The Autobiography of Paul Kanamori

Kanamori’s Life-Story Told by Himself (1921) is a short, intense spiritual autobiography told entirely in the author’s own voice. Paul M. Kanamori recounts his beginnings in Japan’s samurai class, his early embrace of Christianity as one of the Kumamoto Band of young converts, and his rise to become a pastor in the Meiji-era church.

The heart of the book is a fall and a return. Under the influence of higher criticism and the intellectual currents of his day, Kanamori lost his faith, left the ministry, and spent years as what he calls a prodigal. He tells that season without flattery, tracing the emptiness of his wandering and the long road that finally led him back to Christ.

The final movement is his second life as an evangelist. Restored in faith, Kanamori took to preaching across Japan and among Japanese in Hawaii and on the American Pacific coast, best known for a marathon three-hour gospel sermon that drew great crowds and, by his own count, brought more than forty-eight thousand decisions for Christ. The book reads as a prodigal-son testimony in miniature — brief, direct, and shaped for a reader meant to hear the gospel in it.

Kanamori tells his story in his own words, and our public-domain edition presents that first-person testimony in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, alongside a link to a free source.

This is a clean reading edition of Kanamori's Life-Story, published in 1921. The text is in the public domain and we set it from the Project Gutenberg transcription.

Paul Kanamori (1857–1945) was one of the Kumamoto Band — the samurai-class students who in 1876 climbed a hill above their school and swore together to preach Christianity in a country that had outlawed it within their fathers' lifetimes. He became a pastor. Then, reading the German liberal theology that was reaching Japan, he lost his faith, left the ministry, and spent nearly twenty years in business and politics. This is his own account of the going away and the coming back, and of the preaching tours that followed, in which he would speak for three hours at a stretch to halls holding thousands.

A note on what we changed. The transcription kept the line breaks of the printed page, so every paragraph arrived as a column of short lines. We joined them back into paragraphs — which is whitespace and nothing else — and then broke the longest paragraphs at sentences Kanamori had already ended. His median paragraph was 85 words and is now 64. His hymns and his campaign tables were left as they were set, one line to a line, because they are not prose and reflowing them would ruin both. We removed Project Gutenberg's licence, which is not Kanamori's.

We corrected nothing in the text. A checker proposed one change, "betook" to "be took", and "betook" is a word.

The free transcription is linked from this book's page.