Because of the connections and the traditional knowledge Buddhist temples and similar organizations helped maintain, to be a Japanese Buddhist in America was to be considered at once a greater risk to the nation and a potentially valuable asset to the war effort. Buddhist priests, the FBI presumed, could thus serve as a bellwether for the loyalty of the entire Japanese American population.
While many of the priests seized in the early days of 1942 were kept apart from other internees for the duration of the war, some were eventually allowed to join their families and communities in order to resume their former roles presiding over rituals of celebration and loss, all now held in temples improvised behind barbed wire.
Behind the fence at Poston, Reverend Fujimura began his memorial service for the two fighting men of the 442nd with a poem recited from memory:
The cherry blossoms on Mount Yoshino—
All right if they fall,
All right if they remain.
How like a warrior’s life.
“That Privates Yamamoto and Shiomichi died for their country in a hail of bullets while in the prime of their life is something their families can take pride in,” he said. “Theirs is truly the Bodhisattva Way in the Buddhist teaching.”
In the “Pure Land” tradition of Fujimura’s Jodo-Shinshu school of Buddhism, to be a Bodhisattva is the most revered of paths one can pursue. Those who attain this level of spiritual achievement are thought to have had the chance to become enlightened Buddhas themselves, and thus to be released from the wheel of life and death that governs all existence. But they have foregone personal salvation in order that all others may first be saved. Bestowing such a title upon these young men—boys, really—was no small matter. Fujimura no doubt intended it as a great honor and solace to their families.
Not content to leave his reflection on the young men’s lives at the level of the palliative, however, the priest then questioned his own straightforward religious interpretation of the meaning of the soldiers’ deaths. “But the above feeling is only the joy of reason, the satisfaction of logic,” he said. “In the world of human beings… we must know that the opposite sentiment, that of sadness, also exists.”
Fujimura had no firsthand knowledge of the “warrior’s life” he had invoked through his opening poem, but sadness was something he understood. Though he had never been in battle himself, the last few years had often felt like one. It had been early in the morning almost three years before, in a dark hour even before the milkman had arrived, that he had heard a knock on the door of his bedroom at the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist temple of Salinas, California. While his wife lay sleeping, he had opened the door and found two white American men identifying themselves in well-practiced Japanese.
“We are from the FBI,” one of the agents said.
Fujimura was not entirely surprised. For weeks, the priest had been hearing rumors that leaders of other Buddhist communities had been questioned and arrested. Some had been taken quietly from their families under cover of darkness—or they were, as Fujimura himself soon was, caught in the flash of newspaper photographers eager for images of “enemy aliens” in handcuffs on U.S. soil. The next day’s edition of the local Index Journal displayed his image beneath a damning front-page headline: “Wholesale Jap Raids Staged by Agents in Salinas.” Shown the picture at the police station, he was dismayed to discover that he had reflexively smiled into the photographer’s lens.
Along with thirty members of his congregation, he spent several nights in the Salinas jail under constant interrogation.
“Are you a spy?” the Japanese-speaking agent asked him.
“No,” he replied.
“Did you come to the United States because of orders from the Emperor of Japan?”
“No.”
“Have you ever met the Japanese Emperor?”
“No.”
“Are you a Japanese Naval officer?”
“How can a skinny person like myself be a Japanese Naval officer?”
Then came the transport train. As Fujimura would later write, he and several other Buddhist priests, along with dozens of people who called him sensei, teacher, were shipped “like livestock.” They were not told where they were going or when they would arrive. The sight of children crying and calling to fathers now locked behind barred windows was the last he saw of the outside world for days. Heavy curtains had been installed in the railroad cars, keeping the passengers in semi-darkness.
When the train finally ground to a halt some seventy-two hours later, the doors opened to reveal a frozen white landscape, empty but for a number of green army vehicles. In California it had been a pleasant sixty degrees; wherever they were now, the temperature was well below freezing. Like fenceposts rising from the snow, soldiers in fur-lined hats stood at ten-foot intervals around the trucks, rifles at the ready.
As they soon discovered, the priests’ ultimate destination was Fort Lincoln, a decommissioned army base five miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota. Confined to brick barracks through the winter, they did what they could to keep warm and to carry on something like normal lives. On Buddha’s birthday in April, with the temperature still near freezing though it was time for their traditional springtime festival, Fujimura and the rest of the Bismarck Buddhists crafted flowers from tissue paper, and carved an image of the Buddha out of a large carrot stick.
After five months at Fort Lincoln, just long enough for them to see spring finally arrive in the form of a few dandelions poking through the snow, Fujimura was put back on a train, shipped south and east for internments of varying lengths at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and Camp Livingston in Louisiana, and then west to Camp Santa Fe in New Mexico, and finally to Poston, where his wife had been sent not long after his arrest.
He had not seen her in more than two years; they had been kept apart for nearly half their marriage. Making up for lost time, and uncertain when they might win their freedom, the Fujimuras set about starting a family.
