Preserving The Dharma Behind Barbed Wire

Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we’ll be exploring stories from the history of Buddhism in the United States over the last century.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll discuss one woman who went from wealthy Chicago socialite to a Buddhist zen pioneer.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll learn how the Beat Generation popularized certain aspects of Buddhism in America.

Brian Balogh: We’ll chat with an American Buddhist scholar who’s been pals with the Dalai Lama for decades.

Nathan Connolly: Let’s return now to my conversation with Duncan Ryuken Williams. I asked him about the opening to his book, American Sutra. It features a poem by a Zen Buddhist priest named Nyogen Senzaki. When Pearl Harbor happened, Senzaki had been in the U.S. for nearly 40 years and organized a multiethnic Buddhist community in Los Angeles.

Duncan Williams: He writes a poem once he learns of the U.S. Army policy that every Japanese person, it doesn’t matter if you’re a threat to national security, if you’re a infirmed grandmother or a little tiny baby, everybody’s going to go to these camps. He writes a poem called Parting on May 7th, 1940. He’s writing it to his multiethnic Zen Buddhist community. He’s writing it to the folks in his group who are not of Japanese ancestry.

Duncan Williams: This is the poem that he writes. “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 13 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.” The reason I open the book with this poem, in part because of this first line, “Thus have I heard.” It’s a phrase that is used in classical Buddhist scriptures, sutras. When the Buddha was alive and he was preaching, nobody wrote it down. Three months after the Buddha’s death, they have this big assembly of Buddhist priests. One of the monks, Anand, that was supposed to have a great memory, he apparently was requested to recite all of the Buddhist sermons in front of everybody, and they would agree that that’s what the Buddha said. He would always preface what he recalled with, “Thus have I heard.” That phrase is a indication of a Buddhist scripture.

Duncan Williams: What is fascinating here is that usually what follows is Buddhist lessons on wisdom or compassion or meditation or something like that, but in Nyogen Senzaki’s poem, he’s just describing the lived experience of the Japanese American community being removed by the U.S. Army, but with this hope that wherever he goes he may form other groups, inviting friends of all faces with the empty hands of zen. He’s saying he’s hopeful that some kind of multiethnic American Buddhist community might even come out of this army policy, or despite it.

Duncan Williams: To me it’s an interesting thing that the Buddhist lesson that’s being taught here is something about this lived experience of forced removal and incarceration. It’s actually going to be a lesson not only for Buddhists, but perhaps for Americans of every stripe.

Nathan Connolly: Tell us what you’ve heard and what you’ve read about the conditions in the actual camps, the assembly centers and such, for Japanese American Buddhists, and particularly how Buddhism was practiced in those camps, in those spaces.

Duncan Williams: One of the first challenges that they faced when they got to these euphemistically called assembly centers, this is while the long-term war relocation authority camps, 10 of them were being built to house 120,000 people. They first went to these temporary assembly centers. They were often at fairgrounds, county fairgrounds or livestock centers or horseracing tracks, like the one in L.A. that Nyogen Senzaki went to. He lived literally in a horse stall where you could smell the urine and the manure that had been there just weeks before these Japanese were placed there. In that kind of context, they entered the assembly centers, and the first rule that they are informed about is that the army is prohibiting anything written in Japanese, including Buddhist scriptures or even a book of Japanese poetry. That’s considered contraband, and you got to take that out of your suitcase as you enter these places. The two exceptions they made to that policy was that if you had a dictionary that had English and Japanese in it, that was okay. If you had a Christian Bible written in Japanese, that was okay.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Duncan Williams: The message they got is a assumed, I sometimes call it Anglo Protestant normativity, but this idea of Anglo both in the sense of whiteness, but also in the sense of English only. That’s what the government expected.

Duncan Williams: The other big thing in these camps was the creation, very creatively sometimes, of a way to practice Buddhism, despite the fact that you don’t have your normal surroundings and the normal ritual items and so forth. The very first big ceremony once you get in these camps is April 1942. It’s the Buddha’s birthday. It happens every April. In one camp they didn’t have anybody with a Buddha statue that you normally would use. You usually have a ceremony on the Buddha’s birthday where you pour sweet tea on a statue of a baby Buddha. They had neither, but they did have army-rationed coffee and some sugar, and so they made a sweet coffee drink. One of the young men went to the mess hall and found the largest carrot that he could find and carved at least a semblance of a Buddha out of that carrot.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Duncan Williams: They poured that sweet coffee on this carrot Buddha. That’s the kind of thing that they have to do to recreate Buddhist practice in these camps, because they just didn’t have anything. I think they were actually very creative in so doing.

Nathan Connolly: You actually discovered a Japanese American intelligence officer who was captured by the Japanese military. What was that story?

