Redeeming the War on the Homefront: Alberta’s Japanese Community During the Second World War and After
David ]. Goa
The Spiritual Sources of Culture and Community Life
Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher of For King and Country: Alberta in the Second World War;)
A special sensibility made it possible for the Japanese community of southern Alberta to accept harsh circumstances and to work for recognition of the interdependence of all nature, including all peoples, enemies and friends alike. This sensibility has its source in the teachings of a prince of the Sakya clan of northwestern India, Siddhartha Gautama, a man who has come down through history as the historical Buddha. Legend and historical sources suggest that he was born some 2500 years ago [624 and 448 B.C.E. are the usual suggested dates], and taught a gospel grounded in the experience of the three inescapable evils that afflict humankind: age, disease, and death. He taught that everything was suffering [sarvam duhkhami]: “birth is suffering, decay is suffering, sickness is suffering”, everything impermanent is suffering. When we experience life as suffering, the source of this experience [and this became his second truth] is desire, or tanha. If you wish to overcome experience in bondage to suffering, you must recognize that suffering is rooted in desire. This desire, such a fundamental motivation for human feeling and action, is ultimately the desire to make things permanent which are in their nature impermanent. You will need to suppress this desire, the Buddha taught, if you wish to be free of suffering. Establishing one's life and sensibilities on the recognition of this connection between desire and suffering, and moving to a recognition of the interdependence of all things in an ever-changing nature, including our historical experience, is the Eight-fold Path which Buddhist tradition developed.
The Buddhist Church of Canada26 established four congregations in southern Alberta during the war period; there are now seven congregations in the province. These four churches were the centre of community life. The various services which focus the meditation of devotees are structured around contemplation of the fleeting character of life. There is a set of memorial services for those relatives and friends who have died, and a set of festivals which recall the life and teaching of the Buddha and Shimran Shonin [1173-1262 A.D.], the reformer who rejuvenated a portion of Japanese Buddhism in the thirteenth century. The Buddhist Church of Canada is a part of the Jodo Shinshu wing of Japanese Buddhism. The Jodo Shinshu tradition, recalled in the text, chants, sermons, plays and symbolic gestures of the festivals, cultivates the key Buddhist insights and the teachings which flow from them. The insight into the connection between suffering and desire and the teaching about the interconnectedness of all nature are at the centre of all these services.
In Japanese homes as well, this insight and teaching are central. Most of the homes in southern Alberta have a butsu dan, a home shrine, where offerings of thanksgiving are placed on a daily basis and where prayers are offered to the Amida Buddha in gratitude for life with all its impermanence, for the insights and teaching of Buddha and Shinran Shonin, and in thanksgiving for relatives and friends who have died. Butsu dan also were built in the internment camps and used there on a daily basis.27
At the heart of the cultural life of Alberta's Japanese community is meditation, cultivating within the faithful a regard for the impermanence of life, thanksgiving for life, and an awareness of how our desires can so easily deepen our suffering and estrangement from the possibilities of the present. For the 2664 evacuees moved to Alberta during 1942, the Buddhist Church provided a language of meaning for the historical events which appeared to tear their life apart. It brought the central teaching which flows from the insight into suffering, the teaching that all life is interdependent, to the centre of consciousness and provided a ground upon which to accept without passivity, to act, not out of a sense of victimization as so often happens, but out of a sense of interdependency, and to build a stable and fruitful community in service to its own children and to the larger public good.28
The sensibility which led the Japanese community in southern Alberta to cultivate a commitment to a civic vision has its roots in another dimension of Japanese culture which traces its roots back to China and another spiritual and civic leader, Confucius [probably born in the second half of the sixth century B.C.E.). Scholars of Japanese culture have noted the deep influence of Neo¬Confucian thought in shaping Japanese family and civil life.
The Confucian worldview understands each person's goal as “the pursuit of the excellency of their humanness [jen yi] by the correct and proper accomplishment of their social duties [li]”.29 This pursuit is shaped by the educational process within the heart of the culture. It nurtures a direct parental love for all those who are younger, and a reverence, called filial piety, for those who are older and in positions of authority. Within the Confucian tradition a breach of the rules of filial piety is the only definition of sacrilege. This view is articulated in a famous passage in the Hsiao Ching, in which the following words are put in the mouth of Confucius.
The master said, “Filiality is the root of virtue, and that 1i'O/11 which civilization derives .... The body, the hair and skin are received from our parents, and we dare not injure them: this is the beginning of filiality. [We should] establish ourselves in the practice of the true Way, making a name for ourselves for future generations, and thereby bringing glory to our parents: this is the end of filiality. Filiality begins with the serving afoul' parents, continues with the serving of our prince, and is completed with the establishing of our own character.”30
Family and community are woven together through filial piety. During the war years with the hardships of living in granaries and chicken coops, often without the presence of father and older sons, this fundamental value of respect and honour for parents gave a stability to Japanese families that is remarkable. The importance of respect for the state, even when the state had treated one's community so badly, remained intact. The goal of filial piety, after all, was to establish the character of each citizen, including the character of the young children within the community. In reviewing this period and the Japanese response to the way they were treated, it is striking to notice that there was virtually no rioting, criminal activities or incidents of rebellion against the circumstances in which the community found itself, much less rebellion against the state.
Notes
26. Mark Mullins, Religious Minorities in Canada: A Sociological Studv of the Japanese Experience [Queenston, Ontario: The Edwin Mellen Press. 1989].
27. There is a Bursu dan made in one of the internment camps in the Folklife Collections of the Provincial Museum of Alberta.
28. See Mac Nishiyama's essay “A Devotee's Reflection on Jodo Shinshu Buddhism“, in David J. Goa, ed., Traditions in Transition: World Religions in the Context of Western Canada [Edmonton, Alberta: provincial Museum of Alberta, 1982], pp. 59-61.
29. The Iliade Guide to World Religions, Mircea Eliade and Ioan P. Couliano [New York: Harperand Row, 1991], p. 92.
30. Scripture of Filiality I; Hsiao Ching, quoted in Laurence G. Thompson. Chinese Religion [Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1989], p. 42.