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American Sutra: Buddhism and the WWII Japanese American Incarceration
The Role of Religion in Surviving Incarceration: Patriotism Through Religious Freedom
A conversation with journalist, MacArthur Fellow, and National Book Award-winning author Ta-nehisi Coates. During his tenure as senior editor at The Atlantic, Coates wrote the influential 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” and in 2019 testified in front of a Congressional House hearing on H.R. 40, a bill to establish a commission to study reparations. The conversation will be moderated by Duncan Ryuken Williams (USC Ito Center).
Is there a Buddhist approach to acknowledging and transforming America’s enduring racial karma? Larry Ward - senior Dharma teacher ordained by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn and founder of the Lotus Institute - will share insights from his recently released book America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal on how to break the nation’s cycles of racial trauma. In conversation with Ito Center Director Duncan Ryuken Williams.
Co-sponsored by the Lotus Institute
Larry Ward (pronouns- he/him) is a senior teacher in Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition and the author of the book America's Racial Karma. Dr. Ward brings 25 years of international experience in organizational change and local community renewal to his work as director of the Lotus Institute and as an advisor to the Executive Mind Leadership Institute at the Drucker School of Management. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies with an emphasis on Buddhism and the neuroscience of meditation
Global Asias and the Migrations of Race-Religion
Where do we find home? How do we become free together? How do we find a place of refuge and belonging in a world often intent on exclusion? These have been enduring questions for American Buddhists of Asian ancestry since the 1850s when the first Buddhist temples were built in the U.S. by immigrants and their descendants. Today, people of Asian heritage make up more than two-thirds of American Buddhists. Yet the histories and perspectives of Asian American Buddhists remain marginalized in many sanghas. What can we learn from Buddhist Asian American insights about navigating the complexities of identity and building an American Sangha that values multiplicity over singularity, hybridity over purity, and inclusivity over exclusivity? How does centering Asian American voices expand our understandings of race, identity, and belonging in American Buddhism? What can Buddhists of all backgrounds learn from Asian American Buddhists when it comes to building multiracial coalitions and inclusive communities?
In dialogue with each other and with participants, Duncan Ryūkan Williams and Chenxing Han will draw from their respective books, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019) and Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021). These groundbreaking works form the basis for a timely conversation on buried histories, trailblazing contributions, race and identity, belonging and refuge. We hope you’ll join us.
As we work to become a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse community, we invite feedback/suggestions you may have regarding ways that we can make participation in the program more accessible and welcoming; please email us at contact@buddhistinquiry.org.
This is a free online course. Register below.
The forced removal and incarceration of over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them Buddhists, in U.S. concentration camps during WWII began with the arrest of Buddhist priests even before the smoke had cleared at Pearl Harbor. The prewar surveillance of Buddhist temples and the making of registries that targeted Buddhist priests, unlike Christian ministers, as threats to national security was based on a long-standing presumption that America is essentially a White Christian nation. The first federal immigration law that targeted a particular group for exclusion from the United States was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that deemed the predominantly Buddhist Chinese immigrants as the “heathen Chinee,” a group religiously and racially unassimilable. Despise this long history of religion-racial animus, Buddhists who found themselves behind barbed wire in camps surrounded by guards drew on their Buddhist teaching, practice, and community to not only survive the wartime incarceration, but advocate for a vision of America that is multi-ethnic and religiously free. In this presentation, Duncan Ryuken Williams will talk about how the teachings of these Asian American Buddhist ancestors offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure to the present. An interned Buddhist priest and a postwar advocate of racial reparations, Rev. Kyoshiro Tokunaga, often spoke about the “Karma of a Nation” in reference to America’s racial legacy while Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued that reparations is more than a recompense of past injustices, but a national reckoning “that would lead to spiritual renewal.” Williams proposes a Buddhist approach to the work of repair and building a nation that values multiplicity over singularity, hybridity over purity, and inclusivity over exclusivity.
The forced removal and incarceration of over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them Buddhists, in U.S. concentration camps during WWII began with the arrest of Buddhist priests even before the smoke had cleared at Pearl Harbor. The prewar surveillance of Buddhist temples and the making of registries that targeted Buddhist priests, unlike Christian ministers, as threats to national security was based on a long-standing presumption that America is essentially a White Christian nation. The first federal immigration law that targeted a particular group for exclusion from the United States was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that deemed the predominantly Buddhist Chinese immigrants as the “heathen Chinee,” a group religiously and racially unassimilable. Despise this long history of religion-racial animus, Buddhists who found themselves behind barbed wire in camps surrounded by guards drew on their Buddhist teaching, practice, and community to not only survive the wartime incarceration, but advocate for a vision of America that is multi-ethnic and religiously free. In this presentation, Duncan Ryuken Williams will talk about how the teachings of these Asian American Buddhist ancestors offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure to the present. An interned Buddhist priest and a postwar advocate of racial reparations, Rev. Kyoshiro Tokunaga, often spoke about the “Karma of a Nation” in reference to America’s racial legacy while Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued that reparations is more than a recompense of past injustices, but a national reckoning “that would lead to spiritual renewal.” Williams proposes a Buddhist approach to the work of repair and building a nation that values multiplicity over singularity, hybridity over purity, and inclusivity over exclusivity.
