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TI: Another book that you, more recent, Mukashi, Mukashi.

RM: Oh, yeah.

TI: That's another book, so talk about that one and how you got involved in that.

RM: Okay. Well, Joe Kosai passed me over to a lady named Sadie Yamasaki, and they called and said, "We're very interested in doing a book on the history of the Buddhist Church in Seattle." "Oh," I said, "that's an interesting topic." I said, "Gee," I said, "I, I found the history of the Tacoma Buddhist Temple very interesting, and I studied that in contrast to the Tacoma Japanese Methodist Church, the Whitney church." And said, "I'd like, I know a little bit about the history of the Seattle Buddhist Temple, not a great deal, but I'd, I'd like to talk about it at least." And it was a hundred years old, about to be, and so I came over and met Sadie and the archives committee. And again, like the Fukui book as the basis of, was the basis of Furusato, here's, the archives of the Seattle Buddhist Temple are a hundred years old. They go back to the birth of the, the temple, of the first people who founded it and why they founded it. Could, and with one central question: "Could Buddhism survive in America?" And this is a hundred-year history of could it, would the Japanese people here be assimilated into American society and forget their Buddhism, their culture of the homeland? And so the, the topic appealed to me. I wanted to see the ups and downs of the fortunes of the Buddhists here in America. And so I entered it with that idea, and the early documents, like in Tacoma, were in Japanese. Down to 1927 they were all Japanese. But I had a good friend in Tacoma who just retired from Osaka University. Wonderful guy. And I said, "You know, if I take this topic on, would you help me with some of the documents that are in Japanese?" "Oh yeah," he said, "I'd like to test my strength against kanji, early Japanese language. And so we entered that with the idea that he'd translate these basic documents, and then I'd tell the story. So it unfolded very much like...

TI: Now, what would these basic documents be? What kind of documents are they pre-1927?

RM: Okay. The seven founders decide they're gonna go out and recruit, one-by-one, other people. And then, and pretty quick they, they have a hundred people coming to Tsukuno's noodle shop once a month for a meeting. They don't have a Buddhist minister or anything, they're just meeting. And, and so they, they then get the desire to have a minister. And so they appeal in to Kyoto to send a minister. And there's this long wait because the Japanese Consulate said, "Hey, that would interfere with trade." Don't, that's another story. But the whole point of it was that again, knocked down eight times, but come back the ninth time. And survive what can, in a larger plane, can Buddhism survive as a, as a religion, is a really interesting question. Because it's the first religion from Asia to try to make it in America.

TI: And all this was captured in, again, what documents? Was it like sort of the minutes of the meetings?

RM: Oh, they, they, in the very first documents.

TI: And these were, like, writings from the ministers, or it was from the actual founders?

RM: No, these are for, writings from the founders and from, they started a public document called, "The Light of Dharma." They had a monthly publication, this little group, that they were using to get people to subscribe to and adhere to. This is before the coming of a minister. So... and those documents are, would it be embarrassment if Buddhism came and failed here? Would, would it be success if... would the, would it rouse the Christian religions to really oppose Japanese, how would it fit there? How about the trade picture? We've already spoken of that. There were these different elements, and these were covered in the Japanese documents. They don't have to hide anything when they write it out in Japanese.

TI: Good. So, and these were all, the Buddhist archives committee had all these documents?

RM: Yeah. Well, they had the start of them, that was sort of interesting. They would have the early issues of the documents, and then I saw where, well, they went on for six years, and again, for twenty-one years. And so we had to locate those. We found those at the Bancroft library. And so you can put the whole picture together, and that's what we did.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.