Abstract: My dissertation, 'Ishii Juji, the Okayama Orphanage, and the Chausubaru Settlement: A Vision of Child Relief Through Communal Labor and a Sustainable Local Economy, 1887-1926,' traces the transformation of radical political action following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, into an ethical practice of child relief during the Meiji period. Through the life work of Ishii Juji, a young Christian convert who founded the Okayama Orphanage in 1887, I seek to illustrate the historical shift of compassion and empathy (aware) into motivating forces for social action, social reform, and ultimately, plans for social renovation during the early industrial society. For the network of social activists that came to surround Ishii during the early 1890s, he and the Okayama Orphanage reflected the possibilities of compassionate action—action that led not only to Ishii's own utopian cooperative in Miyazaki, but that also inspired the Christian socialism of Abe Isoo, the juvenile reform work of Tomeoka K osuke, and the Marxist investigation of the 'social problem' by Ohara Magosaburo. Although the Okayama Orphanage is now placed at the center of Japan's modern welfare system by historians, during the last two decades of the Meiji period, Ishii Juji rejected the influence of the state and moved the institution and his activism to the peripheries of the nation, where he sought to construct a utopian model of the ideal industrial society—a model in which the profits reaped for future generations (i.e., youths and children) would be social, cultural, and religious, rather than those of monetary gain and military might.