Today, our celebration of All Saints, I’m going to tell you a story about a saint—a modern-day saint from Nebraska. His name is Fr. Hiram Kano, and in our church calendar the official day for remembering him was a week ago. Once upon a time—1889 to be exact—Hiram was born into a Japanese noble family in Tokyo. His father was the governor of their province and a member of the Japanese parliament. As the second son in the family, young Kano was not required to follow his father’s career. Instead, he chose to study agriculture at the Imperial University in Tokyo. While he was at the university, he suffered a ruptured appendix. During the surgery to save his life, he saw a vision and began reading the Bible as a result of the experience, and eventually he asked to be baptized by Dutch Reformed missionaries.
When Hiram graduated with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture 1916, he felt strongly that God was calling him to go to America to help Japanese families who moved to the Midwest to make a new, better life farming here. It turns out that William Jennings Bryan, a US Representative from Nebraska and three-time presidential candidate, was a family friend because Hiram’s mother and father had hosted him on a visit to Japan. Bryan urged Hiram to continue his agricultural studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln—there was no better school, and no better people, than in Nebraska. With a handwritten letter of recommendation from Bryan in his pocket, Kano journeyed to Lincoln, Nebraska, enrolled, and in 1918 he earned a master’s degree in agricultural economics at UNL.
Hiram married the love of his life, Ai in 1919; the couple moved to a farm north of Kearney near Litchfield, Nebraska, and had two children. Like many others, including most of the Japanese immigrants in the area, they farmed sugar beets. Hiram became active in the Japanese Americanization Society and served as an interpreter and English teacher for immigrants. Unfortunately, then, as now, there were people who were afraid of immigrants and wanted to keep them out. Japanese people were considered to be a different “race,” and in lawsuit after lawsuit for more than 100 years declared to be legally not “white” (and therefore targets for legal discrimination). Federal law prevented Japanese people from becoming US citizens until 1952! It was so bad here that there was a bill in the Nebraska legislature to make it illegal for Japanese people to own the land they lived on and came here to farm—or even leasing it for more than two years—ensuring they would be force to leave. Even worse, the law would prevent Japanese parents from being considered the legal guardians of their own children, enabling the children to be removed as happened with many Indigenous people’s children. In the midst of this fear and hatred, Hiram strived for understanding, racial justice, fairness, and equality. He joined with the Episcopal Church, led by Bishop George Beecher, to testify at the Nebraska Legislature against this evil legislation.
Bishop Beecher saw that Hiram was not just a good farmer and eloquent speaker; he was a great teacher and pastor, too, and Beecher appointed Hiram to minister to all of Nebraska’s Japanese people. Hiram, now Fr. Kano, was ordained a deacon in 1928 and a priest in 1936. Within just two years, more than 250 people were baptized at his church. Fr. Kano became a beloved member of the community in Western Nebraska, where he and Ai were raising their two children.
Then, something awful happened. Early in the morning on December 7th, 1941, the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese military and many lives were lost. That morning, Fr. Kano was at the Episcopal church in North Platte, the Church of our Savior, to preach and celebrate. At the end of worship, as he stood on the church steps greeting people, he was arrested by local police and FBI, not permitted to notify his wife and children, and taken to Omaha. Fr. Kano learned about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the police car radio as they drove. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt, allowed the rounding up and imprisoning of any Japanese person in America without any due process or evidence. Federal authorities decided Fr. Kano was a threat to national security and sent him to one of the prison camps.
Full-scale arrests of Japanese Americans began on March 24th. People had no real notice and had to dispose of everything they owned except for what they could carry. In today’s dollars, they lost $8 billion in property. Anyone who was at least 1/16th Japanese was arrested, including 17,000 children under the age of 10, and several thousand very elderly and disabled people. In total, almost 120,000 people—nearly all of whom considered themselves to be US citizens—were affected.
Despite his own defense and pleas from Bishop Beecher, who testified that Fr. Kano was a dedicated Christian and loyal to his adopted country, Fr. Kano spent the next two years in prison camps. He was imprisoned in four different states—and while in prison he was always working to help others. He created a school for the internees and taught courses in agriculture and English. He led church services, not just for the Japanese prisoners but also for imprisoned court-martialed US soldiers and even the prison camp guards. Fr. Kano became widely known for his compassionate ministry to everyone.
Finally, in 1944, Fr. Kano was released from the prison camp—but it was determined to be too dangerous for him to return home to Nebraska, because there was still too much violent anti-Japanese sentiment here. So the church had him go to the Episcopal seminary in Wisconsin, where he stayed for two years and earned another master’s degree. Finally, in 1946, it was at last safe enough for him to return home to Nebraska and his family. Fr. Kano and Mrs. Kano earned their citizenship as soon as the law allowed it, in 1952, and then he began teaching citizenship classes. With his leadership, in the two years between 1953 and 1955, nearly 100 percent of Japanese people in Nebraska became citizens. Forty years later, the U.S. government acknowledged that Japanese Americans had been wronged by the imprisonments and offered to pay reparations. Fr. Kano said, “I don’t want the money. God just used [the evil men did] as another opportunity for me to preach the gospel.” Fr. Kano continued to work as a priest and as a missionary among Nebraska’s Japanese residents until his retirement in 1957. He died in 1988, just short of his 100th birthday. Fr. Kano was added to our calendar of saints in 2015, his son and daughter watching the celebration.
In her 1976 book, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, Michi Nishiura Weglyn, one of those imprisoned, wrote that “not one instance of subversion or sabotage [was] ever…uncovered…involving these [Japanese-Americans] during World War II.”
There are many reasons for us to remember Fr. Kano as a saint today: Fr. Kano’s witness to the power of compassion in the face of hatred and racism is a tribute to his extraordinary faith and his extraordinary life, and the work of a saint. Fr. Kano’s unwavering efforts to lift up others by teaching, preaching, and drawing them into community even while he was imprisoned, taken away from his community and family, is the work of a saint. Fr. Kano, a saint, a Nebraskan just like us, was alive while most of us here were born. He lived out the saintly mission given to us all so many times in Scripture: protect the vulnerable, clothe the naked, welcome the foreigner, feed the hungry, forgive those who persecute you.
St. Paul addressed his letters like this: “To the Saints in Ephesus,” and, “To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints.” God’s beloved people of St. Andrew’s, you are called to be saints. May we all recognize our own calling to be saints in this world. Like Fr. Kano, we too are called to be instruments of God’s mercy and healing, God’s justice and compassion, especially when we encounter prejudice and fear and hatred for another. This week, I ask you to reflect on how we can make a difference in our community, standing against hatred and division and exclusion in our own lives, drawing the circle wide and bringing people more and more into God’s beloved community. May we have the courage to love boldly, to stand firmly in our faith, and to act with the same relentless compassion that Fr. Kano showed. Let us be saints, proclaiming God’s unbounded acceptance and eternal love and unyielding hope to everyone we meet.
I sing a song of the saints of God,patient and brave and true,who toiled and fought and lived and died|for the Lord they loved and knew…They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,and God’s love made them strong;and they followed the right, for Jesus’ sake,the whole of their good lives long.And there’s not any reason, no, not the least,why I shouldn’t be one too.
