In the wake of Japanese American accomplishments during the war, Buddhist groups petitioned for the military throughout the late 1940s to add a “B” to their dog tags. Such requests were repeatedly denied, but a turning point in their quest for formal acknowledgement of their right to express religious affiliation eventually came with a dispute concerning the use of crosses over the graves of the war dead.
The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located in a volcanic depression known as the Punchbowl Crater, overlooking Honolulu, was designated as the final resting place for the service members killed in the Pacific theater in 1948. When burials began, each grave was marked with a white wooden cross. Within two years these crosses numbered fifteen thousand.
The crosses were intended to be temporary; they were to be replaced with flat marble stones as the cemetery was developed into what one congressional patron of the effort called “one of the great patriotic shrines in the nation.” However, when the crosses came down in 1950, there was outrage. Members of Congress led by Joseph Rider Farrington, the nonvoting representative from the Territory of Hawaii, and Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, sought funds to erect permanent crosses. The Subcommittee on Public Lands hearings devoted to debating these funds became a dramatic portrayal of differing notions of the meaning of religious liberty in America.
After Representative Farrington lamented that the loss of the crosses had made the cemetery look like a “vacant lot,” Fred Crawford of Michigan objected that the replacement of the temporary markers with stones set into the earth was part of a larger design including a chapel and an amphitheater, the completion of which would be threatened by undoing work that had already been done. “It takes a lot of money to run this government,” he said, “and I am not in favor of taking $3,000 or $750,000 to put these crosses back, and thus further deprive funds that we might use to go ahead and complete this plan with.”
Speaking in defense of the bill she had introduced the previous October (H.J. 338, for “the installation of crosses to replace the white wooden crosses which until recently marked the graves at the National Memorial Cemetery”), Congresswoman Rogers delivered something of a sermon on the singular significance of Christian symbolism to the men whose remains now lay in the Punchbowl. While she allowed that those who followed other creeds might prefer different symbols, she left little doubt that the cross alone deserved pride of place in this “great patriotic shrine.”
“The resolution which we have under consideration here at this moment has a fundamental significance to our American way of life,” she said. “Ours is a Christian nation, inspired in its establishment by strong, courageous, determined men and women in their decision to worship their God in their own way. Freedom of religion constitutes and assembles the strength of America. The graves which are the subject of our hearing this morning hold for all time the fighting hearts of these Americans who, among other things, gave their lives to preserve the precious right of freedom of religious worship.
“I believe every one of our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, would feel stronger in their hearts if they knew that when they fell, their sacrifice would have the honor of the cross.… I know that the men who live, after the shock of battle has cleared away, are pleased to know and are satisfied in the knowledge that their comrades who fell in the fury of the struggle have the distinction and honor and the glory of the cross standing at the head of their own graves.… The cross stands for the Christian way of life. It stands for all that is right. It stands for belief in the right, and stands for the courage to sacrifice for the right. It stands for life everlasting. I believe this powerful symbol of our Savior is a fighting symbol for those who gave all for what they believed to be right.
“Yes, gentlemen,” the congresswoman said to the members of the committee, “I believe that Our Savior, Jesus Christ, is pleased to have the symbol of the cross on the graves of those who believed in him, and sacrificed their lives for the right. Who are we as government officials to dispute this fact? Who are we to contest the power and the meaning of the cross? Every fighting man, as he goes into battle, has a prayer on his lips. Do we as government officials have the right to take from him the last visible symbol of the meaning of Christ, his Savior, and his salvation?”
Apparently awed by this pious performance, it took Representative Lloyd Bentsen, the committee chair and future senator and vice-presidential candidate, several minutes to return the hearing to the subject at hand, which was the cost—nearly three quarters of a million dollars—rather than the symbolism of replacing crosses that had just been removed. “Mrs. Rogers, I would like to ask,” he ventured, “do you dispute the evidence or the opinion that has been given to us in the report, that if you go to a permanent cross, that it would cost $740,000?”
“Perfectly frankly,” Rogers said, “I am rather shocked at the government’s raising the matter of cost in this matter.”
“I know we don’t like to put a dollar value on these symbols,” Bentsen said, “but it seems to me… that some of these funds can be expended toward taking care of veterans who are still alive, and that sort of thing, and saving the economy of our country, if it would be possible, perhaps, to put up one symbolic cross in the center of the cemetery and one symbolic Star of David, and whatever other religious faiths are represented, in order to make it easier to maintain the cemetery and to limit the cost to some extent.”
After shrugging off a few more questions concerning budgetary matters, and about the memorial practices at various American military cemeteries around the world, Rogers deployed an argument that she may have suspected would be her most persuasive in the political climate of the day. She had received a great many letters, she explained, from constituents who “state they feel that the removal of the crosses is a move toward Communism.”
