The Barbed Wire Sutra: How Internment and WWII Helped Mainstream American Buddhism

Back in the early 1960s many of my friends in Lodi California were Nisei (second generation Japanese). Their parents had been put into concentration camps (let's face it that's what they were).

I remember friends like Ronald Watanabe (had hair like Elvis), Emily Nakamura (drove a brand new Oldsmobile to high school), and the legendary Milton Takahashi (got drunk and pushed the stage props over during the performance of Hamlet at Sacramento State). When I worked for Mr. Crete at Crete's Drug Store, I would walk over to Okazaki's hardware store and buy incense then look at his bonsai garden at the back of the store (you had to ask him - he would always smile and give me the nod to look at his bonsai trees).

They were great friends and as American as apple pie. I would like to see George Lucas do a Nisei version of American Graffiti. I can see Ronald and Milton in it. :)

Started crying here:

He had not seen her in more than two years; they had been kept apart for nearly half their marriage. Making up for lost time, and uncertain when they might win their freedom, the Fujimuras set about starting a family.

Eight-and-a-half months after their reunion, his wife gave birth to a baby boy. It was a cause for great excitement not only for father and mother, but for a camp full of people eager for any portent of new beginnings. Because of conditions at Poston, however, the usual physician was not available to attend the delivery.

The only medical professionals present had been a veterinarian and an inexperienced nurse. On the infant’s death certificate, written just an hour and 20 minutes after he was born, an animal doctor wrote “asphyxiation” as the cause of death.