“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, and engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”
Travels with Charley; In Search of America, John Steinbeck
Carmela and I spent our 15th wedding anniversary in San Juan Bautista, California. For those of you who do not know, this area and the neighboring towns of Salinas, Monterey and Watsonville are considered Steinbeck Country, in honor of the Nobel prize winning American author John Steinbeck. One of the things that Carmela and I enjoy on vacation is just hanging out, listening to or reading books and eating good food. Since we were in Steinbeck Country while driving out there, I started reading and listening to Steinbeck’s book Travels with Charley, the first paragraph of which the quote I began with is from.
The first actual reading book I read was called Spark Plug of the Hornets when I was in second grade. However, Of Mice and Men was the first book I remember not being able to put down. It inspired my life-long love of books. After more than fifty years, I still remember lying down in the back of my Dad’s 1963 Buick Special station wagon. On this particular trip, our family was going to a movie at the old Motor Vue Drive in. I don’t remember the movie we were going to see, but I do remember I didn’t want to stop reading the book because I wanted to find out what happens to Lennie. If you want to satisfy your curiosity, read the book; it is very short, but amazing. However, the reason I bring this up is that, to me, John Steinbeck personifies the great American author even more than Ernest Hemingway. Steinbeck wrote about migrant workers and the western United States, something more familiar to me than Hemingway’s more exotic locales in his novels. In particular, this book Travels with Charley was a travelogue Steinbeck had published in 1962. This was a few months before he received the Noble peace prize in Literature. It was about a trip in search of what “real” America was. He had accomplished a lot in his career and as I say, he had written a lot about the West and middle America, such as his famous book “Grapes of Wrath”. Even though he had written a great deal about the West, which was the setting for this book, he had been living in New York City for close to twenty years by 1960. He was fifty nine years old and was not in the best of health. He felt he really no longer knew what “real” America was.
In a similar manner, as I am getting towards the end of my career, I too have accumulated quite a few challenges to my health. I don’t know how many times I have heard about the “Nembutsu teachings in America” or even the “World”. Then I started wondering, “Have the Nembutsu teachings even spread across America?” Having been involved with the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) at the national level for many years, I often see how BCA considers America as mostly the “west coast”. To be specific, since BCA’s headquarters are in the Bay area, much of the leadership of BCA comes from a very liberal political perspective. I consider myself quite liberal politically, however, I understand that this liberal voice does not define America or the Nembutsu teachings. Jodo Shinshu is not political. And BCA should not be just for Japanese Americans. This has really been increasingly fueling my yearning to understand America better, to see it for myself.
One of the best things to happen to my career as a Kaikyoshi was to have been involved with the Idaho Oregon Buddhist Temple (IOBT). There are so many things about IOBT that are very familiar -- the Japanese-American traditions and foods, the kindness of so much of the membership. However, in the area of politics, I know that many of the members differ from my own perspective and it has been an eye opener to learn that. I was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. I grew up acquiring the “handicap” of division between LDS (Mormon) and non-Mormon political views. I have had an “us” vs. “them” viewpoint. My perspective was the liberal viewpoint and the Mormon way was the extremely conservative way. Now that I am involved with IOBT, their views have taught me that the conservative viewpoint is a very legitimate view, just as legitimate as my liberal view.
Now that I have glimpsed the conservative Japanese American viewpoint in Ontario, Oregon, I would like to see more of my America. Some people have said the United States is not a bunch of states but a bunch of countries, with their own cultures and traditions. I believe this is true. Just as Steinbeck questioned his own prejudices to this question, I’m challenging my personal perspective of what America is and “has the Nembutsu spread throughout America?”
As the current Director of the Buddhist Churches of America Center for Buddhist Education (CBE), my vision is for CBE to offer a more comprehensive and far-reaching, albeit ambitious, approach to Buddhist education that will help share the Jodo Shinshu teachings throughout the English speaking world. A part of that is to provide online seminars relevant to an American, if not international, audience. To do this, I want to have a better understanding and handle on America beyond the west coast. In my life and career, I have yet to explore the rest of this country other than BCA temples I have visited during my 30-plus years as a kaikyoshi. Things in BCA and the world have changed quite a bit since I began studying Buddhism in the seventies.
In 1978, I had attended the Institute of Buddhist Studies (IBS) Summer Session, then an opportunity to take IBS graduate level classes focusing on Jodo Shinshu and Buddhism. That year, I was still a college student at the University of Utah and had wondered about whether I would really like to study Buddhism with a more academic structure. When I began this journey, literally the first person I met when I went to the old IBS on Haste Street in Berkeley, California was Kenny Yamada. At that time, Kenny was not yet ordained and was a student at UC Berkeley. He was a very friendly and interesting person.