At this point the most fiscally cautious member of the subcommittee, Representative Crawford of Michigan, spoke up: “Let me ask you this question: Which do you think is the greatest contribution to the progress of the Communists: the destruction of our economic powers here in the United States, or the preservation of a sound fiscal policy?”
Rogers insisted that theology, not the economy was what separated Americans from their Russian rivals. “I think the most important thing for us here in the U.S. is to state our belief in God and religion,” she said. Saving money was not the point, in other words; the salvation of the nation was.
At the height of the Red Scare, the push to maintain the Christian atmosphere of a “great patriotic shrine” grew out of the same politicized religiosity that led to efforts to insert the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance that began a year later. Explaining the motivation of that later bill, its original sponsor, Representative Louis Rabaut of Michigan, echoed Rogers’s sentiments about how public displays of American religiosity could be used as weapons of the Cold War: “You may argue from dawn to dusk about differing political, economic, and social systems, but the fundamental issue which is the unbridgeable gap between America and Communist Russia is a belief in Almighty God. From the root of atheism stems the evil weed of communism and its branches of materialism and political dictatorship. Unless we are willing to affirm our belief in the existence of God and His creator-creature relation to man, we drop man himself to the significance of a grain of sand and open the floodgates to tyranny and oppression.” This basic understanding was elaborated in a report submitted to the Judiciary Committee in May 1954:
“The inclusion of God in our pledge therefore would further acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon the moral directions of the Creator. At the same time it would serve to deny the atheistic and materialistic concepts of communism with its attendant subservience of the individual.… From the time of our earliest history our peoples and our institutions have reflected the traditional concept that our Nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God.”
While her colleague from Michigan soon would make a battleground of
the Pledge, Rogers believed that the Cold War should be fought even with the memories of those lost to the hot war of recent memory. Rogers, it should be noted, was a vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which made the Communist hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy a fan of her legislative efforts. “We probably owe it to her and the grace of God,” McCarthy once said of Rogers, “that American boys are not being killed today by American-trained Reds.”
Yet even as members of Congress were pushing for various official proclamations of religious uniformity—demonstrations that the “one nation” was indeed under one God—the U.S. military, newly aware of the number of war dead who did not fit neatly into the Protestant-Catholic-Jew understanding of American religious life, was simultaneously reinforcing the right of service members to have their remains buried under the signs not of one god but many.
In the hearing room, just as the tide seemed to turn in favor of replacing the crosses in the Punchbowl, Colonel James B. Clearwater, chief of the Memorial Division of the army’s Office of the Quartermaster General, was called to testify on behalf of the Department of Defense. Clearwater explained that his efforts as administrator of the nation’s military gravesites and other memorials were informed by a directive issued by the Secretary of Defense in 1947 that there would thereafter be no discrimination in national cemeteries based on race, rank, creed, or religion. Though this directive had been issued explicitly to end the shameful practice of segregation of the remains of white from black service members, at the Honolulu site it was proving to have unexpected implications.
“Many of the Hawaiian war dead were of the Buddhist faith,” Colonel Clearwater explained to the committee. As a consequence, for the first time military funerals were held not only with Protestant ministers, Catholic clergy, and rabbis but with Buddhist priests—the very class of people who had been classified as A-1 suspects during the war.
The one Japanese American called to testify, Mike Masaoka, the National Secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League, corroborated Clearwater’s sense of the number and influence of Buddhist troops. “I think it should be pointed out for the record that aside from the Christian and Jewish faith, probably more persons of Buddhist faith have served in and are serving in the armed forces of the United States than any other group,” Masaoka said in his testimony. “I think today, when the world is in such a state of flux, that attention to the religious recognition of a great faith of Asia is very important in terms of our national policy.”
If the crosses were to be put back in place, Clearwater insisted, they should be erected in the company of Stars of David and Buddhist Wheels of Righteousness. As a compromise to the call to replace specifically Christian markers with a stone of the same rectangular shape for all, the Department of Defense would inscribe the appropriate symbol on the face of the gravestones already in place. Crosses would return to the Punchbowl, but they would not be set above the messages of other religions.
In response to the colonel’s testimony, Congressman Arthur Miller of Nebraska made it clear that he wanted no sign of religious difference in the national cemetery. Crosses, he argued, would be fine for all. “I have always felt it was unfortunate that someone decided to remove the crosses,” he said, “because a cross in a military cemetery is such an essential part of that cemetery, you might as well have a garden without flowers or a church without Bibles or an altar as to have a cemetery without crosses.”
