Kanban originally came from the scheduling practices of Lean before Agile was a thing.
IMHO, the reason why Agile came alone was people were sick and tired of seeing effort/money/time wasted with the waterfall approach in a complex environment.

Lean/Kanban and all the other methods/practices we call Agile serve the same purpose. Eliminate waste.

So in a way, yes, Kanban is Agile. Some people refer it as flow-based agile while calling others, such as Scrum, the iteration based agile.

In terms of three pillars of empiricism, I do believe if we implement Kanban method properly, we would be seeing all three.

Having columns ONLY does not make it a Kanban though, it’s only a status board. We need WIP limits, poll policies, as well as the definitions of where to start and where to end.
Kanban help us focus on the work itself, not on the people doing the work.