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Issei Buddhism in the Americas

University of Illinois Press

Contents

Foreword Roger Daniels.........................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Dislocations and Relocations of Issei Buddhists in the Americas Duncan Ryûken Williams and Tomoe Moriya.....................ix1. "Can I Put This Jizo Together with the Virgin Mary in the Altar?": Creolizing Zen Buddhism in Brazil Cristina Rocha.........................52. Bukkyokai and the Japanese Canadian Community in British Columbia Masako Iino...............................................................273. The Japanese Language School Controversy in Hawaii Noriko Asato.............................................................................454. The Legal Dimensions of the Formation of Shin Buddhist Temples in Los Angeles Michihiro Ama.................................................655. Buddhist Modernism in English-Language Buddhist Periodicals Lori Pierce.....................................................................876. "Americanization" and "Tradition" in Issei and Nisei Buddhist Publications Tomoe Moriya.....................................................1107. The United States-Japanese War and Tenrikyo Ministers in America Akihiro Yamakura...........................................................1418. The Role of Buddhist Song Culture in International Acculturation Keiko Wells................................................................164Contributors....................................................................................................................................183Index...........................................................................................................................................185

Introduction

DUNCAN RYÛKEN WILLIAMS AND TOMOE MORIYA [Nishi] Hongwanji was the first Japanese [Buddhist denomination] to start an American mission, which in itself exemplifies the history of an eastward transmission of the Buddhist teachings (Bukkyo tozen). This means that American Buddhists have considerable responsibility as pioneers for spreading the teachings around the world. —Koyu Uchida, Bishop of the Buddhist Mission of North America (1905–1923)

Bukkyo tozen: The Eastward Transmission of Buddhism

Buddhists in Japan had long employed the idea of "Bukkyo tozen," literally "the eastward transmission of Buddhism," to describe the geographic advance of their religion from its roots in India, across the Asian continent, and finally to Japan. In this formulation, Japan was conceived of as the last stage in the progression of Buddhism. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, however, Buddhist "missionaries" such as Bishop Uchida advocated a new eastward movement of Buddhism: this time, from Japan across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas. These pioneering Issei (or "first-generation") priests and the devout Japanese Buddhist laypeople they served established a Buddhist presence in lands further east by constructing temples, transmitting Buddhist teachings and practices, and to a lesser extent, through converting non-Buddhists in the Americas. This volume explores these pioneering efforts in the contexts of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese diasporic communities and immigration history on the one hand and the early history of Buddhism in the Americas on the other.

The eastward reorientation across the Pacific to the Americas allows us to question certain disciplinary boundaries and categories that have traditionally located Buddhism solely in Asia or defined "America" in Anglo-Christian terms. By examining the "eastward transmission of Buddhism" in conjunction with the lives of the Issei in the Americas, we will explore how Buddhism negotiated local, translocal, and transnational boundaries as well as how a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious vision of America emerged from the realities of transplanted Asian religious practices in Hawaii, South America, and the West Coast of the United States and Canada. In this way, we hope to build on the emerging scholarship of historians such as Thomas Tweed who have begun to "retell" America's religious history with sustained attention to Asian religions in America.

The rhetoric of the American West and its "opening" by "pioneers" suggest that America faces only Europe and is centered in a New England Anglo-Protestantism every other immigrant group and religious tradition ought to "assimilate" into. Instead of the "American West," especially for the first Japanese sojourners and settlers, the Americas should be viewed as the "Pacific East." This is a perspective that is in part inspired by an emergent scholarship on American religious history at its "frontiers" such as that of Laurie Maffly-Kipp who focuses on the American West as part of the Pacific Rim or America's "Pacific borderlands."

Further, given Japan's own colonial and imperialist ambitions, Japanese Americans could be located, in the words of Eiichiro Azuma, as "between two empires": Japan and America. Yet, neither the simplistic frameworks of a Japan-centered diaspora ignoring local conditions and community formations nor an America-centered assimilationist model that reduces religious change to "Americanization" are adequate for understanding the place of religion in the lives of Buddhists in the Americas. The study of Issei Buddhism, thus, opens up the possibility for retelling American religious history from the perspective of those for whom Asia, rather than Europe, constituted the homeland.

Dislocations: Religion and the Sense of "Home"

After a period of over two hundred years in which Japan had discouraged international exchange, Japan's emergence into modernity in the late-nineteenth century coincides with its government establishing diplomatic relations with the West and the subsequent approval of the emigration of its subjects. The new Meiji-period (1868–1912) government also established a system of state-sponsored Shinto, withdrew support from the Buddhist tradition, and allowed Western Christian missionaries into Japan for the first time in centuries. This was the context in which, starting with the so-called gannen mono (people of the first year [of Meiji]), Japanese students, businessmen, and laborers began emigrating to the Americas. Even though its treaty with the United States assured Christian missionaries the freedom to proselytize, the Japanese were so wary of Western religious and imperialist ambitions in Asia that the gannen mono were issued passports that explicitly prohibited them from converting to Christianity during their journeys abroad.

This policy eased over time, and by the late-nineteenth century some Japanese Christian converts made their way to the Americas for further study and economic opportunities. Still, the overwhelming majority of Japanese immigrants were Buddhist, hailing primarily from certain regions of Japan such as Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, and Fukuoka prefectures. They initially went as laborers to the sugar plantations in the Kingdom (and later Territory) of Hawaii, followed by journeys further east to the North or South American mainland to work on farms, railroads, canneries, fisheries, and logging operations.

Although many were sojourners and returned to Japan at the end of their labor...