RELIGION & E M B E R I N G by Annie Poole
By analyzing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II through sites of remembrance, visual culture, and Buddhism, generational memory is established in efforts to heal and educate.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
5
Introduction
6
Key Terms
8
The Buddhist Temple in Japanese American Survival
10
The Museum as a Site of Remembrance
12
Artworks
20
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Inspired by Duncan Ryūken Williams’ “Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhist Identity and the Internment Experience of WWII” and Jane Iwamura’s “Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion,” this zine explores Japanese American religion through artworks at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) and what it means to view these works in this space. I selected pieces by Benji Okubo that reveal religious life at camps, nostalgia, the violence of militarism, and a longing for freedom. By doing a series of visual analyses influenced by these readings, this zine explores how visual and physical acts of remembering contribute to the faith of Japanese Americans.
KEY TERMS
ISSEI: Japan-born immigrants. NISEI: first generation children born in US. SANSEI: children of Nissei. YONSEI: fourth generation children of the Sansei. KIBEI: Japanese Americans born in the US, sent to Japan for education and then returned to the US.
SHIN ISSEI: newcomers, primarily Japanese businessmen and their families.
NIKKEI: more contemporary term to refer to Japanese Americans as whole.1
JAPANESE AMERICAN BUDDHISM:
Introduced to the US when migrants brought Buddhism with them to Hawaii and the continental US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Derived from the various Buddhist organizations in Japan, the Nishi Hongwanji denomination of Jōdo Shinshū, a form of Land Buddhism (Shin) is the oldest and largest form in the US. The characteristics of Japanese American Buddhism changed during internment due to the relationship between the US and Japan.2
IMMIGRATION ACT OF 1924:
restricted number of immigrants to the US from southern and eastern Europe and ended further immigration from Japan.3
EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066: Signed by
President Franklin D. Roosevelet on February 19, 1942, this order authorized the mass forced removal and incarceration of all Japaense Americans on the West Coast following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.4
CIVIL LIBERTIES ACT OF 1988: Signed
by President Ronald Reagan, this act carries full acknowledgment of the US’s wrongdoing by awarding $20,000 in reparations to each surviving internee, along with an official apology. 5
MANZANAR ANNUAL PILGRIMAGE: a festival, political forum, and religious ceremony in which Japanese Americans return to the site that served as an internment camp for their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.6
CIVIL RELIGION & CRITICAL FAITH: Sociologist Robert Bellah developed the term American civil religion to be “that religious dimension found … in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality.”7 For Americans, this manifests through beliefs, symbols, and rituals like monuments, presidential inaugurations, and the Bill of Rights. Jane Iwamura carefully uses this term for the Japanese American community as a framework, also using critical faith to describe what emerges from the internment’s legacy in terms of religious expression through texts, sites, and rituals.8
THE BUDDHIST TEMPLE IN JAPANESE AMERICAN SURVIVAL
In the 1890s, Shin Buddhists sent two missionaries to North America to offer religious and social services. By the end of the 1890s, the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (1898) and the North American Buddhist Mission (1899) were created. By the late 1930s, temples were established, as well as Buddhist Women’s associations, Sunday schools, and Boy Scouts.9
After Pearl Harbor, major Buddhist organizations tried to convey a strong sense of loyalty to the US as Buddhist priests were the first to be arrested. As Japanese Americans were incarcerated and sent to camps, many Buddhist temples provided storage for belongings left behind. In the camps, the barracks/ temples held religious and education services, funerals, weddings, and memorial services. While the different Buddhist sects cooperated with each other, they found common ground in Buddhist teachings to help alleviate the pain and confusion faced. During reintegration, the temples served as hostels to those who could not find housing and jobs.10
THE MUSEUM AS A SITE OF REMEMBRANCE The Japanese American National Museum, made of two distinct buildings, stands in the heart of the Little Tokyo district in downtown LA. The Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, built by Japanese immigrants in 1925, was refitted for the museum that is to the right of the temple: a curved glass building. This is a space dedicated to cultural memory, linking current generations of Japanese Americans with their ancestors and offering an opportunity for them to reflect on internment and create a more just America.11 The museum hosts over 150,000 objects that chronicle the Japanese American experience from early immigration to the present, with a focus on the WWII incarceration experience.12
Benji Okubo, Untitled, oil on linen, 14.5” x 12”, 1942-1945
A woman, dressed in a blush pink sundress and gray sun hat, holds a key in her right hand as she walks down the center of two rows of gray barracks. Depicted from a bird’s eye view, this perspective makes the woman larger and enables the viewer to see the top of the roofs. Terra cotta chimneys are dispersed throughout the buildings that recede in the distance pointing to the base of a mountain. The colors are very muted and pale, revealing not only the dusty landscape but the lack of freedom and independence to life during Japanese internment. The woman seems trapped between these rows, faceless and anonymous, with a large shadow looming behind her. Perhaps, the life she used to have she carries with her as she holds a key that is the only sense of hope in the painting. A key that opens up doors could symbolize a yearning for freedom and a return to life outside of incarceration.
