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Volume (2012) Essays in History Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898- 1941. By Michihiro Ama. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). Pp. 313. Cloth, $47.00. This volume is a timely contribution to the burgeoning field of American Buddhism, expanding our knowledge of Shin Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū) in the United States between the 1880s and the 1930s, the formative years of its overseas development. Ama Michihiro provides textual details and fascinating insights on the evolution of Shin Buddhist churches and teachings in mainland North America and Hawai’i through careful studies of prewar Japanese sources. His research draws upon the BCA Archives (the Buddhist Church of America), one of the earliest Buddhist organizations in the United States which was renamed the Buddhist Mission of North America of Nishi Honganji (BMNA) in the decades prior to World War II, and Nishi and Higashi Honganjis’ periodicals and writings published in the United States and Japan. His study of the ethnic religion pays close attention to the Nishi Honganji branch and touches on Higashi Honganji’s overseas propagation despite the relative paucity of primary sources. By examining the Shin churches’ religious and institutional development within the context of Honganji headquarters’ evolution in Japan and the American immigration and racial policies toward the Japanese immigrants, Ama successfully demonstrates that the Nishi Honganji ministers succeeded in their early overseas propagation by primarily addressing Japanese Americans’ cultural and ethnic experience in Hawai’i and North America. These ministers’ perseverance and resourcefulness also contributed to Shin Buddhism’s institutional spread into the 1930s. In his effort to produce a social history of Shin Buddhism, Ama maps out its institutional expansion in Hawai’i, California, and Vancouver, where the Japanese immigrants most densely resided from the 1880s to the 1930s. He examines Nishi Honganji’s history from the lenses of its two major overseas headquarters—the Honpa Honganji Mission of Hawai’i (HHMH) and the BMNA—in the United States and Canada. The two organizations were founded in response to the drastic increase of Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i and the US mainland. Since the majority of the firstgeneration Japanese (Issei) in Hawai’i were Shin Buddhists by origin, HHMH grew faster than BMNA who focused on Shin missions in North America. The ministers’ involvement in the teaching of Japanese language is one of the major topics discussed throughout the book. The language schools were instrumental in maintaining the Japanese’s ethnic identity and community solidarity, accommodating their resettlement in the host culture and inculcating their religious belief and behavior. In the 1920s, the majority of the second-generation Japanese (Nisei) in Hawai’i attended the language schools, of which at least 47% were directly sponsored by the Buddhist organizations. On the mainland, “almost every Buddhist church had a Japanese language school” (55). Ama associates the religion with the Japanese community’s cultural identity, appreciating Shin Buddhism’s successful consideration of the immigrant experience, which in turn contributed to Shin’s popularity among the Japanese. Ama makes a persuasive argument that the Honganjis’ early overseas development benefited significantly from its close relationship with the Japanese government’s colonial expansion in Asia and the Pacific. In Asia, Honganjis made inroads into Hokkaidō, the South Pacific, and the Asian continent, among other regions (182). Although the BMNA and HHMH had different programs and relationships with their Kyoto headquarters, who had the right to assign titles and status to the 1 Volume (2012) Essays in History overseas ministers and churches. Thanks to the Japanese government’s negotiation of labor immigration with the Hawai’ian consul, the Japanese population in Hawai’i reached 125, 368 by 1924 (32). The Kyoto headquarters prioritized the expansion of HHMH over BMNA, considering Hawai’i as “Japan’s future territory” (36). Since the Japanese were one of the largest ethnic groups in Hawai’i, the HHMH was more involved in the Japanese plantation workers’ public and private life, whereas BMNA ministers showed more interest in promoting Śākyamuni’s teachings among white Americans until the late 1930s. Moreover, BMNA’s attention to Japanese American women was consistent with the Kyoto headquarters’ development. In 1908, Nishi Honganji founded the Federation of Buddhist Women’s Associations throughout Japan. BMNA’s female members subscribed to the Federation’s monthly journals for women and donated money to their coreligionists in Japan. In the 1930s, these women supported the Japanese government’s colonial expansion by sending materials “to Japanese soldiers stationed in Manchuria” (83). From as early as 1897 to the 1930s, as the Kyoto headquarters exercised significant influence over overseas Shin organization’s development, the American branch maintained a complex dialectic relationship with the Japanese Empire: the prosperity of one nurtured the prosperity of the other. Ama considers the Shin clergy’s activities in North America and Hawai’i as a continuation of the two Honganjis’ reform in Japan. The resident ministers focused on contemporaneous issues including the application of democratic principles and the integration of Western and Japanese cultural practices. Ama interprets their approach as an extension of the Honganji headquarters’ reform in Japan. In