American Sutra by Duncan Ryuken Williams

The opening poem to the book American Sutra

Nyogen Senzaki was a Rinzai Zen monk who was one of the 20th century's leading proponents of Zen Buddhism in the United States. William thinks a monk discovered his body along a snowy stream, but Wikipedia cites two things and says it was a fisherman. Perhaps a monk fisherman. He was adopted into a temple family, and became ordained. When he came to the USA he read Emerson and William James.

Senzaki is eventually sent to Wyoming during WW2 when people of Japanese heritage were moved to camps after Pearl Harbor. American Sutra begins telling this story.

I'm coming to see America as the place where people overcome racial prejudice. I'm reading a biography of Frederick Douglass and I'm struck by how inspiring these stories are, and how gutting they are. I suppose I'm drawn to stories of triumph over adversity, like most people.

Duncan Ryuken Williams is a scholar, writer, and Soto Zen Buddhist priest who is currently professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California (Wikipedia). His website (the first link) says his father was British and his mother was Japanese. He was born in Tokyo. He grew up in Japan and England and went to college in the USA (Reed and Harvard for his Ph.D. His social history of Soto Zen will set you back $30. I've wanted to read American Sutra, and I think I'm the first one to read it from my library and that they just bought it.

William got interested in Senzaki through looking through the notes of his deceased advisor at Harvard, Masatoshi Nagatomi, who's father was also in the camps in Manzanar. Nagatomi was in Japan when Pearl Harbor happened, and could not get back to the USA. Nagatomi's wife also had a story. In an effort to appear more American her father burned all her Japanese artifacts, no matter how dear she held them.

Half this book is footnotes! P. 263-371 is more like a third, less like a quarter. This is the kind of book that I have two bookmarks, one for where I'm reading and one for where the footnotes for where I'm reading are.

And the above is all in the prologue. Read the book.

Here's an article about why Dr. Seuss got away with anti-Asian stereotypes.