Camp Dharma
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. Nearly all Americans of Japanese descent were subject to bigotry and accusations of disloyalty, but Buddhists aroused particular suspicion.
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. Here is a brief except from the book looking at how Buddhists maintained their faith in the internment camps.
Despite being targeted by government authorities, most Buddhists did not allow fear to diminish their faith behind barbed-wire fences. In the high-security camps run by the US Army and the DOJ, the incarcerated Buddhist priests were predominantly issei men who had migrated from Japan for the explicit purpose of bringing the Buddhist religion to the Americas. These priests’ outlook, values, and practices were unlikely to waver. They believed that Buddhism had something to offer the American religious landscape.
Stripped of their freedom and of the outward symbols of their faith, Buddhists drew on whatever was available to sustain their faith and freely practice their religion. Imprisonment became an opportunity to discover freedom — a liberation that the Buddha himself attained only after embarking on a spiritual journey filled with many obstacles and hardships. That journey began when he let go of his comfortable life as a prince in the royal palace of the Shakya clan into which he was born, an acknowledgment that unease and suffering were not only part of being alive, but essential to discovering one’s own nature and the world’s.
In Buddhism, the practice of delving into the depths of this world so as to transcend it is sometimes symbolized by the image of a beautiful lotus flower emerging out of muddy waters. The lotus flower represents enlightenment and in sculptural traditions is the seat upon which the Buddha is centered. Muddy water represents delusion and greed, or anything that hinders enlightenment and causes suffering. While some traditions of Buddhism center on the need to transcend the muddy water to attain a state of enlightenment, most Japanese Buddhist traditions emphasize that for the lotus flower to exist, the nutrients from the muddy waters are essential. It is a metaphor that emphasizes how the karmic obstacles of this world are interconnected with liberation and enlightenment.
For the interned Buddhist priests, incarceration often served as muddy water. Their American sutra was written not in a realm of purity and formality but in the swamps of Louisiana and deserts of New Mexico. The internment camps became new arenas for deepening religious practice for those whose mission it was to offer valuable Buddhist teachings to America.
At Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, Bishop Kyokujō Kubokawa of the Jōdo sect — the priest who had been arrested in Hawai‘i in his Buddhist robes — officiated at the first Buddha birthday ceremony. With these robes, he had arrived in the internment camp as the only priest with the appropriate attire to officiate at such an auspicious occasion. One priest wrote that he had only a single pair of underwear, a pair of pants he’d been unable to wash, and a belt made of rope. To the disheveled men, Bishop Kubokawa delivered his sermon. “Your participation in those filthy clothes can be likened to the Buddha’s teaching of the lotus blooming in the mud,” he said. In these muddiest of waters, the men found ways to embrace all manner of karmic hindrances to realize the lotus mind of freedom, wisdom, and compassion.
At another Buddha’s birthday celebration in Fort Lincoln Internment Camp (North Dakota), Rev. Bunyū Fujimura from the Salinas Buddhist Temple noted how the group managed to improvise without the normal items typically employed on the auspicious day:
We did not, of course, have a single religious implement to use for Buddhist services. We did not have a tanjobutsu [Baby Buddha statue], butsu-gu [Buddhist ritual tools], flowers, incense, or any of the implements used in Hanamatsuri [Buddha’s birthday] celebration. Fortunately, we were with many people who were clever with their hands. Arthur Yamabe “borrowed” a carrot from the kitchen and carved a splendid image of the Buddha.
The ritual to mark the birth of the religion would normally have involved the ceremonial pouring of sweet tea on a statue of the newborn Buddha. Without such items, the Buddhist priests imaginatively re- created the ritual for themselves collecting rationed sugar from other internees, stirring the sugar into coffee to concoct an American approximation of the traditional sweet tea, and pouring it over the carved- carrot Buddha. Making do was, of course, part of the Buddhist tradition. Throughout Buddhist teachings, there are examples of people using whatever ingredients they could assemble. Consider this, for instance, from a thirteenth-century cooking manual written by Zen Master Dōgen, the founder of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Japan:
If you only have wild grasses with which to make a broth, do not disdain them. If you have ingredients for a creamy soup do not be delighted. Where there is no attachment, there can be no aversion. Do not be careless with poor ingredients and do not depend on fine ingredients to do your work for you but work with everything with the same sincerity.
Carrots were available. Rev. Rien Takahashi also used one to carve a Buddha for the founder’s birthday ceremony several days later at Camp McCoy (Wisconsin), where many Buddhist priests from the Hawaiian Islands were initially incarcerated. In that camp, run by the Army from March to May 1942, priests surrounded the carrot Buddha with “a cherry blossom flower arrangement” crafted by a Nishi Hongwanji priest using beet-dyed toilet paper, while a Jōdo sect priest officiated the intersectarian birthday ceremony at an altar created by transforming bread wrapping paper and labels from canned goods.