Eight and half months after their reunion, his wife gave birth to a baby boy. It was a cause for great excitement not only for father and mother, but for a camp full of people eager for any portent of new beginnings. Because of conditions at Poston, however, the usual physician was not available to attend the delivery. The only medical professionals present had been a veterinarian and an inexperienced nurse. On the infant’s death certificate, written just an hour and twenty minutes after he was born, an animal doctor wrote “asphyxiation” as the cause of death.
Everything about Fujimura’s experience of internment thus far had seemed designed to reinforce the truth of a basic Buddhist idea: impermanence. The understanding of the contingent, dependent nature of all things and the consequent inevitability of their loss was regarded as the key to attaining enlightenment. “This impermanent world,” the founder of his Jodo-Shinshu Buddhist tradition had written, “is like a burning house.” Awareness of impermanence was not an excuse for complacency or despair, however, but a call to action. As the same sage had said: The compassion of the Buddha, which benefits all creatures, “must be repaid, though I be crushed.”
And now came the memorial for the young men killed in the war—an opportunity to meditate on the subject of impermanence in its most searing form.
As he stood before the dead men’s families, the priest recited verses from a second poem, this one as true of their experience as of his own:
Though I know
How transient this world is
Still, I cannot give him up.
Gesturing to the parents, he added, “For over twenty years, their sons were always at the forefront of their minds. After learning to crawl, then to stand, and finally learning to walk, the sons were in a position to repay their parents. But the beloved child they finally raised to adulthood has now been transformed into a single telegram informing the parents of his death.” Along with these telegrams, he explained, the Yamamoto and Shiomichi families had also received their sons’ last letters home.
The
final words Pfc. John T. Yamamoto had sent to Poston had been as matter-of-fact as he had always been. “I guess I might as well tell you that we’re in action now,” he wrote. Not a man for embroidery, he was an American archetype of strong and silent farmboy, raised picking his father’s strawberries in the shadow of oil derricks on the southern California coast. The “T” in his name was for Tsuyoshi, meaning “strength.” The “John” was added because his parents had known no American names, and the doctor who delivered him thought John “was as good as any.”
Plainspokenness was a trait he shared with his sister, Hisaye, who would become a celebrated journalist and short story writer, a crafter of deceptively simple tales of immigrants and their children—none more powerful than those inspired by her time at Poston, “that unlikely place of wind, sand, and heat,” she called it, and her younger brother’s too brief life. In a short essay she wrote at the war’s end, “After Johnny Died,” Hisaye Yamamoto described his nineteen years in a heartbreaking accumulation of detail: the joy he found in the color of his first bicycle (blue), his touching fondness for the baby brother “who had died soon after he learned to walk and sing and dance a little,” the automobile accident that had left a small scar giving him a permanently crooked grin. He was in junior high, his sister noted, when their mother died; he was a safety monitor in his school at the time, and even in those days of mourning he came home wearing a blue satin ribbon reading “hall guard” across his chest. In high school, he went out for football but “fumed when talking about the coach because he had spent the season on the bench.” He felt better later when he switched to basketball and earned a letterman’s sweater—“green with two white stripes on the left sleeve”—paid for with money picking tomatoes for other farming families in need of an extra hand.
Though he was known primarily as a Japanese Nisei by both his country and his community, Johnny’s life had been first of all thoroughly American—cut short, as so many others were, by an exploding 88-millimeter shell. It had also been a thoroughly Buddhist life. The Yamamotos had moved often as farmers who owned no land, but the family had attended temples often enough to know well the chanting and bowing of the priests, the sweet smell of the incense, and the huge feasts that followed weddings and funerals. His faith was perhaps not as intensely lived as that of Reverend Fujimura, but he took pride in not having taken the Christian path toward assimilation. “What would I know about God?” he wrote to his sister. “I’ve never even been to church.” So, too, he had come to know personally the Buddhist truth of impermanence through the war, and even to acknowledge that not all transformations were improvements. “I’ve changed,” he wrote from the front. “Don’t expect me to be the same guy I was.”
The other Poston soldier killed in action that summer also showed himself to be something of an American archetype: a striver and a true believer in the possibility of assimilating into the melting pot while maintaining a particular cultural and religious identity. Unlike Johnny Yamamoto, Joe Shiomichi had already finished school by the time of his relocation to Poston. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he became a chemistry teacher at the camp school, and from the beginning knew that the lessons he wanted to convey to his classes were not limited to science. Faced with students burning with resentment at what the only country they had ever known had done to them, he would say, “All this is a temporary aberration. We don’t belong in a camp. But don’t be bitter. Don’t let this get you down. America is the best country in the world. There will be flukes and aberrations along the way. But get past it. This is temporary.”
His life, too, had been fully American and fully Buddhist. A Boy Scout in elementary school, a track star in high school, Shiomichi was a natural for the service when it was announced Nisei would be allowed to volunteer. “I’ve become more and more convinced that we must take a firm stand now in asserting our beliefs in regards to being Americans,” he wrote. “We may have just causes for some of our grievances but I certainly don’t feel that those grievances should be kept so long and harbored with us to the point of distorting our views for the future.” Particularly dismayed by pro-Axis sentiments expressed by his more disgruntled peers, he saw enlisting as having benefits that would long outlast the fighting on either front. “By volunteering for the Army,” he said, “I feel that the Niseis are building up something concrete with which to fight discrimination after the war is over.”
