Duncan Ryūken Williams. American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Illustrations. 400 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-98653-4.
Reviewed by Thomas Calobrisi (Graduate Theological Union)
Published on H-Buddhism (March, 2021)
Commissioned by Ben Van Overmeire (Duke Kunshan University)
Among the religions of the world, Buddhism presently holds a unique place in the American imagination. Visions of meditating monks clad in saffron and curry robes come to mind when the term is uttered. Introductory books on Buddhism and meditation fly off the shelves of bookstores and warehouses, landing on the nightstands of many curious American readers. Buddhist figures such as the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the Tibetan 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso have been interviewed by heads of state and television talk-show hosts alike; crowds gather to hear them speak. Meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, has taken off in terms of popularity in the last few decades and has moved into nearly every arena of contemporary life. A recent sociological study of attitudes toward various religions and religious denominations by the Pew Research Center has shown that across generations, demographics, and religious affiliations, Buddhism is respected by Americans despite the fact that, save for college graduates, atheists, and agnostics, very few people have met a Buddhist.[1]
And yet, it was not always this way. In fact, Buddhists and Buddhism held a place of considerable fear, suspicion, and contempt within the United States leading up to and during the American involvement in World War II. Aided by newly available archived sources from the United States Government as well as numerous interviews with those who experienced internment and with the surviving relatives of internees, the narratives that Duncan Ryūken Williams weave together in American Sutra retell how Japanese Americans, many of whom were Buddhists born on American soil, were perpetually suspected of foreignness and disloyalty to their own country. Williams recounts how, in the face of this suspicion, discrimination, internment and violence, Japanese American Buddhists persevered in their faith and in their loyalty to their nation, refusing to be told they could not practice how they pleased or that they did not truly belong in their own country.
Williams’s book is composed of a prologue, ten chapters, and an epilogue. While other studies of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, such as those by Anne Blankenship, Beth Hessel, and Lester Suzuki, have considered the role played by race, Williams notes that religion—that is, the predominantly Buddhist identity of the Japanese Americans—has received little attention, the work by Eiko Masuyama being something of an exception.[2] The reason for the seeming opacity of Buddhism in this situation is, according to Williams, basically twofold: “the invisibility of communities that do no share religious heritage with the monotheisms of the West; and the postwar political imperatives of foregrounding a story about Japanese Americans that conformed to prevailing narratives about what makes a person American.” This is to say, Buddhism is elided here by “the same underlying presumption of America as a white and Christian nation that contributed to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans in the first place” (p. 4). By recentering religion in the narrative of Japanese American internment, Williams is able to consider not only “this nation’s history of conflating race, religion, and American belonging,” but also “how the roots of what is now a much more popularly accepted religion were cultivated.” This is arguably the key innovation of Williams’s book, as over the several chapters of the book he again and again shows how “American Buddhism was nourished by the experiences of a community that strove to remain grounded in tradition while also adapting to the multisectarian, multigenerational, and multiethnic realities of Buddhist life in the United States” (p. 5). Williams’s method of proving this is broadly empirical, bringing together the historical work in the archive with ethnographic work among the interned, their survivors, and the institutions they built. That being said, since his work straddles the line between scholarly and popular history, it does not include prolonged, explicit elaboration on the methodology it utilizes. This makes the work more accessible to those less in-the-know but may upset scholars looking for theoretical detail.