The BCA Center for Buddhist Education (CBE) will present this seminar online via Zoom.
The Zoom link will be sent to you on the Monday before the lecture .
Please check your email again on the day before the lecture for final information and possibly lecture handouts.
The Manzanar Ireito (Consoling Spirits Tower) is an iconic symbolic of the forced removal and indefinite incarceration of over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during WWII. An interfaith monument built in 1943 in time for the Buddhist summer ancestral festival of Obon, it was designed by a Catholic architect Ryozo Kado, built by the Young Buddhist Association and residents of Block 9, and dedicated by the Holiness Church’s Rev. Junro Kashitani and Buddhist priest Rev. Shinjo Nagatomi, whose calligraphy adorns the monument built at the cemetery to honor the spirits of those who had passed away in the camp. Today, at a moment when controversial monuments are being pulled down in a national reckoning about America’s history of racial violence and exclusion, the Irei Names Monument is a new initiative that memorializes the names of all persons of Japanese ancestry who experienced incarceration during WWII in Army, DOJ, WCCA, WRA confinement sites and temporary detention facilities. Duncan Ryuken Williams will speak about the making of the names list, the construction of an installation, and the building of an online memorial website.
Talk Abstract: The forced removal and incarceration of roughly 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, into various kinds of confinement sites during WWII began with the arrest of Buddhist priests even before the smoke had cleared at Pearl Harbor. The prewar surveillance of Buddhist temples and the making of registries that targeted Buddhist and Shinto priests, unlike Christian ministers, as threats to national security is based on a long-standing presumption that America is essentially a White Christian nation. The first federal immigration law that targeted a particular group for exclusion from the United States was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that deemed the predominantly Buddhist/Taoist Chinese immigrants as the “heathen Chinese,” a group religiously and racially unassimilable. Despise this long history of religion-racial animus, Buddhists who found themselves behind barbed wire in camps surrounded by guards drew on their teachings, practice, and community to not only survive the wartime incarceration, but advocate for a vision of America that is multi-ethnic and religiously free. In this presentation, Duncan Ryuken Williams will talk about how the incarceration experiences of Japanese American Buddhists offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure in different ways even to the present. At a time when the karmic legacy of America’s racial past has put into question what becomes monumentalized, Williams will outline a major new initiative to remember the names of those incarcerated in the form of a Buddhist monument that he is creating.
A Conversation on “American Sutra” with J. Cody Nielsen (Founder and ED, Convergence on Campus)
A workshop exploring how Buddhist communities in Japan and the U.S. have skillfully adapted to the constraints, suffering, and challenges from the global COVID-19 pandemic. Presentations will include an overview of religious responses to COVID-19 in Japan by Levi MacLaughlin (North Carolina State University), adaptations at North American Buddhist temples by Jeff Wilson (University of Waterloo), and Buddhist practice at the San Quentin State Prison by Jun Hamamoto. The workshop will be moderated by Duncan Ryuken Williams (USC Ito Center).
A conversation between former national JACL Executive Director John Tateishi (author of Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations - Heyday, 2020) and Duke University Professor William Darity and Independent Scholar A. Kirsten Mullen (co-authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century - UNC Press, 2020). The conversation will be introduced by Duncan Ryuken Williams (USC Ito Center) and moderated by Susan Kamei (USC).
60 min Lecture
15-30 min Q & A
This lecture is open to the public too. If you are not affiliated with Jodo Shinshu Temple in Canada, please indicate "New to Jodo Shinshu".
In this time of Covid-19 lockdowns, our loss of freedom has been one of the most difficult aspects to bear. The inability to see loved ones and go where we want, when we want, has been painful, overwhelming - and increasingly, profoundly depressing. How will we cope with what looks like months more of this pandemic-imposed imprisonment? Perhaps we can learn from the experience of law-abiding people who underwent actual imprisonment and found a way to thrive with the help of their unfolding Buddhist faith. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to declare much of the West Coast a military exclusion zone. This act resulted in the incarceration of 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent -- including some 70,000 American citizens. Their crime? Being of the wrong ancestry in a time of war hysteria and rampant racism. These Japanese Americans were forced from their homes, deprived of their property and civil rights, and locked in concentration camps. Yet, behind barbed wire, many looked to their Buddhist faith and found the inner strength and peace to carve out a new life. Professor and author of the new book American Sutra, Duncan Ryūken Williams, PhD, will show us a path to peace found in the experiences and teachings of these imprisoned believers. As they discovered, the wisdom and compassion of their faith led to true "freedom" that enabled them to rise above the circumstances.
