Satoko Kitahara was the daughter of an aristocratic Tokyo family, raised in Shinto, and worked in an aircraft factory during the war. She came out of it with tuberculosis and with a revulsion at what her country had done. In 1948, passing a church in Yokohama, she went in, looked at a statue of the Virgin, and could not explain what happened to her; she was baptised on 30 October 1949 and took the name Elizabeth.
In November 1950 she met the Polish Franciscan brother Zeno Żebrowski, who took her to Ants Town — a shanty settlement on a riverbank where a few hundred people lived by collecting rubbish. She went as a visitor, then as a teacher of the children, and then, having understood that visiting was a way of staying outside, she left her family's house and went to live there, and pulled a ragpicker's cart with the rest.
Her family were appalled. Her health broke. She went on. When the city moved to clear the settlement she joined the ragpickers' petition for land of their own, and it was granted after she and the community's leader made their case publicly. She died on 23 January 1958 at twenty-eight, of tuberculosis, in the town she had joined, and the people of Ants Town carried her coffin. Pope Francis declared her Venerable on 22 January 2015.