buddhist

Buddhist Church Faces End of an Era Century-old Japanese Congregation Fading from its Oakland Beginnings

Seated between his grandparents in a pew toward the back of the chapel, a young boy dressed up as "Indiana Jones" adjusted his stiff new hat and listened to the special Halloween children's sermon.

Across the room in another pew, "Elvis" was not as patient. He squirmed in his seat, fussed with his black exaggerated pompadour wig, and pestered his mom for details about the party afterwards in the big hall downstairs.

At the front of the chapel, the 76-year-old Reverend Seigan Yamaoka, dressed in a black suit, crisply pressed blue button-down shirt and no tie, told a story of a kid who was afraid to trick-or-treat on Halloween, until a skeleton on the street offered a piece of candy.

"The point of this story is, if you see someone who's scared, be kind, share your candy," Yamaoka said to the audience of children and their grown-ups.

After the short sermon, the organist played, hymns were sung, and a collection plate was passed around. People lined up between the pews to pay homage to the Buddhist icons at the shine in the front of the room. Each person took a turn at the altar, where smoldering incense and offerings of fresh fruit and flowers were neatly arranged in front of three gilded idols at three separate shines. The supplicants cupped their hands together for a short silent prayer before bowing and taking their leave.

This sort of service would seem foreign to newly-arrived Asian Buddhists, who expect, when they enter a place of worship, to be overcome by the haze of incense smoke, and to hear the bald monks dressed in long robes chanting in a low monotone, punctuated by bells.

This non-traditional Buddhist service, held every Sunday at the Buddhist Church in Oakland at 8th and Jackson Street on the edge of Chinatown, is a hybrid that evolved over the last century, starting in Northern California and spreading across the West Coast. Today, the Oakland Buddhist church is one of 60 such churches that make up the Buddhist Churches of America and serve around 17,000 members, most of them Japanese-American.

This unique cultural hybrid is facing a crisis in Oakland. The Japanese-American community that existed in Oakland at the turn of the century is long gone. Older church members are dying off. And as the Buddhist Church of Oakland prepares for its centennial next year, the younger members, assimilated into the American culture, no longer need the cultural center the church once provided.

"There is no sense of community now," said Yamaoka, who also served as minister of the Oakland Buddhist church for seven years during the 1960s. "The vitality of the young kids is not here."

The church is empty on most weekdays, except for the couple of elderly members who volunteer in the administrative office on the first floor. The church is busiest on the first Sunday of each month, when the regular service is combined with a memorial service. But even on these Sundays, only a couple of dozen worshippers come, many of them in their 60s and 70s.

Yamaoka seemed resigned to the fact that people don't turn up for regular services. He said rituals were unimportant to the actual teachings of Buddhism. "Buddha didn't like rituals," he said. "Monks outlined these rules hoping to adhere to Buddha's path."

The Reverend isn't indifferent or apathetic about the loss of membership at the church. His seemingly passive reaction comes from a highly cultivated sense of acceptance, central to Buddhist teachings that all things physical are ephemeral, change is inevitable, and all things are interrelated. "If we don't understand that, we don't understand why we suffer," he said.

The Oakland Buddhist Church was established at the turn of the century as a social center for the Japanese immigrants to the area. Almost as soon as they arrived, this new group adapted the foreign aspects of their own religion to blend in with the local culture.

They called the congregation a "church" rather than a "temple," and held services on Sundays partly because that was the day everyone had off from the fields where most of them worked. They started to call their religious leaders "ministers" rather than "monks." They made physical adaptations like building pews and an organ. They composed hymns compiled in hymnals that the congregation sang to take place of the drone of sutra chanting.

"On the outside we looked more Protestant than Buddhist," said Yamaoka, who has a full head of hair, dresses in ordinary clothes and is a father of two. "Some of the adaptation was coerced, some out of necessity."

Because of immigration laws passed in the early 1920s, which prohibited new Japanese immigrants from coming to the United States, the assimilation process of the Japanese American community was not challenged by new arrivals from the old country. Shaped by their experience in the new country, the community developed indigenous traits and gradually became a unique American hybrid.

Since the Japanese immigrants to America all arrived in the country at approximately the same time, there is uniformity in the distinct immigrant experience of each generation born here. Unlike other immigrant groups in America, Japanese-Americans define themselves by generation. And now, after almost a hundred years in the new country, the first American-born generation is dying off.

Designed in the heyday of the Japanese immigrant community in Oakland in the 1920s, the church has its shrine and place of worship on the second floor. "The original idea was to have the place of worship above the din of everyday activities," Yamaoka explained. "But now the aging membership has a difficult time walking up the stairs to attend services."

When complimented on his Jackson Street church being on the National Register of Historic Places, Yamaoka sighed and offered a distinctly Buddhist response. "Emptiness is not emptiness, and not-emptiness is emptiness," he said. He said he appreciated the architectural flourishes: the roof of curved tiles, the stylized dragon heads at the three corners of each gable, the deep overhanging eaves. The stylized building is described in California State records as "an especially fine and early local example of a Japanese temple type, and a long enduring bastion of Japanese culture in Oakland."