In the first chapter of the book, Williams notes that as early as 1909, American governmental forces in the Hawai’ian islands began to surveil the growing Japanese communities and institutions, fearing that, with Japan’s recent victory against Russia, the island nation would grow as a force to be reckoned with in the near future and that these diasporic communities of Japanese people in Hawai’i might function as an internally subversive element. The institutions under the most careful watch were Buddhist temples and Japanese-language schools, as these were considered to be places that would engender treason. Williams makes a concerted and clear effort to demonstrate, with plenty of evidence, that the findings of the government surveillance of Japanese people living in Hawai’i as well as on the West Coast indicated no threat of disloyalty to United States nor a willingness to act in subversion against it.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the events leading up to the internment of Japanese Americans and nationals. Williams notes that, despite evidence of the loyalty of Japanese Americans, as the smoke was clearing from the attacks on Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawai’i in December of 1941, the military government on the islands was already at work rounding up Buddhist priests and Japanese-language instructors as well as prominent Japanese businessmen and other figures promoting elements of Japanese culture such as martial arts. Many of these individuals were taken away on only a moment’s notice, some still in their priestly robes; they were held without charge in makeshift interment compounds, subject to inhumane treatment, and interrogated fruitlessly. In the ensuing months on the American mainland, the FBI, in a similar fashion to the military government in Hawai’i, began to pick up, intern, and interrogate select Buddhist priests, particularly those in higher positions.
Chapters 4 and 5 take a look at the place of Buddhism early on in internment-camp life. Japanese Americans, given the mandate to report for internment, taking with them only what they could carry in a suitcase, scrambled to sell their assets and to secure Buddhist temples, which were to be closed down and left behind. In a few instances, temple members were able to entrust their property to a handful of white sympathizers or insurance agencies who would protect the temples during internment. In the early years of internment, Buddhism was heavily suppressed. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) and the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA), at least initially, refused to provide space in the camps for Buddhists to congregate and conduct services; Buddhist funerary rites for those who had died in the camps were often denied; Japanese-language materials, save for those approved by the WRA, such as the Bible, were considered contraband, and the speaking of Japanese was largely prohibited. All of this, despite the stated protocol of these organizations to respect the First Amendment rights of those interned. Williams notes that this stance by the WRA and WCCA in the early period of interment served as a catalyst for the interned Buddhists to articulate their right to practice their religion as well as to practice their faith in novel ways.
Chapter 6 explores five ways that “American Buddhism,” as Williams refers to it, was formed by Japanese Americans in the camps. The first of these, being something of a continuation of practices done in the past, was the incorporation and sponsorship of American-style social events such as dances, pageants, and oratory contests as well as sports events such as baseball games and ping-pong tournaments. Second, Japanese Buddhists cultivated greater solidarity with their white Buddhist counterparts, which typically involved creating English-language Buddhist materials such as “service books,” the singing of “Buddhist hymns” (sanbutsuka) written in the styles found in Anglo-Protestant Christian churches, the adoption of Christian terms such as “minister” and “reverend” for Buddhist priests, and the introduction of English-language sermons to Sunday services. Third was the attempt, though not necessarily a successful one, to construct Buddhist rituals and services that would be trans-sectarian in nature and therefore able to accommodate the minority Buddhist sects, in this case, Zen, Nichiren, and Shingon, with the Jōdo and Jōdo Shin sects being in the majority. Fourth was the effort to cultivate interfaith cooperation between Buddhists and Christians in the camps; this effort was, compared with that of unification among Buddhists, much more successful. Buddhist leaders encouraged their sangha members to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas alongside their fellow interned Christians, viewing both as national holidays core to American life rather than strictly religious observances. An interfaith group at the Manzanar camp in Southern California commissioned the construction of a monument to commemorate the deceased, now known as the Manzanar Ireitō. The monument was designed by Ryozo Kado, a Catholic, and dedicated in August of 1943 by Shinjō Nagatomi, a Nishi Honganji Jōdo Shin Buddhist priest, and Junro Kashitani, a Pentecostal minister. Fifth, particular to the Nishi Honganji Jōdo Shin sect, was the effort to establish a distinct organization that was run in a democratic fashion and whose principal language was English. The organization that emerged from this effort was the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA), founded in 1944 in Ogden, Utah, and still one of the largest Buddhist organizations active in the United States today.
