When Buddhists Were A “Threat To National Security”

Ed Ayers: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman. If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, along with our colleague Ed Ayers, and each week we explore a topic in American history.

Nathan Connolly: We’re going to start today on a farm in California’s Central Valley in 1941, where 10-year-old [Masumi Kimora 00:00:44] lived with her parents.

Duncan Williams: Central Valley, California is a place where a lot of Japanese American families were involved in migrant farm working, or in her case they actually owned their farm.

Nathan Connolly: This is scholar Duncan Ryuken Williams. Several years ago, Masumi Kimora told Duncan about her family’s experience living in California after the attack at Pearl Harbor. She said that one day shortly after the attack she came home from school and immediately noticed something was terribly wrong.

Duncan Williams: She comes home from school and she sees her dad at the front door of her farmhouse being beaten by some men in suits. She peers into the living room and she sees her mom sitting really still at the kitchen table, with somebody pointing a shotgun to her mom’s head. She knew in that moment, she was only 10 years old, that she had to be calm and go in the midst of that to serve as a translator, because her parents are from Japan and they don’t have much English, and she could tell these men in suits did not have much Japanese. She goes in, and what she discovers in the work of translating was that these men were FBI agents and that they were there because her dad was on the board of the local Buddhist temple and that her dad had been out in the lettuce fields with some rabbits or something, so he had a shotgun he was shooting in the air to scare them off. That was unfortunately in the precise moment when these FBI agents arrived.

Nathan Connolly: Despite only being a kid, Masumi was able to talk down the FBI agents and diffuse the situation, but that wasn’t the last time they showed up at the Kimora family’s doorstep.

Duncan Williams: They actually came back several times to question him about involvement in the Buddhist temple and whether he was a threat to national security. In the midst of all of that, the dad says, “Look, just because we’re Buddhists, we’re not a threat to America, but we need to somehow demonstrate to these people that we’re loyal to this country. Our daughter’s born here and we’ve lived here for decades.” In a fire, he takes everything in the house that has made in Japan or Japanese characters, things with Japanese language on it, and just throws that in the fire.

Nathan Connolly: Even before Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Duncan says the federal government was surveilling Japanese Americans, who they deemed as a national security threat. Buddhists were at the top of the list.

Duncan Williams: They believed that Japanese Americans who are Christian would likely be more loyal to the United States compared to Buddhists. Right after Pearl Harbor, Buddhist priests are the very first people picked up by the FBI. Back then it’s perhaps parallel to, say, Islam in America today, that there was a generalized fear in the media, among the general public, and certainly among the government officials running the intelligence services of the army, that Buddhist priests and temples were potential hotbeds for both espionage and also some kind of fifth-column kind of activity that might happen in case of war with Japan, that these temples would be the places where some kind of secret plots would be hatched against the United States. These type of ideas were very common in the late ’30s and early 1940s.

Nathan Connolly: Back at the Kimora’s farm, as Masumi’s father burned every Japanese artifact in the house, he came across something that made him hesitate.

Duncan Williams: The dad says, “Look, I have this Buddhist sutra, this Buddhist scripture that’s been handed down in our family for generations, and I just can’t throw that into the fire. Also, as a temple board member, I’ve got all of these records from the time of the founding of the temple, the minutes of the board all the way up to December of 1941. This is not my personal property that I can just burn.”

Nathan Connolly: He put these items in a box and buried it next to a large tree near the garage. Soon after, they were ordered to relocate to the Fresno Assembly Center and had to sell their farm. They only got one 20th of the property’s market value.

Duncan Williams: They go to camp, and ultimately they return after the war, and he’s like, “We need to find that box,” because the new owners won’t let them buy their farm back. He’s like, “We still have to find that box.” Ultimately, the new owners, because they had torn down all the large trees and torn down the garage, he roughly knew where it was, but that box, he could never find it.

Duncan Williams: I talk about this story because it’s a story of a family that had to bury their faith, and that they were saying symbolically, by burning away all that Japanese stuff in the fire, they were saying, “We can burn away our Japaneseness, we don’t need to identify with that, but we are not going to burn away our faith, because this is what helps us get orientation in this world,” and that it’s actually a very American thing to do to defend this idea that you can be of any faith. To me this story was can you be both Buddhist and American at the same time, and this is one family’s way of saying, “Yes, we can.”