During the memorial, Reverend Fujimura read aloud an expression of faith found in a letter written home. “Okaa-san, mother, this will probably be the last letter I write to you in my poor Japanese. I am finally being sent to the front lines. You have taken good care of me for a long time, and I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Even if, unfortunately, I fall in battle, I will go to the Buddha’s land that I heard about from sensei from the time I was a child, so there is nothing for you to worry about.…”
This same spiritual optimism had led Joe Shiomichi, as it had led Reverend Fujimura, to start a family while still confined to Poston. Before enlisting with the 442nd, he had married a fellow Berkeley student; they were expecting their first child by the time he shipped out. Allowed to accompany her new husband out of the camp for the start of the journey that would take him first to Basic Training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and then to war, his pregnant wife waved from the platform as his train left the station.
“A child’s death has been said to be the death of the parents,” the priest said. “And that is why tears flow. Why I sorrow. When Saigo Takemori, the great warrior and statesman, learned that his younger brother had died in battle, he is said to have clung to the dead body, and wailed long and hard.” Even the Buddha, he added, “raised his voice and cried in sorrow at the sight of the dead.”
“Trying to discard sorrow is a lie,” the Reverend Fujimura said. “Telling someone not to cry is unreasonable. To sorrow when we should sorrow is what makes us human. To cry when we should cry is what the parents of a child should do. The tears that flow at the most miserable periods of life, the tears unknown to others that soak our pillow, that is where the light of the Buddha’s Great Compassion is always found.”
Speaking to his own hopes and those of the parents who had lost sons, the siblings who had lost brothers, and the child born a month after her father died, he added, “When we accept the Buddha’s teaching, those who pass on first, and those who are left behind become one. We enter the world where we can meet again, the Pure Land. That is how we are ‘saved.’ ”
The Pure Land of which he spoke is a key concept of Buddhist thought. As the realm where the Buddha awaits all those who near enlightenment, it is often described as a world of overwhelming beauty, opulence, and happiness. The sutras describe it as a place where “heavenly music is played continually. The ground is made of gold. Six times during the day and night mandarava flowers rain down from the sky.” The Pure Land has another meaning: the higher state of consciousness achieved through meditative practices that has the potential, Buddhists believe, to bring enlightenment to individuals as well as nations.
“This is what I believe,” the priest concluded. “I believe the great land has been soaked bright red with Yamamoto and Shiomichi’s blood and the heartrending tears of their bereaved family.” This blood and these tears, he suggested, were symbols of the Japanese American experience during the war, a “sacred sacrifice that will in the near future sound the bell of the dawn of peace in the entire world.”
By the time the war ended, exactly a year later, in August 1945, there could be little doubt that the experiences of Japanese Americans had indeed helped sound the bell of peace. Some 15,000 men served in the 442nd, earning 9,486 Purple Hearts, 21 Medals of Honor, and eight Presidential Unit Citations—a full fifth of all such citations awarded during the war. They are credited with being instrumental in breaking the last defenses of the Axis Powers known as the Gothic Line, the breach of which helped end the war in Italy, making ultimate Nazi surrender inevitable.
Elsewhere in Europe, Nisei soldiers detached from the 442nd as the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion were sent to support the Seventh Army in Germany, where men with families still confined to places like Poston participated in the liberation of Dachau. In the Pacific, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, Major General Charles Willoughby, described the contributions of the Nisei servicemen as having “shortened the Pacific war by two years and saved possibly a million American lives.”
More than half of the soldiers of the 442nd and the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), which had trained Nisei linguists and codebreakers, were Buddhists. They were using the knowledge that their families had maintained through temple activities to benefit the national interest. It was on the home front, however, that they had their most significant impact on American culture, through the unlikely medium of the U.S. military itself.
When Hisaye Yamamoto visited her brother’s grave in Italy many years after his death, she found that though their family had been set apart for particular scrutiny back home, in the U.S. military cemetery outside Florence, Johnny had been treated like any other G.I. She was dismayed, however, to see “only crosses and stars” over the American graves. There were “no Buddhist wheels,” she wrote, “which would have been more appropriate.”
At the time of his burial, the dharmachakra, the eight-spoked wheel of life and death signifying the impermanence and interdependence of all things, had not been sanctioned by the U.S. military as a symbol appropriate for the grave markers of those killed in action. Subscribing to the view of acceptable religious diversity common in the middle of the twentieth century, the army’s official recognition was reserved for those who fit into the triad soon to be defined by the sociologist Will Herberg as “Protestant-Catholic-Jew.” Herberg saw American life divided along Judeo-Christian lines and no further, and this division found expression not only on the graves of the dead but on the dog tags of the living. On the lower right corner of the small metallic rectangle used to identify a soldier by name, rank, serial number, and blood type, Catholic soldiers had a “C”, Protestants a “P,” and Jews had an “H,” for Hebrew. All the rest were “O,” for “Other.” Acknowledgment of diversity beyond that, it was argued at the time, would only cause confusion.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 40