Buddhism as a National Security Threat

By Duncan Ryūken Williams

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is not only a tale of injustice; it is a moving story of faith. In this pathbreaking account, Duncan Ryūken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation’s history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American. In the face of discrimination, dislocation, dispossession, and confinement, Japanese Americans turned to their faith to sustain them, whether they were behind barbed wire in camps or serving in one of the most decorated combat units in the European theater. Using newly translated sources and extensive interviews with survivors of the camps and veterans of the war, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War reveals how the Japanese American community broadened our country’s conception of religious freedom and forged a new American Buddhism.

Years prior to Pearl Harbor, the US Army’s G-2 intelligence section, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and the FBI had all commissioned investigations of Buddhism as a potential threat to US national security. Kilsoo Haan of the Sino-Korean People’s League — writing dispatches under the pen name of W. K. Lyhan — became an informant for the G-2 section in Hawaii as early as 1931. In his various reports, he routinely identified Buddhist and Shinto organizations as a hindrance to Americanization. In the same vein as the white Christian missionaries who had worried about the “repaganization” of the islands, he wrote in his 1933 report, The Japanese Problem in Hawai’i:

The hard working and God fearing American missionary pioneers have founded the Republic of Hawaii in the crossroads of the Pacific However, little did these builders of Hawaii ever dream of facing a racial problem so distinct and so peculiar in character and spirit as the Japanese racial problem. [The Japanese] pound into the minds of the younger generation religious faith in Buddhism and Shintoism as a necessary condition to emancipate their souls Buddhism serves as an indirect agency in keeping the spirit of Mikadoism alive in Hawaii and as one of the best mediums of pro-Japanese propaganda. [The Young Men’s Buddhist Association’s] chief aim is to bring American citizens of Japanese ancestry closer to Japanized Buddhism, Japanese culture, ideals of religio-patriotism we doubt whether the American citizens of alien-Japanese parentage can be truly loyal to America. It would be like asking a tadpole to change himself to a frog within an hour of his birth.

Lyhan identified the Japanese-language schools along with “Buddhists in Hawaii, “The Young Men’s Buddhist Association,” and the “Japanese press in Hawaii” as the four groups most detrimental to Americanization. He believed that Buddhist organizations were dangerous to the social order and pointed to temples and youth groups as hotbeds of potential indoctrination, likely to steer even full-fledged citizens of Japanese American descent into disloyal and unpatriotic behavior.

The idea that Japan, and by extension the Japanese community in America, posed a military threat to the national security of the US became widespread after Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).58 On December 20, 1906, for example, the San Francisco Examiner suggested in an article that the Japanese had sent their soldiers from that war to Hawai’i in the “guise of coolies [but] secretly preparing for hostilities.”

Between the Russo-Japanese War and the end of World War I, anti-Asian animus increasingly focused on Japan and those of Japanese heritage because of Japan’s demonstration of its military power. Franklin D. Roosevelt — assistant secretary of the Navy in this period and later president of the United States — especially worried about a future war with Japan at sea. That a supposedly inferior race was militarily capable of threatening the United States led to discussions about the mysterious nature of these “heathen” peoples.

By World War I, US postal censors decided to screen letters written by members of the Japanese community for signs of potential subversion, despite the fact that Japan was an ally of the United States during that war. Historian Gary Okihiro, in a close analysis of a 1919 report by Captain Philip Spalding, an Assistant Military Censor, explains how potential disloyalty to the United States was discerned:

[Spalding] divided the Japanese into two groups, Christians and non-Christians, that cut across generations and citizenship. [According to Spalding] Christians showed “an independence of thought” and were imbued with “more of the ideals of American democracy”; non-Christians, who constituted “a very large majority,” worshipped the Emperor.

Among the letters that Spalding highlighted were two written by Buddhist priests that did indeed challenge the existing racial hierarchies and social norms of the islands. In one, a Buddhist priest described a new effort by a Japanese businessman to develop a Japanese-owned sugar plantation on the Kona coast. The priest praised this effort, complaining of a subservient mentality among many Japanese who had hitherto accepted a racially stratified wage and social structure that meant lower wages for the same work done by Portuguese and native Hawaiian plantation workers. “Japanese children are too submissive to white men,” he wrote. “They are taught to look upon white men as supermen.” In the second letter, Spalding condemned what he believed was the anti-Americanism of another priest, Rev. Nishiyama of Kohala Mills, who called Japanese Christians “traitors” to the Japanese American community for aligning themselves with the territorial government’s effort to shut down Japanese-language schools, many of them run by Buddhist temples. Okihiro concludes that, for Spalding, “Americanization was a matter of national defense for the army,” and that Christianity and English-language education “were essential to the fulfillment of the military’s mission in Hawaii.”