Chapter One, he shows that the Honganjis introduced a representative assembly between the 1880s and the 1890s and reformed their liturgy and doctrines after the example of Christianity in the West. Ama attributes such modernizing activities to the top-down effort of the headquarters and prominent Shin clerical scholars such as Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903) of Higashi Honganji and Shimaji Mokurai (1838- 1911) of Nishi Honganji. He believes that Kiyozawa’s Shin Buddhist teachings not only helped revise some of the doctrinal practices in Japan, but also inspired several important Japanese ministers to promote Shinran’s teachings in North America. For example, Itsuzō Kyōgoku (1887- 1953), a Shin minister who received Kiyozawa’s influence in Japan and worked for the Issei and Nisei laity in North America between 1922 and 1941, preached among the Japanese the idea of attaining liberation by relying on the original vow of Amida Buddha. Ama emphasizes the resilience and resourcefulness of the resident Shin ministers and Japanese American laypeople who gradually turned their attention away from Japan to the United States, learning to define and manage the new world they were encountering. In the early twentieth century, the ministers participated in the host culture, trying to maintain their cultural heritage while adopting some of the Protestant and democratic practices. Chapter Two demonstrates that the growth of Shin Buddhism during its formative period in Hawai’i was achieved not only through the support of the Kyoto headquarters and Japanese American laypeople, but also through the ministers’ tenacity to work with anti-Japanese policies and those Japanese plantation workers who were suspicious of the ministers. In Japan, Shin remained a popular movement with a tremendous following. In the United States, however, it grew by addressing the ethnic needs of Japanese immigrants. The Shin churches engaged the Japanese community less fully than the Christian churches and were subject to American laws and policies. This inspired some ministers to experiment with new management style and revise church rituals, culminating in them developing 2 Volume (2012) Essays in History new organization styles different from those in Japan. Their churches’ open, syncretic feature became especially prominent in the 1930s, partly as a result of the Issei clergy’s response to the Nisei and white American Buddhists’ request for a liberal configuration of the ministry. In the mid-1930s, the BMNA officials terminated the rituals pertinent to Japan’s emperor-centered holidays and ceremonies and standardized the eclectic form of services shaped by American and Japanese culture (91). The book pays close attention to the Shin churches’ conflicts and disputes with the Japanese communities, calling into question the stereotypical perception of the people as homogenous and the religion as peaceful. Based on a nuanced reading of the BCA archives and those on the history of Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i and Vancouver, Ama sheds light on the complicated love-hate relationship between the BMNA office and the local churches, between the churches and their congregations, and between the churches and the Japanese language schools. For example, in the 1910s, two Shin churches in California had conflicts with the authorities in the BMNA and the Kyoto headquarters. As the conflicts intensified, the ministers left Nishi Honganji for Higashi Honganji, changing their religious affiliation in order to advance their interests (52-53). The emergence of the dissenting groups reveals that the overseas churches did not always comply with the requirements from the Kyoto headquarters, destabilizing the view that Nishi Honganji was a unified body with a common loyalty. In the 1930s, in some Japanese American communities without language schools, parents would send children to a school affiliated with a Shin mission or church to learn Japanese, not the religion (57). This illustrates that even though Japanese Americans did not always respond to Shin churches’ call for building an ethnic community and participating in religious activities, many expected the ministers to be custodians of Japanese language, customs, and culture. By discussing the internal tensions of the Japanese American communities and their complicated relationship with the churches, Ama produces a compelling account of Shin’s success as an ethnic religion. The close reading of the Japanese Shin archives allows Ama to unveil a wealth of stories and histories about BMNA and HHMH, but his focus on the institutions’ internal landscape leaves out the larger social and religious context of the United States. For example, in reconstructing the converted white Americans’ experience, he underestimates their contribution to Shin’s integration into mainstream American society in the decades prior to World War II. At the time, Buddhism was perceived in the United States as a school of philosophy and religion founded by Śākyamuni which was similar to monotheistic Christianity. From around 1900, Shin ministers in the US mainland, perceiving the West’s lack of sophisticated understanding of Shin Buddhism, decided “to propagate the doctrines of Gautama Siddhartha [sic], the Buddha Śākyamuni, as set forth in the sacred scriptures of His disciples” (38). The ministers cultivated a friendly relationship with Euro-Americans, borrowing some of the Theravāda monastic rituals to initiate and ordain them. In California, the BMNA ministers taught some of Śākyamuni’s basic doctrines to the white audience, while delivering Shin teachings in Japanese