North Platte’s Episcopal Church of Our Savior has donated $12,500 towards a fund to establish a Japanese American display at the Lincoln County Historical Museum. The funds come from an endowment to the church given by the family of the Rev. Hiram Hisanori Kano.
[Kano was] a missionary to western Nebraska’s Japanese Americans from 1925 until his 1957 retirement. [O]rdained an Episcopal priest at the North Platte church in 1936, [he] had his ministry interrupted by three years in Japanese American internment camps during World War II.
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Kano, who was born into Japan’s imperial royal family, immigrated to America during World War I with the assistance of three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan of Lincoln.
He soon was advocating for Nebraska’s growing Japanese American community, working alongside western Nebraska Episcopal Bishop George Beecher to defeat legislative bills meant to exclude Japanese from farming in the state. Kano, a farmer himself, was ordained an Episcopal deacon in 1928. He served Japanese American mission congregations in North Platte and Mitchell before and after his priestly ordination.
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