Complex Loyalties: Issei Buddhist Ministers During the Wartime Incarceration1

Complex Loyalties: Issei Buddhist Ministers during the Wartime Incarceration1 Duncan Ry¥ken Williams University of California, Irvine December 7, 1941: A Jødø-e Ceremony to Remember The Southern California Coastal Region’s Young Buddhist Association had planned a Jødø-e ceremony, so I drove thirty miles to in Guadalupe. When I got there, Rev. Todoroki of the San Luis Obispo Buddhist Temple said to me, “This will really be a Jødø-e ceremony to remember.” Unsure what he meant, I replied, “Why? What’s going on?” “War has begun!” he said, “I just heard on the radio that Japan has attacked Hawaii.” […] I thought the planes must surely have been German, but then I heard a radio broadcast from Japan that began with the harsh words “As the Pacific is now at war,….” With its military marching music in the background, that broadcast left no doubt that war had indeed begun. There we were, 5,000 miles from our country, living in America at a time when we would be seen as enemy aliens. So at that memorable Young Buddhist Association Jødø-e ceremony that evening, I said, “When we Buddhists look west, we ordinarily think about returning home to Japan. But now, we must look even further west, to the Pure Land, and be prepared to return there instead. With a mind as firm as the Diamond Seat upon which the Buddha is seated, let us live each day with this immovable Dia- mond Mind.” Despite this declaration, my own mind thoughts were troubled as I returned home along the mountain roads that night. Although while in Guadalupe I had called home ordering them to destroy the documents, I was worried that the American authorities had gotten there before me. I was anxious that anything that might cause trouble for my fellow Japanese in America be destroyed.2 The above is a diary entry by Rev. Daishø Tana. Tana was a Nishi Honganji minister in California whose immediate reaction to Pearl Harbor gives us a sense of his disbelief about the attack, his resignation to his 255 256 Pacific World situation as an enemy alien, his faith in Pure Land Buddhism in the face of possible death, and his concern about certain documents at his Buddhist temple that might have been construed as anti-American. Although immi- grant Japanese Buddhists and their American children had assimilated considerably by 1941, Rev. Tana recognized that however Americanized the Japanese had become, the perception of the Japanese community and their Buddhist heritage held by the United States government and the public-at-large was tainted with suspicion and fear. Rev. Tana’s instincts were correct. Even before Pearl Harbor, the FBI, ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), and Canadian Intelligence had been investigating Buddhists in Hawaii, California, and Canada. By means of surveillance teams assigned to temples including the Shingon sect Los Angeles Køyasan Temple and intelligence reports filed on suspect Bud- dhist priests, the names of Buddhist priests were compiled in what later became known as the “ABC” list, a list of those to be arrested if war was declared. At least three years prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, intelligence units had commissioned studies on the “Americanization” and “potential loyalty” of Buddhists versus Christians in the Nikkei community. The studies had concluded that Buddhists were more likely than their Christian counterparts to identify with Japan and less able to properly “Americanize.” One such report by the Counter Sub- version Section of the ONI (which shared information with the FBI and Army Intelligence), declassified at my request from the National Ar- chives, states: Affiliated with Buddhist and Shinto temples are Japanese Lan- guage Schools, welfare societies, young people’s Buddhist societies, and Buddhist women’s associations. They provide excellent resources for intelligence operations, have proved to be very receptive to Japanese propaganda, and in many cases have con- tributed considerable sums to the Japanese war effort. Japanese Christian Churches are much less closely affiliated with the Japa- nese Government, and there is considerable evidence to indicate that their major concern outside of religious matters centers on improving Japanese-American relations and the restoration of peace in Eastern Asia. At the same time, it is true that some individuals and groups among Japanese Christians are working against the interests of this country.3 Here, while particular Christian persons or churches were suspect in the minds of the U.S. government, Buddhists and “Shintoists” were suspect as a category. Indeed, under Hoover’s FBI, the final ABC list catego- rized Buddhist priests along with Shintø priests, unlike their Christian counterparts, as “known dangerous Group A suspects,” a group which Williams: Complex Loyalties 257 also included members of the Japanese consulate, Japanese language instructors, fishermen, and