As Japanese American Buddhists were reshaping their faith to better fit the American mold, many young men who were interned began to join the war effort in order to further demonstrate their loyalty to their country. Chapter 7 shifts gears from the broader Japanese American community to those young men who enlisted in the United States Armed Forces and their experiences while serving a country that openly despised and distrusted them. Williams’s narrative initially follows one Japanese American member of the US army intelligence service referred to as “G-2,” Richard Sakakida, who served as an informant in the Philippines, was captured by the Japanese, endured torture by the Kempeitai, and then escaped through his connections only to suffer the racist disapproval of American soldiers. In spite of the distrust they faced, nisei soldiers, particularly those who had undertaken some amount of education in Japan, referred to as “kibei,” were assets to the American efforts in the war—intercepting, translating, and decoding Japanese messages as well as conducting interrogations with Japanese POWs. Their ability to speak Japanese and their familiarity with Japanese culture—the very aspects that garnered suspicion from their white counterparts—was what made them so valuable. Williams notes Major General Charles Willoughby’s claim that some six thousand Japanese American soldiers saved the lives of nearly a million Americans and shortened the war by two years (p. 161)—though direct acclaim like this was hard to come by for those Japanese Americans who served. Nisei who were drafted or volunteered for the armed forces, seeking to fight on the European front, were initially refused combat positions, being relegated to menial tasks.
While young nisei men went off to war in the Pacific and in Europe, the entire Japanese American community was roiled by the introduction of a questionnaire distributed by the WRA intended to assess the loyalty of those interned. Chapter 8 explores the controversy over this questionnaire. Questions 27 and 28 in particular, which asked if those questioned were willing to serve in the armed forces and whether they would swear allegiance to the United States, respectively, were designed to determine who was likely to be disloyal. Those who answered these two questions in the negative, who came to be referred to as “no, nos,” as well as those who refused to enlist in the armed forces, were segregated at Tule Lake Segregation Center beginning in July of 1943. Those who refused to the answer the questions altogether on the basis that they could neither serve nor swear allegiance to a country that had denied them their rights were also rounded up at gunpoint and segregated.
At Tule Lake, tensions grew along religious lines among those who had either refused to enlist or refused to swear allegiance to the United States. Christians, particularly Christian clergy and chaplains, were often the victims of this, with ostracization soon turning to harassment and then to violence. Williams notes that the religious differences and struggles among those at Tule Lake began to reveal a concern that enlistment in the American armed forces spelled certain death for the nisei, who, it was suspected, would be placed in a suicide battalion. While Williams notes that this fear was not entirely baseless, as the very idea had been floated to the government by the secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League before the enactment of Executive Order 9066, the 100th Battalion and 442nd Regiment were not treated as such.
Chapter 9 focuses on the actions of the 442nd Regiment while in Europe. Williams points out that the regiment faced the issue that the American army did not recognize the identity of its Buddhist members. Soldiers at that time had only the choice of “C” for Catholic, “P” for Protestant, and “H” for Hebrew to be placed on their dog tags; their identity as Japanese also was not recognized, so they had to be designated as “Mongolian.” What is more, due to legal constraints and further discrimination, the 442nd Regiment had no Buddhist clergy to serve as chaplains to the Buddhists in the group. Despite this discriminatory treatment, the 100th Battalion and 442nd Regiment fought valiantly and suffered heavy losses in battle while moving through Italy into Germany, receiving a Presidential Unit Citation for their efforts.
Buddhist services commemorating the fallen nisei soldiers in Hawai’i and the West Coast were rare during the latter years of the war. While the Japanese American population as a whole was not interned during the war on the Hawai’ian islands, many Buddhist priests were, as noted above; this dearth of priests to officiate services led the faithful to hold funerary and memorial services at Christian churches. In contrast, on the West Coast, services were held for the fallen nisei inside the camps. As the war came to a close on the European and Pacific fronts, Japanese Americans began to be released en masse from the WRA and Department of Justice internment camps, though, as Williams notes, Christian nisei families and individuals were often let out before their Buddhist counterparts.
