While the story of how over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in American internment and concentration camps during WWII has become widely recognized, little has been told about the ways in which Japanese American Buddhists and Christians alike drew on their faith to survive forced removal, incarceration, family separation, and unjust deportation.

Join Duncan Ryuken Williams, co-curator of the exhibition Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration, who will be in conversation with Sherman A Jackson (USC King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and author of Islam and the Blackamerican) and Russell M. Jeung (Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State University and Co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate) about the links between the wartime Japanese American experience with other forms of religious and racial animus and exclusion in the United States.

This discussion will be followed by a Japanese renga (linked-verse-poetry)-style prayer of interconnected readings including excerpts from Dharma talks or Christian sermons delivered during the wartime removal or incarceration as well as letters, diaries, and poems written in the camps. Readers are Buddhist and Christian clergy as well as descendants of the wartime writers including Rev. Marvin Harada (Bishop, Buddhist Churches of America), Rev. Mark Nakagawa (West District Superintendent, United Methodist Church), Rev. Ron Kobata (retired, Buddhist Church of San Francisco), Kevin Kowta (lay leader, Union Church of Los Angeles/grandson of Rev. Sohei Kowta), Hoshina Seki (President, American Buddhist Study Center [NYC]/daughter of Rev. Hozen Seki), Satsuki Ina (Co-Founder, Tsuru for Solidarity), and Mitch Homma (President, Amache Alliance/Vice-President, American Baptist Historical Society/great-grandson of Rev. Masahiko Wada).

Together, the program will interlink faith leaders from the Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim traditions, literary memories across time and place, and provide a community vision of freedom and equal justice through insight and compassion.

Co-presented by the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the Japanese American National Museum 

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Bios
Sherman A. Jackson 
Jackson is the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Jackson was formerly the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Visiting Professor of Law and Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan. Jackson received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. From 1987 to 1989, he served as Executive Director of the Center of Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. He is author of several books, including Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihâb al-Dîn al-Qarâfî (E.J. Brill, 1996), On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî's Faysal al-Tafriqa (Oxford, 2002), Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Towards the Third Resurrection (Oxford, 2005) and Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Oxford, 2009). Jackson has been featured on the Washington Post-Newsweek blog, "On Faith," as well as the Huffington Post. 

Russell M. Jeung  
Dr. Russell Jeung received a BA in Human Biology and a MA in Education from Stanford University. After working in China and in the Mayor's Office of San Francisco, he obtained his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. After teaching at Foothill College for two years, he came to San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies Department in 2002. His research interests include the Sociology of Race, the Sociology of Religion, and Social Movements. Dr. Jeung is extensively engaged with his students in conducting community-based, participatory research with Asian American communities. In 2020, Dr. Jeung launched Stop AAPI Hate, a project of Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, and SF State Asian American Studies. It tracks Covid-19 related discrimination in order to develop community resources and policy interventions to fight racism.

Duncan Ryuken Williams 
Duncan Ryuken Williams is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, Chair of the USC School of Religion, and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. He has also been ordained since 1993 as a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition and previously served as the Buddhist chaplain at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD. Williams’ latest book, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019) is the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Religion Award and a LA Times bestseller. Williams is also the author of The Other Side of Zen (Princeton) and editor of seven volumes including Hapa Japan (Kaya), Issei Buddhism in the Americas (Illinois), American Buddhism (Routledge), and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard). Find him online at www.duncanryukenwilliams.com

About the Images
Interlinked religious observances in the WWII American concentration camps: (Upper image) Hanamatsuri, the celebration of the Buddha's birth, held at Gila River concentration camp, Arizona, 1944. Gift of Tamotsu Ikemoto (93.104.6) (Lower Image) "Easter Sunrise Service, April 9, 1944," Manzanar concentration camp, California, by Kango Takamura. Kango Takamura paintings (Collection 433), Special Collections Library, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

This event is a free public event for the Sutra and Bible Exhibition co-curated by Emily Anderson and Duncan Ryuken Williams.