Leading scholars of Japanese American studies will explore how texts, faith, identities, and communities are transplanted, translated, and transformed in a Japanese America positioned beyond national boundaries.

Co-sponsored by the USC East Asian Studies Center and the Japanese American National Museum (JANM)

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This one-day conference, held at JANM's National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, highlights the significance of the positionality of both the subject and object of Japanese American studies. Topics range from mixed-race studies to publication culture to Japanese American Buddhism.

10:00 AM Introduction - Duncan Williams and Lon Kurashige 

10:30 AM Session I - Transformations in Japanese American Buddhism

Tomoe Moriya (Hannan University) "'Buddhism' Translated and Transplanted in the U.S. Soil: Some Findings from the Buddhist Journals in Early Twentieth Century California and Hawai'i"

Michael Masatsugu (Towson University) "Reconstituting Japanese Buddhism in Cold War America"

Michihiro Ama (University of Alaska, Anchorage) "Translating Honen: Transnational Transliteration of Honen's Biography"

12:45 PM Break 

2:00 PM Session II - Positionality in Japanese American Studies

Lon Kurashige (USC) "Hawai'i, the Mainland, and Japanese American History: Historiography and Regional Positionality"

Yasuko Takezawa (Kyoto University) "Positonalities Matter: US- and Japan-based Scholars' Reflections in Transpacific Japanese American Studies"

3:30 PM Closing Remarks

DISCUSSANTS - Lon Kurashige (USC), Jane Iwamura (University of the West), Tetsuden Kashima (University of Washington), Sharon Suh (Seattle University), Duncan Williams (USC)

Abstracts

Session I - Transformations in Japanese American Buddhism
Tomoe Moriya (Hannan University) "'Buddhism' Translated and Transplanted in the U.S. Soil: Some Findings from the Buddhist Journals in Early Twentieth Century California and Hawai'i"
This paper outlines the Buddhist journals published by a Japanese Buddhist missions in California and Hawaii in early twentieth century. They include the Japanese journals, Beikoku Bukkyō and Dōbō, and in English, Light of Dharma, Berkeley Bussei, Hawaiian Buddhist Annual, and YBA Times that were published in prewar and postwar periods. Analyzing heretofore largely ignored texts can reveal how the ethnic religious organizations tried to work with Japanese immigrants while talking to American sympathizers from outset. As can be seen from the titles, the first two were aimed at the Japanese immigrant community and the latter at American Buddhists and sympathizers, which made for a linguistic/racial divide. However, this present research uncovers such a division was more ambivalent than the previous studies have discussed and the linguistic/racial divide slowly merged together owing to the emergence of the English-speaking Nisei Buddhists in the religious congregations in Hawaii and Mainland United States.

Michael Masatsugu (Towson University) "Reconstituting Japanese Buddhism in Cold War America"
In this presentation, Dr. Masatsugu will discuss key findings in his historical study of Japanese American Buddhism in the transitional years between the end of World War II and the Early Cold War years.  Based on extensive research in Buddhist organizational archives, government records, mainstream and ethnic newspapers, and oral interviews, his manuscript examines the critical role that Japanese American Buddhists played in the transformation of Buddhism in American society and culture from wartime associations with the “yellow peril” to more positive postwar associations which remain predominant today.  At the same time, Masatsugu’s study examines some of the costs involved in strategic campaigns to promote Buddhism beyond Japanese American communities including the erasure of the diverse array of perspectives and experiences of Buddhists themselves.

Michihiro Ama (University of Alaska, Anchorage) "Translating Honen: Transnational Transliteration of Honen's Biography"
From about the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese Buddhist leaders began to actively introduce their religion to the outside world by translating and discussing the teachings of their denominations in Western European languages. In the growing body of Shin Buddhist literature in English, however, efforts to introduce other Buddhist figures of medieval Japan have been overlooked. This paper explores the structure of Hōnen the Buddhist Saint: His Life and Teaching translated by Ishizuka Ryūgaku and Harper Havelock Coates and published by Chion-in, the headquarters temple of the Jōdo-shū organization in Kyoto, in 1925; the translators’ intents and the process of translation; and how Hōnen the Buddhist Saint was perceived in the West at the time of its publication. An examination of these conditions helps to understand the trans-Pacific development of Japanese Buddhism during the pre-World War II period.

Session II - Positionality in Japanese American Studies

Lon Kurashige (USC) "Hawai'i, the Mainland, and Japanese American History: Historiography and Regional Positionality"
This paper reflects upon the asymmetrical  experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawaii and on the mainland as understood through scholarship.  It explores the intriguing firewall between studies of each group and the implications for breaking through it.

Yasuko Takezawa (Kyoto University) "Positonalities Matter: US- and Japan-based Scholars' Reflections in Transpacific Japanese American Studies"
“Japanese American Studies” is an established academic field in both the United States and Japan. Respectively, it has different roots in each country. While it’s origins in the US is generally well understood, it is less so in Japan. Japanese American studies in Japan grew out of a combination of local history, a history of US-Japan relations, and the influence of emigration agencies. Additionally, the popularity of nihonjinron (theories on the uniqueness of the Japanese race and its culture) in the 1970s and early 80s might have contributed to the growth of Japanese American studies This presentation is partially based on conversations that have emerged within the Transpacific Japanese American Studies Project that have stimulated dialogue surrounding positionalities between US-based and Japan-based scholars in Japanese American studies. 

