recently, we’ve been fascinated with our study of the life of a man who lived in the same era as Ikuko’s grandmother. It began at a used book sale, when we discovered a book about the 1950 American tour of Japanese author, social reformer and Christian evangelist, Toyohiko Kagawa. He was born in Kobe, Japan in 1888 as the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner and influential politician. After both his mother and father died when he was 4 years old, he found no love in his father’s home with his step-mother. He finally found Christian love from two American missionary teachers after he went away for high school. When he became a Christian, his family disowned him. He put himself through Meiji Gakuin University, studying to be a Christian minister. He angered his fellow students by taking the homeless into his dormroom and was beaten for speaking against the Russo-Japanese war. After his second year, he began preaching in the slums and soon developed tuberculosis. His friends sent him to the seaside to recuperate. Sure that he was going to die, he threw himself to writing his first novel on assorted scraps of paper. He prayed that if he could live, he would devote himself to helping God’s children in the slums. He miraculously recovered and then attended Kobe Theological Seminary. He believed that Christian love meant action, not doctrine. He began working and preaching in the crowded, disease infested Shinkawa slums of Kobe in addition to his daily studies. After finding that he was an outsider, on Christmas eve, 1909, he moved into a tiny shanty in the slums. There, he took in the unwanted, helped the ill, started a Sunday School and preached in the streets. He was robbed, beaten, ridiculed and often went hungry. He began writing to tell about the slums and to support his work. When he found that his books sold well, he stayed up nights to write, sitting between the people he took into his shanty. In 1914, his friends sent him to Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. When he returned to the slums in 1917 and found that some of his Sunday School students had turned to crime, he decided that his approach had been wrong. These people could not be saved from the bottom, they had to first be helped from their desperate situation. Many conditions were like those described by Dickens during England’s Industrial Revolution. The Communists were exploiting the situation, but he felt that they offered no solution. The only solution was in promoting social welfare through Christian brotherly love. He began organizing laborers to help themselves through schools and cooperation. When, in 1921, the longshoremen of Kobe organized Japan’s first labor union and went on strike for the right to organize, they asked Kagawa to lead them. He insisted on peace. While he was in jail, the Communist members organized a march to attack the docks. Upon his release, he went to a bridge in front of the docks. When the 35,000 angry longshoremen armed with clubs and bricks came upon the small, lone figure of Kagawa standing in the middle of the bridge praying, they turned and went home. Negotiations began a few days later. Labor unions soon spread throughout Japan. In 1921, he acquired trachoma from the slums and went blind. When he regained some sight in one eye, he went back to work. This time he concentrated on the poverty stricken small and tenant farmers who still lived in near feudal conditions. He organized the Japan Peasant’s Union for sharing information and education and began organizing rural producer and consumer cooperatives so farmers could help each other. Over the next 10 years, he was busy preaching, writing, campaigning for workers’ and farmers’ rights, for revitalization of the slums, for universal manhood suffrage and for peace, organizing cooperatives and political parties, founding churches and orphanages and lecturing throughout the world where those who heard him formed local Kagawa societies. After the 1923 earth quake which killed 150,000 people, he organized relief efforts and was invited to be on the rebuilding commission. In 1931, after the Japanese army brutally destroyed Shanghai, he traveled there to preach an apology for his countrymen. He was arrested upon his return. During the next 10 years, he continued his activities, more centered on Christian evangelism and world peace, including several more world tours and several more arrests for preaching peace. In 1941, after his return from the United States, he spoke before the Diet (congress) in a plea for peace. He was shattered by the outbreak of war. The war saw his repeated arrest, his books banned, his cooperatives nationalized, his unions outlawed and his foundations destroyed by bombings. After the war, he was asked to be on the new Cabinet, but declined, was asked by the Prime Minister to go to General MacArthur to request food for the Japanese people and was asked by the Emperor to lecture him about his new figurehead position. The first official public visit by the Emperor was to Kagawa at one of his newly founded orphanages. Following his post-war reconstruction efforts, he devoted himself to Christian evangelism. His dream was to see Japan arise from the ashes as a peaceful, socially conscious nation devoted to Christian brotherhood. To this end, he wrote, preached and lectured throughout Japan, as well as traveling throughout the world to recruit missionaries to Japan until his death in 1960. He had always lived in poverty, giving the large income from his 130 books to his charities.

This small, physically weak, partially blind, dynamic man believed in Christian love in action and example. He enthralled audiences throughout the world with his story and his preaching. His life affected millions. He was truly an example of how God can work through a dedicated believer.