After introducing ourselves, he asked me, “Why are you here?”
“I was thinking of whether or not I want to study Buddhism. I met Rev. Kusada at an IBS Seminar in Ogden, Utah, so I thought I’d check it out. What are you doing here?” I replied. He simply said, “I’m going to get the “Big E!”
“What’s the Big E?” I asked. “You know, THE BIG E! I’m here to get Enlightened, like the Buddha!” he replied, somewhat amazed that I didn’t know what he was talking about.
At the time, I didn’t know anything about Kenny Yamada and thought, “Wow, I guess I have to get used to this type of person in Berkeley. That must be why they call this place Bizerkely.”
Since that time, we have become very good friends. When I was attending IBS, we were actually roommates for a while. After I graduated from IBS and went to Kyoto to study, he and I were also classmates for two years at Chuo Bukkyo Gakuin (Central Buddhist Institute) in Kyoto, Japan. We then received our ordination together at Nishi Hongwanji. After that, I attended Chuo Bukkyo Gakuin for another year for the research program, while Rev. Kenny and his wife Naomi returned to Berkeley. He then decided not to complete IBS and became a journalist instead. For a while, he worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then he moved on to other journalist jobs. He then decided he had missed something about the ministry. That was when he decided to follow his family’s tradition in Higashi Hongwanji. He trained again and became a Kaikyoshi of Higashi Hongwanji, and served for many years as the minister of the Berkeley Higashi Temple. Like myself, he was one of the few ministers to return to his home temple. He now serves as the editor of the Higashi Hongwanji’s Shinshu Center of America. He is in charge of all English language publications for Higashi Hongwanji.
The reason I mention all of this, is that I am planning to take a trip across America, just as John Steinbeck did. As you all know, since this COVID crisis, I do everything by computer now with four temples and the BCA Center for Buddhist Education. Since March, the days have glopped together as I just sit here with my laptop. So Carmela and I bought a motor home! If I am not at my desk at home, I am at my desk in my RV. I knew I was getting so tired of just sitting at my house but Carmela doesn’t think it is safe for me to go out. Since she didn’t want me outside my bubble, I asked her about just driving around in my own bubble? She thinks I will be safer, as long as I take the proper safety precautions. We have now taken a number of practice trips since we bought the RV in May, and I have driven about 8000 miles. This upcoming trip I will be traveling with my old buddy Rev. Kenny, and “Travel with Kenny,” as Steinbeck once traveled with Charly, although Charly was a dog. Rev. Kenny is a 5th degree black belt in Wado kai Karate. He will be fun to travel with and much better protection than a dog. We are going to drive through the entire contiguous 48 United States, a little over 16,000 miles.
Since we are both third generation Japanese American Kaikyoshi, I have decided to begin at the site of the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk colony. This group in 1868 was the first Japanese to establish a place to live in the United States. The first Hongwanji Temple was in San Francisco in 1899, which will be our next stop, then the BCA/JSC and Berkeley Higashi. We will then cross California to Los Angeles to the Nishi and Higashi Betsuins, moving on to Arizona to the Amida Stupa near Sedona. We will then continue on the next 46 of the United States. We will be highlighting certain sites significant to Japanese American history, such as Minidoka Concentration site, Heart Mountain Concentration site, the Rohwer Arkansas concentration camp site, Crystal City Concentration Camp site in Texas etc. and other points of interest on the rest of the United States. We plan to hold a Jodo Shinshu service in each of the 48 states, document our adventures by video and upload each service onto the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple Facebook page (@SaltLakeBuddhist) and the BCA CBE YouTube channel.
John Steinbeck named his camper truck “Rocinante” which was the name of Don Quixote’s horse. I already have a truck named “Kantaka,” after Siddartha Gautama’s horse. All our vehicles have names beginning with the letter “K,” e.g., Klesha, Kokoro, and Kantaka; we had Kansha for our now traded-in SUV, and now my RV is named “Karuna,” Sanskrit for “compassion.” So it’s quite auspicious to call my trip with Rev. Kenny “West (Nishi) to East (Higashi): Nembutsu across America carried by Compassion in search of the “Big E”. So please check out our videos, as we begin in September after Labor Day. Namo Amida Butsu.
~ J.K. Hirano