Bios

Michihiro Ama is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He specializes in the study of modern Japanese Buddhism. His research interests include: Buddhism and Transnationalism; Buddhism in Literature and Film; Buddhism, Gender and Ethnicity; and Buddhism and Language. He is the author of Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898-1941 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011). He is also guest editor for the special issue on “Natsume Sōseki and Buddhism” in The Eastern Buddhist 38 (2007). Ama is currently working on a book project, The Awakening of Fiction: Literature and Buddhism in Modern Japan.

Tetsuden (Tetsu) Kashima, born in Oakland, California, received his B.A. from the University of California [UC], Berkeley and a Ph. D. in Sociology from UC, San Diego. He is a Professor in the American Ethnic Studies Department and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. He was an invited visiting professor at Ryukoku University, Kyoto, and Yamaguchi National University, Yamaguchi and is the author of Buddhism in America: The Social Organization of an Ethnic Religious Institution (Greenwood Press) [selected as “One Hundred Titles: A basic library on Japanese Americans”] and Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (University of Washington Press) [Finalist, 2004 Washington State Book Award and a 2004 Finalist for the Kiriyama Prize, Pacific Rim Voices Book Project]. He was awarded the Japanese American Citizens League, 2008 Japanese American of the Biennium Award Education/Humanities, and the University of Washington’s 2009 James D. Clowes Award for the Advancement of Learning Communities].

Jane Naomi Iwamura is Chair and Associate Professor of the Religious Studies department at the University of the West. Dr. Iwamura's research focuses on Asian American religions, race and popular culture in the United States (with an emphasis on visual culture). Her publications include Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S. (Oxford 2011) and the co-edited volume, Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Routledge 2003). She has also written on Japanese American lived religions, as well as the intersection of religion and Asian American literary production. Dr. Iwamura currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and as an Advisor to the Pacific Asian North American and Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM). She co-founded the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) – a national scholarly network advancing the interdisciplinary study of Asian Pacific Americans and their religions. She has also received numerous awards for her teaching and mentoring.

Lon Kurashige is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California. He is author of Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002), winner of the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He is co-editor of Pacific America: Empires, Migrations, and Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016) and “Conversations in Transpacific History,” a special edition of Pacific Historical Review (2014). His article “Rethinking Anti-Immigrant Racism: Lessons from the Los Angeles Vote on the 1920 Alien Land Law” won the Carl I. Wheat prize for best publication to appear in the Southern California Quarterly between 2012 and 2014. His writings have appeared in Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, Reviews in American History, and other academic journals.  Kurashige is co-author of the college-level textbook: Global Americans: A History of the United States (Boston: Cengage, 2018) and co-editor of Major Problems in Asian American History, 2nd ed. (Boston: Cengage, 2016).

Michael Masatsugu is Associate Professor of History at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California. His research interests are in Asian American history and the history of Buddhist social movements.  His work has been published in Amerasia, Journal of Global History and Pacific Historical Review. He is currently completing a manuscript, Reorienting the Pure Land:  Ethnicity, Transnationalism and Orientalism in the Making of Japanese American Buddhism, 1941-1975, and conducting research on the rise of world Buddhist movements in the early Cold War years.

Tomoe Moriya is a Professor in the Department of International Communication, Hannan University in Osaka, Japan. Her research revolves around modernization and globalization of Japanese Buddhism on both sides of the Pacific, connecting Japanese history with Asian American history. Her recent works in English include Issei Buddhism in the Americas (co-edited with Duncan Ryūken Williams) and Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki (volume 3 Comparative Religion, co-edited with Jeff Wilson, forthcoming). She edited D. T. Suzuki’s essays on social issues from the 1890s to the 1960s (Zen ni ikiru) and supervised Japanese translation of Thomas P. Kasulis, Shinto: The Way Home.

Sharon A. Suh is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Seattle University. She received her Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University in 2000 and is author of Being Buddhist in A Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple (University of Washington Press 2004) and Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film (Bloomsbury 2015).  She teaches and writes in the areas of Buddhism, Race, and Gender.

Yasuko Takezawa is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. She currently leads a multi-/interdisciplinary collaborative research project, "A Japan-based Global Study of Racial Representations," funded by JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). Her major English publications include Transpacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations (co-edited with Gary Y. Okihiro, University of Hawai'i Press, in press), Racial Representations in Asia (Takezawa ed. Kyoto University Press/ Trans Pacific Press, 2011), Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (Takezawa, Cornell University Press, 1995), and Special Issue: Rethinking Race/Racism from Asian Experiences of a London-based Journal, Japanese Studies (co-edited with Koichi Iwabuchi).

Duncan Williams is an Associate Professor of Religion and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and previously held the Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley and served as the Director of its Center for Japanese Studies. He is the author of a monograph entitled The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, 2005) and co-editor of a number of volumes including Issei Buddhism in the Americas (Illinois, 2010), American Buddhism (Routledge, 1998), and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997). He has also translated four books from Japanese into English including Putting Buddhism to Work: A New Theory of Economics and Business Management (Kodansha, 1997). He is currently completing a monograph titled, Camp Dharma: Buddhism and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II (forthcoming, UC Press).