One countryman’s story—from Asia to America’s heartland

Nikkei Farmer on the Nebraska Plains (cloth)

A Memoir

Reverend Hisanori Kano; introduced and edited by Tai Kreidler, from a translation by Rose Yamamoto

Japanese-born Hisanori Kano came to the United States in 1916 with the blessings of his influential family, the sponsorship of William Jennings Bryan, and a fervent commitment to master and apply the best of American agricultural practices on the Nebraska Plains. Forgoing an assured career in politics, the military, or business in his homeland, Kano entered the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and worked his way through as a farm laborer. Along with his dedication to farming, he brought a strong Christian faith that would lead to his ordination as an Episcopal minister and sustain him and his family through his internment during World War II. Undertaken in 1967, after half a century in his adoptive land, Father Kano’s memoir reveals how he adapted to an ever-changing American culture and landscape. According himself only modest standing among the Issei—other first-generation Japanese immigrants he was honored to call his countrymen—Father Kano elucidates in a voice as eloquent as it is polite a sorely underrepresented aspect of diversity and rural life on the North American Plains.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1889 at the height of Japan’s westernization and raised in Kagoshima, the young Hisanori Kano was driven by twin passions, his desire to help sustain Japan’s emigration program and his cultural reverence for farming.Tai Kreidler, archivist for Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, descends from a Kagoshima family.

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