Then Miller challenged Clearwater directly: “You said no discrimination, but you do propose to mark the cemeteries in Hawaii as to whether they are Christian, Jew or Buddhist. Why don’t you put white or black or yellow? It’s the same thing, why put on Christian, Jew or Buddhist, if you are not going to have discrimination?”
“That is according to the wishes of the family which they indicate on the application for the headstone,” Clearwater said. “Or, in those cases where there is no next of kin, according to the religion indicated on the man’s service record.”
Becoming increasingly combative, Miller chided, “You don’t put on his color. Why put on his religion?”
Clearwater was unfazed. “One of the freedoms of this country is the freedom of religion, sir,” he said. “One of the things that caused the directive to be issued in 1947 was the question of color.”
Congressman Crawford, who was generally opposed to replacing the crosses on fiscal grounds, jumped in with concern that if you started identifying Buddhists as well as Christians and Jews, where would it end?
“To carry that further,” he said, “chances are within the very near future we are going to have Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mohammodists, Confucianists, Taoists and Hindus mixed into this very picture. This is before you, and you can’t escape it… and you are not going to restrict this country to three religions.”
“That is correct, sir,” Clearwater said. “It just happens, Congressman Crawford, that, so far, outside of the Christian faith, the Buddhist religion is the only one that has brought up the question.”
“But certainly there will be further additions.”
“We anticipate that,” the colonel said.
In the end, the white crosses were not replaced at the Punchbowl. Instead, the existing graves and those to come each received an inset stone featuring a medallion etched with the appropriate religious symbol. With the new grave markers at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the “Buddhist wheel,” as Hisaye Yamamoto had called it when she wished such a symbol had been available for her brother, became the third religious icon sanctioned by the Department of Defense.
Small matter though this may seem, its implications were less so. The symbols of other religious traditions followed, and now number close to fifty. As Private Shiomichi had predicted, Nisei veterans continued to fight discrimination after the war was over, and not just for themselves. The deaths of Buddhist soldiers led the way for members of all faiths to join the symbols of their belief to the memory of their service. In all these cases, the enduring significance was not merely the inscription of a further symbol of faith in stone. It was also the entwining of forms of belief formerly supposed to be distinct: the American and the spiritually marginal. On an island that would become part of the fiftieth state, for the first time in U.S. history, military funerals were held not only with Protestant ministers, Catholic clergy, and Jewish rabbis but with Buddhist priests.
Even Reverend Fujimura soon found himself putting his skills to work in the military’s service. When the Poston Relocation Center shut down for good a month after the war’s end, its former inhabitants were, for the most part, allowed to return to the lives they had left behind three years before. Fujimura, however, was not permitted to return to California immediately upon his release. With the taint of his espionage charge still lingering, and still considered an “enemy alien,” he was told he would remain on probation for a year, during which time he would be legally prohibited from living on the Pacific coast. Making the best of an impossible situation, he moved to Chicago, where he resumed his ministry. He could come and go as he pleased from his home but had to receive prior approval from the FBI in order to leave the city. The terms of his probation also required him to check in once a week with a government-appointed supervisor, as if he had committed a crime other than being a largely Buddhist priest during a war with a Buddhist nation.
When finally Fujimura was permitted to return to Salinas, four years after he had been transported out of town on a darkened train, he found that his temple had not been able to fully recover from the forced relocation of all its members. Only twenty-six of the three hundred families who once attended the temple had returned, and those who did complained of a chilly reception from the locals. Many of his former congregants, however, had settled in nearby Monterey, where a sardine packing factory helped reintegrate the recently returned evacuees by hiring Japanese American workers immediately after the war. Despite the flagging numbers in Salinas, Fujimura did not consider abandoning his temp
le. Instead, he opened another.
At his new temple in Monterey, he was soon providing services for the families who had come to work in the sardine factory and for young men in uniform. The Military Intelligence Service had moved its language school from a bare-bones aircraft hangar at the army’s Crissy Field in San Francisco to Camp Savage in Minnesota during the war, and moved it now to the Presidio, which at the time was a satellite of nearby Fort Ord. There were seven different chapels for various religions to use on the base, but not one for Buddhists, and so once a week, a bus full of soldiers would appear in their dress uniforms to hear Reverend Fujimura speak on the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha. At first most of these soldiers were of Japanese descent, either Nisei who had been too young to serve during the war or the next generation—the Sansei—for whom the Japanese homeland was but a grandparent’s memory. As the weeks passed, however, when Fujimura looked out over his military congregation, he saw that they were no longer all Japanese. There were soldiers with English and Norwegian names, as well as African Americans and Filipinos. Some were there, he soon learned, to practice the language they were learning in order to serve in the U.S. occupation force in Japan. Others had genuine interest in learning about Buddhism. Many came for the food. Sushi, udon noodles, and other traditional fare were regularly offered after the service.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 41