Chapter 10 explores the issues faced by Japanese Americans during their reintroduction and resettlement into the broader population. Although the Japanese Americans were intent on rebuilding their communities and returning to the lives which had been put on an unjust pause during the war, white citizens on the West Coast were vocally opposed to their return to the region. While some merely protested their return, like the members of the “Remember Pearl Harbor League,” others, such as Lambert Schuyler in his pamphlet “The Japs Must Not Come Back!,” proposed shipping them all off to islands in the southern Pacific, where they would be far away from white women. As was mentioned above, many Japanese Americans returned home to find their Buddhist temples with various degrees of damage and disrepair.
Japanese Americans also faced confrontations with African American communities, particularly in Los Angeles, where Little Tokyo was briefly renamed “Bronzeville” due to the change in the demographics of the area from predominantly Japanese- to predominantly African American. Williams recounts the 1945 Los Angeles Superior Court case Providence Baptist Association v. L.A. Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, in which the African American Providence Baptist Church, which leased the Buddhist temple space for one year, refused to vacate the premises at the time agreed upon in the contract. The suit was dropped after the leaders of the church realized their position had little legal standing and, atop that, the Japanese Americans were minorities like them and therefore should not be deprived of their space.
Important to the preservation of the material and spiritual identity of Japanese American Buddhists were the white sympathizers who operated freely during the war. In his discussions of white sympathizers, Williams regularly returns to the figure of Julius Goldwater, who had been introduced to Japanese Buddhism in Hawai’i and ordained as a priest in the Nishi Hongwanji branch of the Jōdo Shin sect in 1936, though he also mentions Ernest Hunt and Sunya Pratt, who had also ordained as priests in the same sect prior to the outbreak of the war. In his descriptions of Goldwater’s efforts to aid his fellow interned Buddhists, which included the protection of property as well as assistance in developing English-language materials for Buddhist services, Williams notes that Goldwater was ridiculed by other white people as a “Jap lover” for his efforts and that his home was often vandalized for his alleged love of the Japanese.
Though many Japanese Americans returned to the West Coast and to Hawai’i, others re- or expatriated to Japan, having been thoroughly disillusioned with America, and others still traveled to the American Midwest and East Coast to begin new lives there. Williams recounts how, in contrast to their Christian counterparts, Japanese American Buddhists traveling to the Midwest and East Coast struggled to establish new temples due to the lack of connections in those regions—an issue the Christians did not face, at least not to the same degree as the Buddhists. It was in the Midwest, with the establishment of the Buddhist Temple of Chicago by the Higashi Honganji priest Gyomay Kubose in 1944, that the trans-sectarian vision of American Buddhism that emerged in the camps came to be realized. The Chicago temple sought to appeal to people across racial lines and present Buddhism in a nonsectarian manner; the temple, though smaller than its BCA-affiliated counterpart in the city, the Mid-West Buddhist Church, continues to function some seventy-five years later as a unique instantiation of American Buddhism.
The epilogue to the book recounts how a rather curious set of stones ensconced in a metal drum was unearthed in the abandoned Heart Mountain camp cemetery in 1956. Though the worker who uncovered them, a man by the name of Bill Higgins, could not decipher them, each stone in the metal drum had a kanji character calligraphed onto it. The stones intrigued the scholar of Indian Buddhism Sōdō Mori. Mori suspected that the stones were not random but rather were a text—a Buddhist one, in particular, as he could recognize among the stones the kanji for “bodhisattva” and “samādhi.” In collaboration with Kenryō Minowa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, Mori concluded that the stones were an incomplete copy of the Lotus Sūtra, done in the style of scripture copying (shakyō) called ichiji isseki kyō, or “one-character, one-stone sūtra.” Their author, it was deduced, was the Nichiren Buddhist priest and master calligrapher Nichikan Murakita, who was interned at the Heart Mountain camp until August of 1943. His abrupt leave from the camp for Japan as part of an exchange of civilian detainees is likely the reason for the incompleteness of the sūtra. In Williams’s words, Murakita “left the stones’ stones teachings, without fanfare, literally entrusted to the American soil” (p. 257). Williams likens Murakita’s buried stone sūtra of Heart Mountain to the medieval Japanese practice of kyōzuka, or “sūtra mounds,” in which copies of Buddhist scripture were purposefully buried to be recovered eons in the future, when the next Buddha, Miroku, would appear and deliver once more the long-forgotten message of the Buddhadharma: “The Heart Mountain stones preach the Dharma,” Williams states (p. 257). Murakita wrote out the sūtra, likely in a clandestine fashion, not only for his individual salvation, but to salvage his religion, which was under threat from the American government.