Yamaoka said making changes to the building, like moving the Buddhist shrine area to the first floor, or installing an elevator, are nearly impossible because of the structural integrity of the church.

The desire to preserve the church building is a low priority for the Buddhist minister, who believes that physical incarnations are ephemeral. He said he was more concerned about the survival of the teachings. "Buddhism as a whole is gaining converts, but this church is not," Yamaoka said. "We have to do something quick. The fifth generation is starting."

The challenge for the Buddhist Church is partly that Buddhism does not have a tradition of actively seeking converts, and partly because an ethnically Japanese religious community is unappealing to new generations who have successfully assimilated into the majority American culture. Yamaoka, a second-generation Japanese-American, questioned whether the members of the church wanted new converts anyway. He said some people in the congregation are intent on keeping the church ethnically Japanese, even though many of the sons and daughters have married other races and bring their spouses and mixed-race children to the church. "They say the temple has to retain its ethnicity," he said. "Why does this place have to remain perfectly in the past?"

Lynn Chung, 42, who was selling Christmas wrapping paper as a part of the fundraiser, said she started coming to the church as a little girl with her grandmother. Now married to a Korean-American, Chung brings her own children to the church each Sunday. She said keeping the church Japanese isn't an effort to exclude others, but comes from a sense of nostalgia. "We are losing a lot of our first generation," said Chung. "I think it's nice that the church maintains some Japanese roots."

"We want to keep our kids close to the Japanese community," said 73-year-old Yo Kawabata, from Ashland, California. "I have 14 grandchildren. Most of them know our customs and try to stick with them." Kawabata said the annual Japanese festivals at the church, like the O-Bon festival in August for "remembering your ancestors," or the Birth of Buddha Festival in early April, were opportunities for the younger generations to learn about traditions and foods from Japan. "These festivals are celebrated in Japan too," she said.

While congregation members might be nostalgic about their Japanese roots, the gradual adaptation process and the trauma of the internment experience have weakened the church's ties to Japan. The Buddhist Church of America is a branch of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism founded during the Tokugawa period of Japanese history, when "shoguns," or warriors, ruled the land. Some of the sect's traditions, like the hereditary leadership in its temples, now seem anachronistic, especially to followers in the United States.

Yamaoka flipped a page in a Japanese manuscript that lay open on his desk in his small but organized office on the west side of the church. "This is a translation of a dissertation I've been working on for twenty years," he said. "I've finally been invited to submit it to a Buddhist conference at the Otani University in Japan at the end of the year."

He said he was proposing something quite radical to the Japanese branch of the sect, suggesting an American "individual centered" approach to spirituality rather than a focus on doctrine.

Yamaoka was born in Fresno. He is one of the many American-born Buddhist ministers who now preach in the churches. Few Buddhist ministers are appointed from Japan these days because it takes the Japanese ministers too long to learn the language and the rituals developed by the American branch.

Yamaoka said he turned to religion while detained in an Arizona internment camp during World War II. In college before the war, he had wanted to be a sportswriter, and after the war, his career in journalism never got back on track. "No paper would hire a Japanese American journalist after the war," he said.

Yamaoka said the rift between the Japanese Buddhist sect and its American branch became dramatic during the internment, partly because the ministers sent from Japan were interned separately from the rest of the community -- they spoke Japanese, and were considered more of a security risk.

The second generation of American-born immigrants held their own services for solace. "People tried to combine chants they remembered," he said. "They held their own Sunday schools in English."

Traumatized by their wartime experience of exclusion, Buddhist church members took on even more of the local culture afterward. The church observes non-Buddhist holidays like Christmas, Easter, Valentines and Halloween with decorations and special lessons about the Buddhist teachings that are applicable to the holidays.

During the postwar years, many of Oakland's Japanese-American community settled further inland. "There is no sense of community now," said Sam Yoneyama, 76, a retired chemist and former president of the church board. In the 1950s and 1960s, Yoneyama said, many of the original church members made an effort to re-congregate in Oakland each Sunday, but now that generation is aging and fewer make the long drive into Oakland. "They live so far away, in Concord, Moraga, Modesto," he said. "They don't all get here."

Many families only travel to the church on special occasions. And like the Kawabatas, many began organizing local "Dharma Schools," similar to Sunday Schools, or religious study groups called "Hawakai," in their own towns. "There's one in Concord and one in Eden [near Riverside, California]," Yamaoka said. "That means a lot of traveling for me. A lot of sermonizing."

These smaller groups further fragment the church community; and keep the pews of the Buddhist Church in Oakland empty, except on special occasions. But if this preserved "fine, early local example of Japanese temple type" -- with its tiled roof, dragonhead gables, and deep eaves -_ threatens to become a hollow monument, Yamaoka isn't worried. In fact, he encourages church members to organize small local groups; these new seedlings could take root and grow. He drives long distances every week to tend to them. "The church may not survive," he said. "But the teachings may."