Toyohiko Kagawa (b. 7/10/1883, d. 4/23/1960) was one of five children. At the time of his birth his father was the secretary of the Privy Council to the Emperor of Japan. Kagawa’s mother was one of his father's two wives and was a professional dancing girl. His father was later made the governor of two provinces and vice-president of a third. Tragedy struck early in his life for when Kagawa was just four years old his father died. Kagawa was then adopted by his father's other wife. Though the family was wealthy and Kagawa lived in splendor his home was empty of love and according to Kagawa a living hell.
At the age of nine Kagawa was sent to a Christian convent for his education. When he entered high school he learned English from an American missionary, using the Sermon on the Mount. According to Kagawa it was Luke 12:27, "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these”, that changed his life. It was due to this verse that he began to notice the beauty of the world and began to pray. He then realized that it was possible, in spite of the pressure of his peers, to live what he considered to be an ethical life.
After high school he entered a Christian college and later begun his ministry in Tokyo. Shortly after arriving he became seriously ill and rented for one yen a month a fisherman's cottage in the slums. The minister stayed with Kagawa for four days. It was then that Kagawa decided that to become healed he needed to begin ministering to the impoverished lower class of Tokyo.
Over time more men joined them to stay at the house. One was a convicted murderer, while another suffering from syphilis. Together the four men attempted to survive on just eleven yen. This tight budget meant eating only two meals a day. They would fill themselves up on water and thin their rice with water. Kagawa wrote, “If you have plenty of food you can never understand the meaning of the Lord's Prayer.”
Eventually Kagawa traveled to America and attended Princeton University. Once he graduated Kagawa went back to Japan. Rather than simply preach to the downtrodden he became a labor organizer. At one point he was arrested for participating in a general strike, which would be just one of many times he would be arrested for throughout his life. After his arrest Kagawa started organizing cooperatives throughout Japan, as well as organizing farmers into associations.
Eventually he moved on to organizing student cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and credit unions. As World War II loomed on the horizon Kagawa shuttled back and forth between the US and Japan in a futile attempt to head off war. At one point the fascist government of Japan arrested Kagawa but later released him. Following the end of the war Kagawa traveled across the world to spread his message of cooperative economics. After his death in 1960 the Emperor of Japan awarded him their nation's highest honor, the Order of the Sacred Treasure.
In 1936 Kagawa wrote his landmark book Brotherhood Economics in which he presented his philosophy of change, theological framework for change, the history of the cooperative movement, and the direction of change that he advocated. In Kagawa’s model he proposed networks of cooperatives that would be organized into federations. The cooperatives within the federations would provide for health care, production, marketing and transport, credit, education, utilities, and distribution.
The cooperative federations would also send representatives to a Social Congress and an Industrial Congress. These congressional bodies would in turn send legislative proposals up to the legislative body. The Social Congress would send legislation on social issues while the Industrial Congress would send legislation on economic issues. Funds for their creation would be provided by the cooperative credit unions.
In Kagawa's model of Cooperative Commonwealth, he also kept small family enterprises and other private enterprises. Kagawa advocated setting caps on the private enterprises to prevent them from growing large and become a threat to the cooperative economy.
Certainly there are some differences between the model of economic democracy advocated here and Kagawa’s. Most importantly though, the core of his economic model, with its emphasis on cooperatives as economic enterprises along with the continuation of family enterprises, without a doubt places Kagawa well within the school of the economic democracy.
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