Duncan Williams: 6,000 Japanese Americans served in the Pacific. If you can imagine conducting the war against the Japanese, Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific, required people who were linguistically and culturally bilingual, bicultural, because you needed to have people that could do code-breaking, you needed people to do prisoner interrogation, radio intercepts. Roughly 6,000 Japanese Americans served in that theater of combat. One of the people, one of those 6,000, was a guy called Richard Sakakida. Before the war, he’s a head cadet in the ROTC at his local high school in Honolulu, Hawaii. He gets the first Japanese American to get a full scholarship offer to go to West Point.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Duncan Williams: He’s also from a very devout Buddhist family, and he gets a full scholarship offer from the bishop of his sect of Buddhism to go to Japan and become the first Japanese American to go and train in Japan and come back as a missionary, as it were, a Buddhist priest. He ultimately rejects both of those things in the late 1930s and gets recruited to serve in the counterintelligence core in the Philippines, even prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. He’s embedded in the American intelligence operations there. As the Philippines fell, thousands of Americans were taken prisoner by the Japanese, often experiencing brutal marches and prison camps, but Sakakida is one of them, the only Japanese American among the Americans captured by the Japanese. He is targeted by the Japanese military, tortured for days. He gets through that torture because of his Buddhist faith and what he calls his rebellious Yankee spirit. He merged the two things to get through the torture and not reveal any kind of American secrets to his captors.

Duncan Williams: The story of Sakakida is really fascinating. He goes through so many adventures. He engineers prison breaks. He himself manages to escape from the hands of the Japanese. McArthur had sent six different rescue teams to try to get him out, because he was such an important intelligence asset. They all fail, but he himself engineers his escape, lives in the jungle for some time, gets captured by some headhunting Aboriginal tribe in the Philippines, nearly dies, is wounded again.

Duncan Williams: Anyway, he goes through this adventure, and finally, right at the end of the war, reunites with the U.S. Army. McArthur says, “Look, Sakakida, you need to head the war crimes tribunal for the entire territory of the Philippines.” He gets assigned to do that job. In that process, he tracks down the three officers that had tortured him during the war. In the moment that he meets them, he comes to recall this Buddhist teaching that he learned when he was growing up in Honolulu, Hawaii. He remembers this phrase from the Dhammapada, a Buddhist scripture that says, “Like fire is not put out by fire but only by water, hatred is put out by love and not by hatred.” He recalls this phrase, and in that moment forgives these people that tortured him.

Duncan Williams: To me, this is a really interesting American story of somebody who really served his country and is recognized so by the highest levels of the U.S. military, but as somebody who did that, drawing both on his deep Buddhist faith, but also his deep faith in America as well.

Nathan Connolly: Keeping with the theme of the aftermath of the war and moment of humanity in its wake, what happens to American Buddhism at large in the wake of internment? In what ways does it spread across the United States after the war?

Duncan Williams: One of the things that happens in the process of resettlement, as it’s sometimes called, people couldn’t go back to the West Coast until 1945, but in the meantime, in ’44, some Buddhists were able, if they could pass, they called it the sometimes colloquially known as the loyalty questionnaire, they were able to leave camp in places like Chicago, New York, Baltimore, places east of this Western Defense Command Zone on the Pacific Coast.

Duncan Williams: Quite a few thousand of the 120,000 people in these camps were able to leave camp a little bit early before the end of the war, and there they set up these Buddhist temples. In so doing, the temple served as a community center for these people that were in further dislocation and trying to resettle and recreate their lives.

Duncan Williams: Also, they introduced Buddhism to people in these areas of the United States that previously didn’t really have very much exposure to the Buddhist religion. You found people of other ethnicities taking an interest, coming to these temples in New York, in Chicago, in Denver. This was the beginning of what would later become, in the 1950s and ’60s and into the ’70s, this Beat Generation, a counterculture hippie movement, these parts of the American community being exposed to Buddhism for the first time.

Nathan Connolly: My sense from your own work is that you’re describing a unique form of Buddhism that comes, in a lot of ways that flowers out of this experience. How does this discussion of the Japanese American Buddhist experience generally tell us about religion and Buddhism’s durability as a part of American life?

Duncan Williams: One of the things that when one studies let’s say the 2,500-year of Buddhism, is that when it moved from its original roots in India and moved to say China or from China to Japan or to Tibet, each time it moves, there’s a concept in Buddhism, in Japanese it’s called [Hoben 00:19:42], but it’s skillful adaptation, so this idea of smartly, skillfully adapting the Buddhist teaching to each time and place.

Duncan Williams: The story of the emergence, in an unlikely moment when Buddhism is in substance under attack, is actually the very moment where something called American Buddhism gets crystallized, where certain kinds of adaptations start happening. There are these pressures to say, “Hey, I’m loyal to the United States in this time before,” and that my faith is what gives me direction and guidance. They didn’t want to abandon that, and yet they also wanted to find a way to say, “Our religion is not a threatening thing,” and so among the many things that happened, using more English terminology, sometimes even using Christian terminology. In 1944 in one of the camps, one of the large organizations that used to be called the Buddhist Mission of North America, BMNA, goes to court and changes their name to the BCA, the Buddhist Churches of America. This idea of doing church or of meeting on Sundays and things like that, that process already was happening before the war to a certain extent, but becomes very much crystallized in the camps. What emerges is a new form of Buddhism, American Buddhism.

Nathan Connolly: Duncan Ryuken Williams is the author of the book American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. He’s also the Director of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California.