<Begin Segment 30>

SF: You were talking earlier about discrimination against the Buddhists in particular. What, can you sort of give us some details about that? Or, maybe, you know, why is -- how Christians may have been under -- Christian JAs maybe -- may have been under less pressure in a sense than Buddhist JAs, and the kind of pressures maybe within the community as a result of that?

RI: Yeah, well I think a lot of this was actually prewar. I wasn't there. I wasn't born yet. So what I, I guess my kind of flimsy thoughts on this matter are more from reading other things. I just heard about, especially in Hawaii, where people were constantly told at school that if you want to be American, you have to be Christian. And so they got quite embarrassed about going to the Buddhist temple, being seen going in there. But even bank officers would say, "Well we'd like to give you a loan but you're not the right religion." And promotions, these things all kind of hinged... and it's kind of clear, if you're, if you're in a company, and especially at the management level and you have a choice of people to promote, you often want to promote people who you're comfortable with, who maybe go to your church, who play golf like you do, who's wives are the same race and where you can go to cocktail parties together. And this is why a lot of racism occurs at that stage. A lot of it is this inability to, or unwillingness to accept people different from yourselves, especially when you have your selfish interests at hand. So maybe that was behind a lot of the discrimination. But I know the churches, the Christian churches, who began in Hawaii -- you know, they're missionary families from New England, who saw Hawaii as the paradise for Christians: the Heaven on Earth. And so they would bring in all these Asian immigrants and convert 'em to Christianity, just like the local Hawaiians. And so when there was a small core of Japanese who refused to convert, it made those who had converted, it made them very uneasy too, 'cause they felt guilt, I'm sure. So there were -- most -- anyway, brutal on their attacks on the Japanese Buddhists were the Japanese Christians, mainly because -- I don't know, it's that strange dynamic that when you step over the line you want everybody to go with you, right? 'Cause the ones who stay back remind you of how you sold out in a way. So I see these Issei who stayed in there despite all this pressure as being real heroes in the very fact -- it's only because of them that the Honganji in Hawaii and BCA are standing today. I don't have too much more to say about that, 'cause that's all kind of hearsay. It's not my experience.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.