Contributions to the Texas Rice Industry by Seito and Kiyoaki Saibara

Seito Saibara had been the youngest and only Christian member of a parliament then hostile to Christianity, and he gave up his seat to study at Hartford. He came at the invitation of the Japanese consul on behalf of the Houston Chamber of Commerce and the Southern Pacific, founded the first Japanese Christian colony in Texas and later spent fifteen years founding colonies along the Amazon. Kiyoaki practiced airplane seeding, broadcast his loyalty to American ideals to Japan by short-wave in the 1940s while his four sons served in the American forces, and became a citizen in 1953.

What the plaque says

Contributions to the Texas Rice Industry by Seito and Kiyoaki Saibara Seito Saibara (1861-1939), former president of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and first Christian member of the Japanese Diet (Parliament). Arrived in the United States in 1901 to study theology, and with the desire to establish a Japanese colony in America. Saibara came to Texas in August 1903 at the invitation of the Houston Chamber of Commerce to advise farmers on the cultivation of rice, which was emerging as a major cash crop. He decided rice farming was the ideal business for a colony, leased this tract of land (which he later purchased), and sent for his family. The oldest son, Kiyoaki Saibara (1884-1972), brought from Japan 300 pounds of Shinriki seed, a variety superior to native rice; and together, father and son planted a field near the canal (1/2 mile NE). Their first crops were utilized primarily for distribution as seed in Texas and Louisiana. The Saibaras built a house (250 yards S), and several families soon moved here from Japan, but the colonization effort failed because of disillusionment and homesickness of the new colonists. Seito Saibara aided the growth of the Texas rice industry with improved rice strains and agricultural techniques until his death, and Kiyoaki Saibara continued new developments until his retirement in 1964. (1974) This marker was originally located 1,090 yards to the southwest. Seito Saibara's house was 1,270 yards SW of here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 0.8 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
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• Emancipation Park — 20 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 21 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

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