Just as Bill Higgins unearthed what may have otherwise disappeared into the fields of Wyoming, America Sutra, Williams states, “shares a multitude of stories and teachings buried in the memories of people who were often too modest or too hurt to recount their experiences.” Here, Williams provides a concise summation of his book: “These Buddhists faced hostility and suspicion before Pearl Harbor, recrafted their sangha in desolate camps behind barbed wire and under martial law in Hawai’i, and served and sacrificed on the battlefields of the Second World War” (p. 257). The epilogue closes with a poem from the Zen priest Nyogen Senzaki, composed in 1945. The poem, with its declaration that the Constitution “blooms like the spring flower” which “no foreign book can surpass” and that America “is the country of righteousness,” Williams notes, expresses Senzaki’s belief that the rights enshrined in that document would protect Buddhists in their practice of the dharma. As found in the poetry of Senzaki, the stone sūtra of Murakita, and the efforts of countless others, “the wartime experience forged a new American Buddhism, manifesting the possibility of being both fully Buddhist and fully American” (p. 258).
Typically, the story of American Buddhism begins either with the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s, or with the Transcendentalists and other Buddhist sympathizers of the Victorian period. By placing Asian Americans as agents at the forefront of creating American Buddhism, Williams’s American Sutra is already a much-needed departure from convention. It was mentioned above that Williams’s aim in the work was to highlight the role of religion as well as that of race in the realities of Japanese American internment during World War II. However, we might want to consider the way in which “religion” is already itself a racialized category. In his book Modern Religion, Modern Race (2016), Theodore Vial argues the modern categories of race and religion share a genealogy and are profoundly intertwined. In many ways, Williams’s book interrogates this relation, claiming that “the long-ignored stories of Japanese American Buddhists attempting to build a free America—not a Christian nation, but one of religious freedom—do not contain final answers, but they do teach us something about the dynamics of becoming: what it means to become American—and Buddhist—as part of an interconnected and dynamically shifting world” (p. 14). As I see it, this is the value of Williams’s work for the present. It does not give us concrete or final answers but does tell its American audience something about what they can become. For its refreshing centering of Asian Americans in the story of American Buddhism and for its deliverance of this story in a profoundly granular yet engaging manner, I highly recommend America Sutra. It is invaluable reading for students and professionals interested in the historical intersections of religion, race, and belonging in the American social imagination. It will also be appreciated by the general public and Buddhist practitioners, as the blend of scholarly and popular historiography in America Sutra makes it accessible well beyond the niches of the academy.
Notes
[1]. Jessica Hamar Martínez and Anna Schiller, “Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Towards Religious Groups” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2017).
[2]. Anne Blankenship, Christianity, Social Justice, and Japanese American Incarceration during World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Beth Hessel, “Let the Conscience of Christian America Speak”: Religion and Empire in the Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1945 (PhD diss., Texas Christian University, 2015); Lester Suzuki, Ministry in the Assembly and Relocation Centers in World War II (Berkeley, CA: Yardbird Publishing, 1979); Eiko Masuyama, Memories: The Buddhist Church Experience in the Camps, 1942-1945, 2nd rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Nishi Hongwanji Betsuin, 2007).
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Citation:
Thomas Calobrisi. Review of Williams, Duncan Ryūken, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War.
H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55929
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