This work, painted in this surrealist style similar to his other works, reveals the violence of militarism. With expressive and expansive strokes, Okubo depicts a muscular soldier impaled by a bayonet lying over a tree stump in blood. His skin color is green with tattered brown pants that wrap around his legs. A golden-colored jacket lies beneath his back and head with his helmet strewn to the right of him. His mouth is wide open as he appears to be dying, gasping for his last breaths. The barren landscape consists of a singular skinny tree, a few tree stumps, and a hazy sky with dark gray clouds. Perhaps Okubo is nodding to the Japanese Americans who fought in the US army during WWII, proving their loyalty to the country. Okubo depicts this multifaceted experience of violence, both on the battlefield and the violence of incarceration to the Japanese American community.
Benji Okubo, Untitled, oil on linen, 20” x 20”, 1942-1945
Benji Okubo, Untitled, oil on canvas, 16” x 12”, 1942-1945
This dream-like surrealist painting depicts a large, muscular, nude man holding a flaming tree as he moves through clouds in the sky. The clouds are painted with large, fluid brushstrokes as they move through the sky in a diagonal that is perpendicular to the man’s body that is running through the sky. The sky lightens in the bottom due to the crescent moon, which in Japanese culture symbolizes truth, and in Buddhist tradition it represents enlightenment.13 By using Buddhist values, the artist emphasizes how Japanese Americans used these values to persevere through internment and make a statement about war. The man’s eyes are shut, as he is blindly running into the unknown holding onto life that is being consumed in flames. Is this the battlefield? Internment camps? America?
This painting depicts a scene between an older woman, perhaps a mother, that holds a yellow flower in her right hand. A smaller boy is also trying to grasp it as he falls in mid air. The woman’s head is much larger proportionally than her body, which is outfitted in a gray robe and a light green sash. She stands upon a floating lotus blossom in the middle of the sea. The young boy, with his feet above his head, has blue-gray skin and wears a red top, green pants, and green shoes. This mix of muted colors with an emphasis on the bright yellow, brings the viewer’s gaze to the middle as the mother’s left hand also points to it. Perhaps this yellow flower represents generational knowledge–religious, historical, cultural–she seeks to pass down as the child tries to hold on. The lotus flower also represents enlightenment, truth, and purity in Buddhist tradition: the foundation on which she stands.14
Benji Okubo, Untitled, oil on canvas, 24” x 18”, 1942-1945
NOTES “Terminology: Japanese Generational Terms,” Stanford Medicine, accessed April 9, 2022, https://geriatrics.stanford.edu/ethnomed/japanese/introduction/ terminology.html. 2. Michihiro Ama and Michael Masatsugu, “Japanese American Buddhism,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2021. 3. Shiho Imai, “Immigration Act of 1924,” Densho Encyclopedia, last modified March 19, 2012, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Immigration_Act_of_1924. 4. Brian Niiya, “Executive Order 9066,” Densho Encyclopedia, last modified August 24, 2020, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Executive_Order_9066/. 5. Jane Iwamura, “Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion,” in Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, 416-17. 6. Iwamura, “Critical Faith,” 412. 7. Ibid., 415. 8. Ibid., 415-18. 9. Gale Kenny, “Japanese American Buddhists and Civil Religion” (presentation, Barnard College, New York, NY, March 1, 2022). 10. Duncan Ryūken Williams, “Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhist Identity and the Internment Experience of WWII,” in Western Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Bau1.
mann, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 191-200. 11. Iwamura, “Critical Faith,” 421-424. 12. “ Collections,” Japanese American National Museum, accessed April 9, 2022, https://www.janm.org/collections. 13. “Benji Okubo Collection,” Japanese American National Museum, accessed April 9, 2022, https://janm. emuseum.com/groups/benji-okubo-collection/results/ images. 14. “Benji Okubo.”