• U.S.

Religion: Quarantined Christian

4 minute read
TIME

The First Baptist Church of Oakland, Calif, was all ready one night last week to extend a rousing welcome to a visitor from Japan, the No. i Christian of that land. Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa. The church folk of Los Angeles would gather the following night to greet the soft-faced, myopic 47-year-old man of God whose arrival has been heralded in church papers for months. Few days after Christmas the Young People’s Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Memphis, had on its program the name of the great Dr. Kagawa, who went to Princeton Theological Seminary (1914-15) and helped earn his way by serving as butler to Manhattan families.

Because he is an expert on Japanese consumers’, producers’, credit and medical cooperatives, a seminar on Consumers’ Cooperation, sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches and to be held in Indianapolis over New Year’s, was planned with Dr. Kagawa as its featured member.

The Fourth Southwide Southern Baptist Training Conference in Birmingham counted on Dr. Kagawa making another flying trip South. Other Southern and Eastern cities had him down for addresses before he was to appear, early in February, at another co-operative meeting in Kansas City. The Illinois Council of Religious Education was listed for a speech by the convert Christian who has written more than 50 books, many of them Japanese best sellers.

For March sponsors of the hardworking, ascetic-living Japanese put him down for meetings in Ohio, Indiana. Michigan and the Southwest, promised Colgate-Rochester Theological Seminary that in mid-April Dr. Kagawa would deliver its annual Rauschenbusch Lectures. After that the East and Canada were to have him until June, when he planned to sail for Europe and the World Sunday School Convention at Oslo.

For a few tense days last week the church folk of Oakland. Los Angeles and 88 other cities on Toyohiko Kagawa’s itinerary were in a frenzy of alarmed excitement. As the result of heavy weather the Chichibu Maru with Dr. Kagawa aboard was half a day late reaching San Francisco. Churchmen of the San Francisco area gathered at a large dinner in Oakland, heard speeches and telegrams greeting the guest of honor who was not there. Next morning when the steamship was finally berthed. Dr. Kagawa did not walk down the gangplank and a frantic churchman telegraphed Secretary of Labor Perkins: “EARNESTLY IMPLORE YOU TELEPHONE ANGEL ISLAND EXPEDITING DR KAGAWA’S EYE EXAMINATION.”

At the U. S. Quarantine Station on Angel Island two Public Health Service doctors confirmed what immigration officials had suspected and what Dr. Kagawa’s friends have known for years: he suffers from trachoma. He contracted this highly infectious eye disease during the 14 years he voluntarily spent in the filthiest slums of Kobe, laying a solid foundation for his views as a Christian radical. After 13 operations, Dr. Kagawa has lost the sight of one eye, must use a powerful magnifying glass to read with the other.

Refused entry into the U. S., Dr. Kagawa tranquilly remarked: “There is an American heaven and an American hell, and I want to see them both. … I hope I shall be permitted to enter.”

Church folk throughout the U. S. began telegraphing Secretary Perkins. The Federal Council of Churches brought Dr. Kagawa’s plight to the attention of President Roosevelt. Promptly, on the third day of the good doctor’s stay at Angel Island, the President at a Cabinet meeting told Secretaries Hull, Morgenthau and Perkins to get busy. In two hours the State, Treasury and Labor Departments evolved a legal arrangement whereby Japan’s No. 1 Christian would get a seven-month visitor’s permit on condition that he be constantly accompanied by a doctor or nurse.

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