When a Scholar Dives Into Japanese American History
I am as intrigued by the stories of books as I am by stories in books. Especially with intensely researched projects, I am fascinated by the author’s impetus to launch on such arduous and even perilous quests.
In the case of the American Sutra, an account of Japanese American experiences in harsh World War II internment camps, the 17-year journey was sparked off when Duncan Ryunken Williams was cleaning out an office.
His doctoral advisor had recently passed away and the advisor’s widow sought Duncan’s assistance in clearing papers and other effects. While organizing or purging papers, he stumbled on a diary, written in Japanese, detailing the chronicler’s experiences of being confined in a prison camp. The entries, inscribed by his late advisor’s father, tugged at Duncan because till then, he hadn’t encountered detailed accounts of Japanese American incarceration.
He started wondering about other diaries and stories that weren’t being captured, especially when those voices were aging and memories fading. This incited his exploration into a significant slice of American history.
The Author’s Personal Story
Duncan grew up in a multifaith, multiracial household. His mother was Japanese and a Buddhist, while his British father was an Anglican Christian. Growing up in Japan till the age of 17, Duncan himself was drawn to Buddhism. To its perennial probing of the relationship between the self and the world. “When you study the Buddha way, you study yourself. And also as a way to let go of oneself,” says Duncan.
After schooling in Japan, he attended Reed College in the U.S. He had always been attracted to the Soto Zen tradition as a layperson. Keen on being more deeply steeped in Zen, he then committed to monastic training in Japan and became a Soto Zen monk. Later, he forayed into a PhD in Religion at Harvard University. He is currently a Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC, where he also directs the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.
A Dark Phase in American History
Just like human resilience is tested during life crises, a nation’s values are subjected to trials during wars or other catastrophic events. Unfortunately, many countries emerge with ghastly and eminently forgettable records. This was true of the United States, when a series of events that occurred between Feb 19, 1942, and March 27th, 1942 revealed how fragile its constitutional values were.
These events themselves had been triggered by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Till then the United States had maintained a neutral position in the war. The Japanese blitz compelled America to shift its stance. But the United States response spawned new victims, many within its own supposedly democratic shores.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the country’s 32nd President, passed an executive order to imprison all people of Japanese ancestry. Ordering the kind of ruthless upheaval reminiscent of Nazi Germany, 110,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps. More tellingly, two-thirds of those rounded up were American citizens and most were Buddhist.
Suddenly, around the country and especially in regions with significant Japanese American populations, notices were posted. Those who “looked like the enemy” were asked to register. No one with the slightest Japanese heritage was spared – not the elderly, not the ailing or feeble, not even children in orphanages.
Neighbors watched people who had previously been peaceful, law-abiding contributors to the community being marched down streets, shorn of their belongings and past identities. Moreover, there seemed to be a large-scale acceptance of the idea that Asians were outsiders; regardless of their citizenry, the Government order reinforced prevailing racial and religious exclusion. As Duncan observes, “race and religion were conflated.” Ironically, the United States was, during that period, also at war with Germany and Italy. But people from those countries were not similarly rounded up or suspected of treason.
Inside the Camps
As someone who had been a monk himself, Duncan was curious about how Buddhism was used by the camp’s inhabitants to survive such a harsh order and dislocation.
The camps themselves had been set up, haphazardly and without any regard for the comfort of its overnight prisoners, in the midst of deserts or swamps. The residents had been permitted to carry one suitcase each – after being forced to forsake lifelong belongings in the space of a short, traumatizing week. Inside desolated barracks, surrounded by harsh barbed-wire fences, they needed to forge or renew their survival instincts. Duncan says, “The Buddhism that put them in the camp also helped people survive it.”
By interviewing many of the 80 or 90-year-old survivors, and piecing together diaries and letters and other reports, Duncan stitched together a narrative of what such confinement felt like for its Buddhist and Shinto internees.
Thus Have I Heard: An Imprisoned Buddhist Priest
Using stories like that of Nyogen Senzaki, a Buddhist priest from Los Angeles who formed a scripture society inside the camp, Duncan describes how a particular kind of American Buddhism was forged inside harsh camp circumstances.
Senzaki, for instance, had been an abandoned infant, rescued from a frozen riverbank in Japan by a Japanese Buddhist priest in 1876. The rescuer priest had been the Buddhist representative at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, the same conference at which Swami Vivekananda had eloquently spoken for Hindus.
Heading to America twelve years after his mentor, Senzaki was keen on propagating Buddhism in the new terrain. Even while working at menial jobs, he read books by William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson at the public library. But he was intent on retaining his independent outlook, abiding by the words of his Zen Master: “See whether it conquers you or you conquer it.”
Eventually, he forged a Buddhist community in Los Angeles, attracting people of Japanese and other origins. When the Government summons arrived in 1942, Senzaki started getting ready for his imprisonment, writing a poem that started with a ‘sutra’ which is “a text said to represent the Buddha’s own teaching.”
Thus have I heard:
The army ordered
All Japanese faces to be evacuated
From the city of Los Angeles.
This homeless monk has nothing but a Japanese face. He stayed here thirteen springs
Meditating with all faces
From all parts of the world,
And studied the teaching of Buddha with them. Wherever he goes, he may form other groups Inviting friends of all faces,
Beckoning them with the empty hands of Zen.
Those herded together at the camps, literally departed with emptiness (a single suitcase) and returned, at the end of their imprisonment, to emptiness – since many of their lands had been sold for a pittance, their things stolen, their homes seized, their jobs lost, their identities shattered with one fell diktat.
Yet, inside the camps, priests continued to preach, with the certainty that this infliction was also the Buddha’s way. Determined to make do with whatever was available, they meditated on the searchlights of guard towers, hunted for small pieces of wood for their altars, and insisted on gathering together to persist with their chants, prayers and other rituals.
Their return also preceded the eventual flowering of Buddhism in the U.S., and the religion’s eastward spread, especially with its fervent adoption by Beat poets like Gary Snyder in the 1960s. Japanese Americans were more dispersed after their release, with some settling as far East as New York, where they established the New York Buddhist Church at Riverside.
But many markers of their past had been obliterated. For instance, earlier, the West Coast had at least large 10 Japan towns, which shrunk or disappeared after their incarceration. And perhaps, keen to assimilate into the “safer” mainstream, the community became majority multiracial, to a degree greater than other ethnic/national communities in the U.S.
More poignantly, American Sutra dwells on a larger lesson. As Duncan puts it, Buddhist teaching specifies that lotus flowers bloom in muddy waters. Muddy waters can signify trappings of this world, suffering, sorrow, greed and other gunk we’re saddled with. The rising lotus flower, according to the author can represent two things: an ability to rise above all this, towards freedom. Or more interestingly, how our muddy lives are necessary “nutrients” for thrusting lotus blooms.
References
Duncan Ryuken Williams, AMERICAN SUTRA: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War, Harvard University Press, Feb 2019