to the Japanese. It was not until the late 1930s that the office began to propagate Shin teachings in English. The different, and sometimes inconsistent, forms of self-representation undermined the church’s relationship with many of its white converts, resulting in the white ministers’ ambivalent attitude toward the church. For instance, after being ordained in BMNA, Robert Clifton, a young white American, left the church. He returned and was ordained again, but finally left for the second time to join the Theravāda 3 Volume (2012) Essays in History tradition. The volume’s discussion of the converted Buddhists appears superficial or fragmented without considering the broader American intellectual and cultural context, the motives behind the Japanese ministers’ conversion of the non-Japanese, and the converted ministers’ understanding of Shin Buddhism. Ama’s study is most successful in addressing Shin churches’ support of the Japanese community, which contributed to Shin’s expansion in Hawai’i and North America. This ethnic dimension denotes the Shin churches’ relative distance from the politics and culture of its host society. In a society with the Christian population as the majority, Ama observes that the Shin churches fostered the Japanese’s ethnic solidarity, an achievement which antagonized some of the anti-Japanese and pro-Christian local communities and governments. The hostility escalated between the 1920s and 1930s, when a series of anti-Asian immigration laws were introduced. In the 1920s, Robert Clark, a converted white American Buddhist, proposed that he could “help lessen discrimination against Japanese immigrants by demonstrating similarities between Buddhism and Christianity to the American public,” if his activities were sufficiently funded by the Japanese (78-79). Ama fails to point out that the Shin churches’ lack of engagement with the mainstream society meant that having the white American converts might have helped improve their political standing and public image as a form of universal religion for both the Japanese and non-Japanese Americans. In the 1920s and 1930s, both the BMNA and HHMH created an English Department to encourage the converted Americans to promote Śākyamuni’s teachings among the non-Japanese and to expand their institutional influence. Ama appreciates the Shin churches’ versatile approach to Japanese Americans and non-Japanese converts, believing that the tension between authenticity and adaptation was conducive to Shin Buddhism’s institutional development in the long run. Although the Shin churches maintained their organizational unity and cohesion during the formative period of development, they also modified some of their interpretations of Shin doctrines and rituals, resulting in a critical departure from the precedent set by the headquarters in Japan. Both the BMNA and HHMH incorporated Protestant forms of church organization and rituals into their Shin churches, illustrating that American Shin Buddhism has evolved over time by not merely preserving the teachings from Japan but also assimilating American political and cultural values. A telling example is that some of the ministers developed different sermons and instructions for the Nisei Japanese members. In the 1910s, the HHMH Bishop Emyō Imamura (1867-1932) instructed the Nisei Buddhists to study American politics, but he also joined with the Issei to continue following Japan’s emperor-centered practices (140). In the early 1930s, the Honganji headquarters attempted to translate Japanese Shin texts into English to be used by the oversea churches. However, the quality of the English translation was so poor that “neither Euro- Americans nor Nisei parishioners fully understood Shin Buddhist doctrine and its relationship to the teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha during the prewar period” (97). This reveals that it was through the joint effort of the Japanese and white Americans that Shin Buddhism became a racially diverse church in the 1930s. The Shin churches achieved success through its multiple forms of teachings catering to the tastes of the Issei, the Nisei, and white American converts. The multicultural context encouraged American Shin Buddhism to stay open and resourceful, suggesting that its future would be shaped by its relationship with the Kyoto headquarters, the Japanese American communities in Hawai’i and North America, and the American policy toward the Japanese. 4 Volume (2012) Essays in History To conclude, this is a well-documented study of the acculturation process of the Nishi Honganji organizations in Hawai’i and North America from their formative years in the late nineteenth century to the crucial years in the 1930s. The history of BMNA and HHMH demonstrates the Kyoto headquarters and the overseas Japanese ministers’ versatility and perseverance in propagating to both Japanese and white Americans. By delineating the religious experience of the Japanese immigrants, Ama successfully shows how Shin churches adopted American legal and religious practices to advance the Japanese’s interest, contributing to Shin’s popularity among the Japanese who were striving to adapt to mainstream American society. The nuanced analysis and interpretation reveal the Shin institutions’ tangled relationship with the Japanese. The study of Shin Buddhism as a convert religion reveals the non-Japanese’s diverse experience and their contribution to Shin’s expansion, opening up a new terrain for future research. Aihua Zheng The University of Iowa (Updated in 2020. Initially published on Essays in History, June 2012; http://www.essaysinhistory.com/review/2012/131) 5