'They’re still part of our lives'

Rev. Patti Nakai stood in front of the Buddhist shrine facing her congregation dressed in a black robe standing 4-foot-10 inches with short, white hair. She spoke haltingly but calmly.

“They’re still part of our lives—what they said, thought and did,” Nakai said, referring to previous generations.

That idea emanates through the Buddhist Temple of Chicago congregation and community as its members celebrate its 78th anniversary.

The founder of the temple, Rev. Gyomay M. Kubose started the temple in 1944 after he moved to Chicago from a Japanese incarceration camp called Heart Mountain Camp located between Cody and Powell, Wyoming.

Kubose somehow brought with him the pieces of a 5-by-2-by-7-foot black, gold and red shrine he had built in the prison camp. Though it doesn’t serve as the congregation’s primary shrine, it still sits in a small room in the corner of the temple. He built the shrine with tongue and groove so the pieces fit together without the use of nails, screws or rivets.

Kubose established the temple as Jōdo Shinsū, the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan, according to the book “Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America.” But, he also integrated meditation, a practice of Zen Buddhism, into the temple’s worship services after attending Otani University in Japan to study Zen Buddhism.

“He recognized in the 60s that (meditation) is what Americans perceive Buddhism to be,” said Bill Bohlman, the vice president of religious affairs at the temple. “Even now, people think all Buddhism is sitting on a cushion.”

That attitude of assimilation is another constant in the congregation. Bolman, who has attended the temple since he converted to the religion in the 90s, said that attitude fits the Buddhist principle of Upaya, which allows teachers to use their own methods to fit the needs of those they teach.

Glenn Fujiura, whose parents were some of the first members to attend the temple, grew up going to the temple each Sunday. He returned shortly after Kubose died in 2000. He said Japanese worshipers exclusively attended the temple during his childhood.

“When I was growing up, it was at the temple that was the opportunity to see the people that looked like me,” Fujiura said. “It was (at) Sunday gatherings. That was the opportunity for the Japanese American Community to get together.”

Despite the lack of diversity at the time, the temple community strove to welcome and teach visitors, Fujiura said.

“(Kubose) was very intent on kind of adapting Buddhism to the American culture,” Fujiura said. “He was just a real important figure in doing that.”
Fujiura said Buddhist temple services on Sunday are an American invention to assimilate with a more Christian culture. Fujiura has a co-worker who grew up in Japan who has never gone to Sunday ceremony despite spending his entire life as a Buddhist.

Today, members of nearly every race and nationality populate Buddhist Temple of Chicago services. One the temple’s most active members is a Muslim for Ethiopia.

The welcoming approach of the temple community stands in contrast to how some of the early members were treated in the U.S. Government incarceration camps during World War II.

Ruby Tsuji, who has attended the Buddhist Temple of Chicago for nearly 70 years, was 9 years old at the time. She remembers officials taking her father from their home in southern California to a prison camp in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

“It was saddening for us,” Tsuji said. “But I really didn’t know what was going on.”

Months later, U.S. government officials tracked down Tsuji, her mother and her siblings and put them in a prison camp called Camp Kohler near Sacramento, California.

Tsuji remembers the camps as drafty. She got measles and her mother had a makeshift surgery where a few of the men in the camp cut her stomach open to try and alleviate the pain she had in her stomach. When they found what Tsuji would later recognize as a tumor, they decided to sow her mother back up because they didn’t think they could remove it without killing her. The mother died a little over a year later, shortly after the U.S. Government released the family from its camp.

The U.S. Government also detained Fujiura’s parents in an incarceration camp. He said his father especially had seemingly conflicting beliefs when it came to the U.S. government. Fujiura’s father served in the U.S Army in intelligence services in the Pacific.

“He was as patriotic as they come,” Fujiura said. “He was a member of the American Legion and very proud of his service — very patriotic. But, on the other hand, he was truly pissed at the United States Government. It’s kind of this dual conflicting reactions to the American Government that I don’t know if he ever truly reconciled.”

Fujiura said his parents taught him and his siblings the importance of assimilating.

Though Kubose endured the camps, he usually avoided focusing on it. Bohlman said Kubose once recounted his life in a service he (Bohlman) attended but all Kubose said about the camps was, ‘that wasn’t fun.’

“My feeling is if we had a minister who had dwelt on (the camps) then it would have been a whole different temple,” Bohlman said. “It would not be welcoming. Because people were coming from the camps, they had a lot of problems. The last thing that (they needed) would be a minister who dwelt on what the problems were.”

When hate crimes toward people of Asian descent spiked during the pandemic, it brought back some of the community's old feelings of being othered. A retired policeman from the community patrolled the parking lot to make sure everyone felt safe.

“For the children and the subsequent generations, the (prison camp) story is pretty real,” Fujiura said. “We obviously didn’t experience it like (our ancestors) did. And I think that you’re always going to have that sensitivity to the reports of Asian hate crimes because there’s that familial memory of what happened just one or two generations ago.”