These Times Are Our Times

[from "Taste of Chicago Buddhism" July 2018]
In the adaptation of Buddhism from Asia in the West, one thing that has gotten lost is the sense of community. I can’t speak for other Asian ethnicities, but I’m trying to understand why so many Japanese Americans, most of whom identify as Buddhist, are against social justice issues. I can’t get into their heads but I can talk about why the presentation of Buddhism in North America has given rationalization for dismissing all marginalized persons as freeloaders and criminals.

Back in Japan, people identified with their communities. Villagers and farmers were expected to help each other – caring for the sick, contributing labor for their neighbors’ harvests, repairing roads together after natural disasters. In many ways the modern Japanese government has included these community concerns in its programs such as national health care and infrastructure maintenance (however, they haven’t done a thorough job of meeting the needs of the 2011 tsunami victims). For the first waves of immigrants from Japan to the United States, there was a sense of banding together for mutual aid societies (primarily to share the costs of burial as people died in the U.S. far away from their families). But from early on, they were under the weight of assimilation – “You people better do things like regular Americans and give up your uncivilized customs.” Our temple like so many others still follows the “church” format for Sunday services which was set up to seem as Western as possible – using readings and songs based on Christian models. So for Japanese American Buddhists, the message was: Act as much as you can like White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and you’ll be considered worthy to be in this country.

Becoming like WASPs also meant one follows the WASP disdain for those who don’t fit the majority’s image of “true American” – the blacks whose ancestors where forcibly brought to the U.S. as slaves, the indigenous peoples, the Catholics from Ireland and Italy, and the Jews. When the Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, it didn’t make them identify more with oppressed people, but rather made them feel indignant, “We’ve been trying to be good Americans (i.e. like white people as much as we could), so why lock us up?”

When I went to assist Rev. Gyoko Saito at the Los Angeles Higashi Honganji after my three years of study in Japan, I saw the disconnect between the teachings of hongan (all beings are taken up in the aspiration for oneness) and how the Japanese Americans thought. In the 1980s, the influence of Cesar Chavez and United Farm Workers movement was still strong in California, but the L.A. members who owned large farms said, “I take care of my Mexican workers – they get food and a roof over their heads. Why should they get more than we had in camp?” It showed that the Japanese Americans thought they were “tough” for having survived the internment camps and the migrant workers were “weak” for wanting more than shacks to sleep in.

In Chicago after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, many Japanese Americans were swayed by the xenophobic view of Muslims. To try to offset this, I scheduled a guest speaker from the Muslim community to speak at our Sunday service. He spoke about the humanitarian concerns in both Buddhism and Islam, but unfortunately he got questions such as, “If you guys have all the oil, why do you attack us?”

Even as recently as our 2017 interfaith service when we had American Islamic College professor Shabana Mir as our guest speaker, members were telling me, “Make sure she doesn’t say anything political.” She gave a brilliant talk that diffused a lot of tension with humor but still I get push back about me doing “too much” for “those Muslims,” hearing that they all support terrorism and should be banned from our country.

[Activist Ryan Yokota at the June 30 rally against immigrant family separation. Regrettably I had to tell him that our temple could not be one of the sponsors of the Japanese American contingent.] 

As much as I criticize the elites who dominate the Western Buddhist groups, it’s many of the Japanese American temple members who believe in what I call “Ayn Rand” Buddhism – “What I own is karmic reward for my own hard work. Why should I share with those lazy blacks/immigrants/homeless etc.?” Too much of the Buddhism in our Japanese American temples talks of personal responsibility and karmic reward/punishment – blaming the poor and disadvantaged for bringing on their own suffering due to their bad choices instead of recognizing our participation in a system that limits their opportunities.

I know what I need to do (before it’s too late health- and career-wise) is speak more about the essence (shinshu) of the Buddhist teachings of liberation from our self-serving ego, awakening to the reality of our lives intertwined with all lives. It’s not some abstract concept but as I’ve experienced – we become truly alive when we go into action together with others. It makes more sense that as Buddhists who respect the worth of all beings, Japanese Americans would be involved in the struggles of those who feel marginalized, instead of identifying so strongly with the privileged who want us to act like them and abandon our Asian heritage.