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6. “Americanization” and “Tradition” in Issei and Nisei Buddhist Publications
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6 “Americanization” and “Tradition” in Issei and Nisei Buddhist Publications Tomoe Moriya The 1990s saw several new studies on the subject of Buddhism in America, mostly categorizing the varieties of traditions according to their members’ ethnic origins.1 Even though every ethnic church/temple shares many cultural features of the ethnic group it is respectively associated with, neither its congregation nor its practitioners would necessarily be homogeneous, in part because of the process of “Americanization.” This essay focuses on the varieties of discourses on “Americanization” (especially as articulated in Buddhist publications) and “tradition” (as the repository of ethnic identity and what was attributed as located in the Japanese cultural heritage) that appeared in early-twentieth-century America. Rather than focus on social structures (as most studies on the “Americanization” of Buddhism do), I highlight the doctrinal dimension of the dissemination of the Buddhist teachings in the public forum of the periodical. Reacting to the Americanization movement, which reached its peak during and after World War I, Japanese immigrants, especially Buddhists, searched for a way to articulate their position in American society.2 Although the antiJapanese campaign existed from as early as the first decade of the 1900s, the discourses contemporary with the Russo-Japanese War did not usually use the term “Americanization.” Nevertheless, discussing these materials is fruitful for understanding how the pioneer Japanese Buddhists saw their mission in America. In other words, the goal of this chapter is not to judge the degree of the Buddhists’ Americanization, but to analyze how they formulated the Buddhist teachings during its transmission to America. When referring to “tradition,” on the other hand, I will be examining those discourses both around Buddhist terms—as such Amida Buddha, Shinran, “Other Power,” Issei and Nisei Buddhist Publications 111 Hongwanji (the Jōdo Shinshū mother temple in Kyoto), and Zen terms as disseminated by Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki3 —and to a lesser extent, terms from Japanese culture as large. I will suggest that “Americanization” and “tradition” are not as antithetical as one might normally think.4 Studies on Buddhism in America: A Critical Overview Here I would like to present an overview of previous studies on Buddhism in America to clarify my stance. When studying the Americanization of ethnic Buddhist churches, scholars usually focus on English-language propagation , church administration by lay board members, or ethnic diversity and the decline in membership of Japanese ancestry due to intermarriage. Naturally, these are important factors indicating the degree of organizational acculturation, but here, I would like to focus on Buddhist ideas rather than institutional developments. In his sociological study on the Buddhist churches in the Sacramento area affiliated with the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA), Isao Horinouchi describes American Jōdo Shinshū as “Americanized or Protestantized Buddhism .”5 He illustrates, with a great deal of useful material, the institutional acculturationprocessesofestablishingSundaySchoolsandtheYoungMen ’sBuddhist Association (YMBA)/Young Women’s Buddhist Association (YWBA), using the titles “church” and “minister,” and installing benches in the temple halls—all of which basically followed the structure of the Protestant Church. However, I would like to contest the term “Protestantized Buddhism” because thisdefinitionuncriticallyassumesthatAmericanizationandProtestantization are equivalent to one another. Collapsing these two processes into the former, merely because they resemble each other superficially, I argue can be more confusing than persuasive to describe a complex cultural process.6 It is likely that, in part because Horinouchi does not include doctrinal issues within the scope of his study, his hypothetical Protestantization model lends itself easily to this too-simple interpretation of the phenomenon as such and hence does not really fit into the reality of the religious identity of the Japanese American Buddhists, nor the doctrinal reinterpretations that accompanied this process. In this sense, Tetsuden Kashima’s 1977 study rightly criticized this approach for neglecting America’s pluralistic nature in religious organizations: “the path along the narrow walkway toward only Protestantization is very limiting.” David Yoo has approached American Jōdo Shinshū from a doctrinal point of view, pointing out that as a “variant of Japanese Buddhism,” Shin Buddhism’s “notions within Buddhism akin to ‘salvation’ and ‘grace’ as well as an emphasis on the laity lent themselves well to religious life in the United States.”7 [3.84.228.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:22 GMT) 112 tomoe moriya When dealing with ethnic diversity in American Buddhism, concepts such as Charles Prebish’s “two Buddhisms” or Rick Fields’s “divided Dharma” were introduced to distinguish between “white” and “ethnic” types of Buddhism , as the 1960s had...