A Remembrance of Names: A Buddhist Monument to the WWII Japanese American Incarceration

Talk Abstract: The forced removal and incarceration of roughly 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, into various kinds of confinement sites during WWII began with the arrest of Buddhist priests even before the smoke had cleared at Pearl Harbor. The prewar surveillance of Buddhist temples and the making of registries that targeted Buddhist and Shinto priests, unlike Christian ministers, as threats to national security is based on a long-standing presumption that America is essentially a White Christian nation. The first federal immigration law that targeted a particular group for exclusion from the United States was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that deemed the predominantly Buddhist/Taoist Chinese immigrants as the “heathen Chinese,” a group religiously and racially unassimilable. Despise this long history of religion-racial animus, Buddhists who found themselves behind barbed wire in camps surrounded by guards drew on their teachings, practice, and community to not only survive the wartime incarceration, but advocate for a vision of America that is multi-ethnic and religiously free. In this presentation, Duncan Ryuken Williams will talk about how the incarceration experiences of Japanese American Buddhists offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure in different ways even to the present. At a time when the karmic legacy of America’s racial past has put into question what becomes monumentalized, Williams will outline a major new initiative to remember the names of those incarcerated in the form of a Buddhist monument that he is creating.