martial arts teachers—in other words, those whose arrest should be of immediate priority in the event of war. While it would have been reasonable for intelligence agencies to keep their eyes on a particular person or a specific temple suspected of subversive activity, the wholesale categorization of all Buddhists as inherently suspect reflected the government’s fear of social elements that seemed foreign and un-American. Indeed, the authorities’ readiness to lump whole groups of people together, rather investigating individual suspects on a case-by-case basis (as done with the German- and Italian-American community), reflected the addition of racial discrimination to religious discrimination as all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States and Canada were incarcerated during the war. The wartime incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese- Americans has been explored by many scholars from legal, political, social, economic, and literary viewpoints, but research on the religious life of those incarcerated has received relatively little attention.4 In particular, the experiences of Issei Buddhists (both ministers and regular temple members) during the war have undergone little scholarly investigation. This essay attempts to focus on the complex feelings of the Issei Buddhists, whose wartime experiences and loyalties were somewhat different from those of their Nisei American children.5 I draw primarily from previously unexamined Japanese-language letters, diary entries, and sermons that I have translated. As this issue of Pacific World is dedicated to the late Professor Masatoshi Nagatomi, I have also included several letters and sermons composed by his father, Rev. Shinjø Nagatomi, the well- known Jødo Shinsh¥ minister who served the Buddhist population in Manzanar, California, one of the ten Wartime Relocation Administra- tion (WRA) camp. December 8, 1941: The First Arrests At 7 a.m., I received a telephone call informing me that Mr. “T,” who had ridden back [from Guadalupe], had been arrested by the FBI immediately upon his return home. As I was still new to this post, I hadn’t made a thorough account of all the documents. But I thought that I would most immediately need to deal with all documents related to the Japanese embassy, the Japanese Associa- tion, and the Women’s Association. I put aside the Emperor’s photo as my personal property and, aware that I would assume full responsibility for any consequences, I started burning everything. That’s when a call came from Mr. “I,” warning me to get rid of all 258 Pacific World the receipts from our donations to the Japanese military. I told him I was dealing with other materials at that moment. […] After this, all the children began to arrive at the temple’s Japa- nese-language school, just as usual. I thought that the continuation of the Japanese-language school would be misunderstood by the Ameri- can officials. So, after telling some folk tales to the first and second year students, we went to the Buddha hall to hold the Jødø-e ceremony and a school closing ceremony. I told the students to be good Americans, as the children of Japanese parents, and to keep up their regular attendance at the white people’s school.6 Rev. Tana’s next diary entry further illustrates the anxiety among Buddhist priests that, with the outbreak of war, Buddhist temples would be deemed subversive by the U.S. government because of their association with Japanese culture, Japanese schooling, and the Japanese military campaign in China. At the same time, his advice to the children to “be good Americans as the children of Japanese parents” reflects the ambiguous situation of the Issei, who wanted to educate their children about Japan, but who also knew that their American children held the key to the entire community’s future in the United States. It was with these complex loyalties that the Issei faced this critical moment: on the one hand was their Japanese heritage and on the other were their Japanese-American children and the adopted homeland where many Japanese would live out their days. (We should recall that under racially biased laws, the Issei, unlike European immigrants, could not acquire American citizenship.) Their loyalties would be severely tested on all sides, both within the Japanese- American community (for example, by Japanese-American Christians encouraging Buddhists to convert to Christianity to display loyalty to America) and outside it by the U.S. government (the most well-known example being the “Loyalty Questionnaire,” which deeply divided individual families and the entire community). The government’s fear of a Japanese “fifth column” that could emerge from a strongly “disloyal” Buddhist community often approached the irrational. A diary of another Nishi Honganji priest, Rev. Buny¥ Fujimura, described the events of December 8, 1941: The next day, the 8th, the sun shone through the clouds.

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