Last
April (in this
article) I wrote about Dr. Takashi Nagai and made reference to The Song of Nagasaki (1988), the brilliant biography of Nagai by Paul Glynn, a former Australian Catholic
missionary to Japan. Because that was such an
enjoyable read, I soon read Glynn’s next book, The Smile of a Ragpicker (1992).
The latter is the
inspirational story of Satoko Kitahara, an outstanding Japanese woman who was
born in 1929 and died of tuberculosis on January 23, 1958, while still only 28
years old.
MEETING BROTHER ZENO
Kitahara Satoko-san grew up in Tokyo as a
privileged child of an aristocratic family, the descendant of samurai warriors and
Shinto priests. While a teenager, though, her lifestyle was seriously thrown
out of kilter by Japan’s entry into World War II. She began working in an
airplane factory and lived in constant fear and anxiety. To make matters worse,
during that time she contracted TB.
Four years after the war, though, Satoko-san
was able to graduate from college. Later in 1949 she was baptized as a Catholic
Christian. The following year she met Zeno Zebrowski, a Polish Franciscan friar
who had gone to Nagasaki in 1930 with Fr. Maximilian Kolbe (whom I wrote about,
here, last August). Satoko-san was greatly influenced by this 59-year-old
man who had little education but a huge heart of love for needy people.
Brother Zeno worked tirelessly to help the
injured and destitute people in and around Nagasaki after the explosion of the
atomic bomb in August 1945. His meritorious activities became known throughout
Japan, and in 1949 even Emperor Hirohito visited the orphanage Zeno operated in
Nagasaki Prefecture.
Zeno then went to Tokyo and began a tireless
ministry there, working on behalf of the 6,000 or more homeless and needy
people who lived in Ari-no-Machi (literally, “Ants Town”). It was there that
Satoko-san met him.
BECOMING A RAGPICKER
The slum section along the Sumida River in
Tokyo was called Ants Town because of the thousands of people who lived there in
such a small area and because of the constant activity in their desperate
efforts to survive. Their means of survival was largely through collecting and
then selling materials discarded in the trash. They were euphemistically called
ragpickers.
Satoko-san sought to help the ragpickers,
and spent time as a volunteer tutoring the children of Ants Town. But after
hearing a man express his scorn for people like her who came condescendingly
from places of privilege to “help” the poor and needy, Satoko-san examined her
own life and work.
Consequently, according to Glynn, she came
to this live-changing conclusion: “There
was only one way to help those ragpicker children: become a ragpicker like
them!” (p. 146). And that is what she did, much to the consternation and
disapproval of her family.
Satoko-san spent the remainder of her
much-too-brief life living in poverty as a ragpicker, and as Glynn emphasizes, she
was widely known for the loving smile she had for the people she lived among.
BEATIFYING THE RAGPICKER
Two years ago, fifty-seven years after her
death, Satoko-san was beatified by Pope Francis on January 22, 2015. Publically recognized for the “heroic virtues” she
displayed in seeking to improve the lot of the people in Ants Town, she became
the first Japanese person declared Servant of God by
the Catholic Church.
How is it that so many of us do so little to help the
needy when Satoko-san did so much? Moreover, how can people of faith be happy that
beginning today the U.S. has a billionaire President who seems largely
unconcerned about the plight of the poor and marginalized?
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