After World War I, the US military focused on both Japan’s military capabilities and what it considered anti-American elements in the Japanese immigrant community. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Military Intelligence Department and the Army G-2 issued half a dozen reports stressing how Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Hawai‘i “retarded” Americanization and should be considered “military liabilities” in the event of a war with Japan.

These conclusions were reached despite internal evidence that Buddhists would likely be loyal to the United States if it went to war with Japan. Captain Charles C. Cavender, stationed at Fort Shafter in the ONI’s Hawaiian Department, for example, produced a confidential intelligence report in 1939 titled “Loyalty of Immigrants in the Event of War.” It explicitly assessed “citizen Buddhists versus Christians” and “alien Buddhists versus Christians” on their relative “adherence” to Japan or the United States, to “totalitarianism” or “democracy,” and to “Japanese authoritarianism” or “American liberal education.” Cavender concluded that “except for a few who stated they would be neutral, the majority of the citizen group stated they would adhere to the United States,” and that even the aliens, “while stating they would adhere, for the most part, to Japan, were unanimous in stating that they would encourage their children to adhere to the United States.”

Other Honolulu-based assessments were similarly guarded about broad claims of disloyalty or fifth-column potential in the Japanese American community. FBI special agent Robert L. Shivers, who headed the Honolulu field office, filed a report to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that attested to the general loyalty of the community. Captain John A. Burns was the head of the Honolulu Police Department and leader of the Police Espionage Unit (and a three-term Governor after the war). Having grown up in a mixed neighborhood in Honolulu with many local Japanese, including some who would become members of his own police department, he was willing to put his own reputation on the line with public statements attesting to their loyalty. Just weeks before Pearl Harbor, he published a guest editorial titled “Why Attack the People of Hawaii?” for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, writing:

Regarding the loyalty of our citizens and aliens, there is a lot of loose talk. It is said that the Japanese maintain their own schools . . . traditions and respect for those traditions They are not alone in this…… those units which have been investigating [them] have not found facts which would prove disloyalty but rather the reverse Let’s be Americans. Basically that means equal justice…… [We should] not allow our people to be condemned without proper reason.

Despite these voices from respected law enforcement officials who knew the Japanese American community well, the prevailing attitude lumped together individuals through guilt by association, whether by race or religion, with the potential enemy of Japan. The minority reports, which suggested that the religious affiliation of Christian or Buddhist would not determine loyalty to the United States, were mainly ignored.

The US government and military ultimately took the view that Buddhists, Shintoists, and Japanese-language school affiliates were part of an anti-American majority within the Japanese American community. From this perspective, only a minority of individuals were considered trustworthy — mostly Christian converts, especially those who spied on the Japanese American community on behalf of US governmental agencies. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the Honolulu field office of the FBI had seventy-three such confidential informants and other “loyal and reliable” Japanese who acted as “listening posts” in the community and gathered information on targeted groups such as the Buddhist and Shinto leadership.

Indeed, military reports emphasized that Buddhism was an alien religion whose entire leadership collectively posed a threat to national security. Just three days before Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the Counter Subversion Section of the ONI shared its Japanese Intelligence and Propaganda in the United States During 1941 report with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the State Department. It concluded:

The Buddhist and Shinto priests in the US and Territory of Hawaii number over 350 To fully appreciate the potentialities of these organizations as media for subversive activity, it should be noted first, that there are well over 100,000 Buddhists in the continental US alone, and secondly, that every Japanese, no matter what his professed faith, is a Shintoist Affiliated with Buddhist and Shinto temples are Japanese Language 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 contributed considerable sums to the Japanese war effort. Japanese Christian Churches are much less closely affiliated with the Japanese 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.

The last line in that excerpt is important to note, as it shows the distinct way in which Japanese Christians were treated by the document and many others like it. Within their community, the US government focused on specific individuals and groups as potentially dangerous to the nation’s interests. Buddhists and Shintoists, by contrast, were perceived as an entire group to be un-American, or even anti-American, and a threat to national security. This threat assessment strategy would have a measurable impact on both the initial dragnet after Pearl Harbor and on the mass incarceration following President Roosevelt’s issuance of Executive Order 9066, which gave the War Department broad powers to forcibly remove people from their communities. Although that executive order did not mention nationalities, it was used only against Japanese Americans.