Hirasaki’s latest honor echoes family history
Award recognizes service to Japanese-American community

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

When Rice’s George Hirasaki ’67 was presented with Japan’s prestigious Order of the Rising Sun last week, he knew it was a great honor, but the full meaning of the event didn’t settle in until he got home.

	GEORGE HIRASAKI

“When I opened the certificate, I was amazed to find that it was almost identical to the one on our wall at home, an award my grandfather received from Emperor Meiji himself more than 100 years ago,” Hirasaki said. “It’s quite an honor because I never imagined I could be in the same league as my grandfather.”

Hirasaki’s family has no shortage of honors. Hirasaki himself, Rice’s A.J. Hartsook Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a distinction he shares with only 14 other active and retired Rice faculty. His brother, John, was the NASA engineer chosen to open the Apollo 11 command module and unload the first lunar rock samples.

But all the family’s exploits pale in comparison with those of Hirasaki’s maternal grandfather, Kichimatsu Kishi, a legendary, larger-than-life figure in southeast Texas. Kishi, who was honored by Japan’s emperor for his army service in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, immigrated to Texas in 1906. He established a successful farming colony, founded the Orange Petroleum Company and at one time owned more than 9,000 acres of land between Beaumont and Orange.

“There were 11 families in the colony and 30-some-odd settlers, but many more passed through,” Hirasaki said. Among the honored guests in the 1920s was a young Japanese naval attache from Washington, D.C., named Isoroku Yamamoto, who would later gain worldwide fame as Japan’s naval commander during World War II.

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Kishi sold the oil company in the 1920s to repay his original investors threefold. However, he suffered setbacks and lost the farm during the Great Depression. But Hirasaki’s father leased back the land and raised his family there.

Hirasaki, who graduated from a small rural school, said he wasn’t qualified to attend Rice as an undergraduate, but he decided to pursue graduate studies at Rice after earning his bachelor’s degree from Lamar University in Beaumont.

“When my mother and uncle spoke about the Rice Institute, they did it with a different tone of voice,” Hirasaki recalled. “I knew it was a very special place because of the way they spoke about it.

“My father said, ‘I think one of the Kobayashi boys is on the faculty there (at Rice); you should look him up,'” Hirasaki recalled. That faculty member was Riki Kobayashi — another of Rice’s NAE members and the Louis Calder Professor Emeritus in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering — who’d grown up in another of southeast Texas’ well-known Japanese immigrant communities near Webster. 

Hirasaki, who became the president of the Houston chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League (JACL) in 2002, was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun in a ceremony May 28 at the Japanese consulate in Houston. The order was established by Emperor Meiji and is the oldest national decoration awarded by the Japanese government. Only 15 were awarded in the United States this year, including one to film director Clint Eastwood.

Hirasaki was honored for “his many years of outstanding achievements and contributions to the Japanese-American community, and for tirelessly promoting mutual understanding between Japan and the United States.”

During his years as JACL president in Houston, Hirasaki has worked to help increase the recognition of Japanese-American communities in Texas. Among his many efforts, he has helped compile online archives for numerous communities and families in southeast Texas, organize the celebration of 100 Years of Japanese Texans and The Japanese American Experience During World War II.  Also, he helped change the names of Jap Road and Jap Lane in Jefferson and Orange Counties, respectively.