It's 1901 and, much like today, immigrants are the engine that drives the industries of America. A Japanese nobleman of the samurai class with terminal tuberculosis-escaping an arranged marriage and rigid social expectations-discovers in an Alaskan cannery how expendable workers are, especially if they dare to ask for fair wages and safe working conditions.
Fleeing to Seattle, Frank Matsura finds that regardless of his university education, fluent English, and qualifications as a photographer, he is valued only as manual labor. But a kindly Japanese farmer befriends and supports him, the only light in this dark time. Frank endures two miserable years as a hotel dishwasher, during which time he is tormented by memories of wartime trauma. On the streets of Seattle, he is horrified to discover that Asians are hated and hunted. This is not the America he dreamed of from across the ocean.
But after leaving the big city for a frontier town in Central Washington, Frank Matsura is able to charm the locals and join the community there, where he uses his camera to document the white settlers on the vanishing frontier and indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest with respect and affection. When he learns that his friend in Seattle has been destroyed by racist land laws, he hatches a plot to get justice. And when the woman he was supposed to marry comes to America on her own adventure, he has one last chance at love before his time runs out.
Based on the life of Frank Matsura.