Kagawa, the Christian who planted trade unionism in Japan

The Christian who got Japan's labour movement off the ground

For decades, Japan was the great counterexample to theories of revolution: an industrialised country with no strong labour movement and no significant Christianity. Until Toyohiko Kagawa came along. Orphaned, converted to Christianity as a teenager and disowned by his family, this pastor, economist and activist drove the country's first trade union organisations. He was no isolated case: Sun Yat-sen himself, the father of modern China, was a Christian, and Gandhi acknowledged that the idea of peaceful revolution came to him from reading the Sermon on the Mount.

The thesis, defended by Denis de Rougemont and popularised in Spanish by Leonardo Boff, holds that the idea of social revolution is coextensive with the world influenced by Christianity. In Asia, where that influence was marginal, the absence of home-grown social revolutions would be the fact to be explained. Kagawa's biography fits perfectly: he was born in Kobe on 10 July 1888, was orphaned and enrolled in a Bible class to learn English. That class ended up turning the boy into a social militant.

Some do qualify the story. The current perception of Christianity in Japan is rather ambiguous, sometimes associated with the aggressive proselytising of evangelical groups. And the Spanish counterpoint is no less striking: some cite Natural Law as the origin of human dignity and human rights, with the Valladolid controversy in the background. Others, however, recall that Christianity has also blessed authoritarian regimes. Was Christianity the salt that leavened social change, or simply one more alibi for telling history backwards?