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8. The Role of Buddhist Song Culture in International Acculturation
- University of Illinois Press
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8 The Role of Buddhist Song Culture in International Acculturation Keiko Wells Kona, Hawaii, during the 1930s to 1950s was one of the most vibrant regions for Buddhists gathering to sing religious music and to exchange original compositions. Singing had always been a part of Buddhist practice; in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when the Issei were still in Japan, laypersons enthusiastically sang songs whose vocabulary and image structures resembled the popular songs of the time. The Issei had brought this singing culture from Japan along with their religion to Hawaii. Interestingly, however, singing was not a part of religious activity among Shin Buddhists on the U.S. mainland until the temples started using gathas (Buddhist hymns) composed by ministers in order to create Sunday services modeled after those of Christians. What factors, then, led people in Kona to be so devoted to singing and composing songs? Daisetz T. Suzuki, in the seventh chapter of his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, writes that both Christian and Buddhist mystics experience unconditional spiritual contentment regardless of “a network of great contradictions running through our human life.”1 A person who faces these contradictions in life and abandons them in a fierce struggle with a will to power, experiences the abovementioned unconditional contentment resulting from a deep feeling of interconnected oneness with the Divine Spirit. Sometimes this awareness produces wonderful mystic literature. Mystic literature is often strangely beautiful and powerful, yet hard to explicate line by line. In the seventh chapter of his book, Suzuki introduces Chiyono Sasaki’s song lyric, “Konomama (as-it-is-ness of life, good or bad),” as an example of Shin (Jōdo Shinshū) Buddhist mystic literature. Suzuki comments on this song by Sasaki, who was a Nisei Buddhist from Kona: “‘Kono-mama,’ we Buddhist Song in International Acculturation 165 may think, sounds too easy and there is nothing spiritual or transcendental in it. If we bring this out in the world of particulars, everything here will be left to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.”2 Suzuki sees spirituality and a transcendent quality in Sasaki’s lyric, but does not clearly explain how and under what circumstance her spirituality exploded into verse.3 The goal of this article is to interpret the Buddhist folksongs in Kona in order to understand the contexts of lyrical spirituality and its transmission over generations in the Hawaiian community. Three factors enabled a vigorous tradition of Buddhist singing in Kona. First, the Japanese population in Kona was quite dense and relatively independent . According to the 1930 Census, 4,845 of Kona’s 9,405 residents were Japanese; about half of the remaining population was Hawaiian, and Caucasians numbered only 120. Most of the Japanese were Shin Buddhists. Unlike in Honolulu, on the Big Island, conflict between Buddhists and Japanese Christians was uncommon. In this environment, Buddhists could comfortably keep the singing tradition they had brought from Japan. Thesecondfactorwasaleaderinreligionandcreativeactivities,ShūunMatsuura , who became the resident minister at Kona Hongwanji in 1936. He was a sensitive young Buddhist whose literary talent was conveyed to the temple members, whom he encouraged to express their religious feelings with words. During the transitional period when the younger generation was emerging from the 1930s to the 1950s, Matsuura consistently guided both the Issei and Nisei to express themselves in song, and he wrote vividly about his experiences with them in his Hōetsu monogatari (Stories of Religious Ecstasy). The third factor in the development of the Kona Buddhist singing culture was the tragic experience of Japanese Hawaiians during the 1940s. In 1941, the Japanese American community was suddenly threatened in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Volunteering for the U.S. Army was one method to demonstrate loyalty to the United States and in 1943 2,686 Japanese American volunteers from Hawaiian Islands went off to fight in the European theater of combat. The 100th Infantry Battalion and later the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose ranks were composed entirely of Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were Buddhist, were sent to the most severe European frontlines. This experience of loss inspired Japanese Americans in Hawaii to compose new songs. The Issei parents of the deceased composed Buddhist-inspired ballads and elegies and shared these songs with each other as they struggled to overcome their grief. These Japanese American Buddhists are particularly well-suited to illustrate the transnational dimensions of the acculturation process of Buddhist spirituality in Hawaii. This essay discusses...