The Buddhist Church of Oakland: Rebuilding community after Japanese-American internment

By Morgan Ross

In 1942 President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, mandating the forced internment of people of Japanese ancestry, including Americans.  That order also shuttered the Buddhist Church in Oakland’s Chinatown until the end of the war. Morgan Ross has the story.

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A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY PART I: The evacuation of more than one hundred thousand men, women and children all of Japanese ancestry removed from their homes in the pacific coast states to wartime community established in “out of the way” places.

MORGAN ROSS: Two thirds of the internees were American citizens. In 1943, the War Relocation Authority produced a film about the internment, but it didn’t call it that.

A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY PART I: They are not prisoners. They are not internees. They are merely dislocated people, the unwounded casualties of war.

They may not have been physically wounded, but the relocation was emotionally traumatizing for Japanese Americans.

ANNA NARUTA: You had so many business people and community members who had to leave virtually immediately.

That’s historian Anna Naruta.

NARUTA: They could only bring a suitcase of goods. So people who had stores, they had to sell under duress, to great losses.

Naruta says the hurried departure was just the beginning. For about 8,000 evacuees in the Bay Area, their first stop was the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno – formerly the Tanforan racetrack.

NARUTA: The horse stables were used as the residence. And they smelled. You know people talk about it. You knew you were forced to live in some horse stables.

From there, the Japanese Americans were sent to so-called relocation centers.

NARUTA: It’s hard to imagine the pain of that. Being told you’re not loyal, you’re somehow not actually American, even though you’re born here like everyone else.

At the internment camps, evacuees encountered a stark existence. They were assigned to barrack type buildings, more than 300 people to a block. The whole camp was surrounded by a wire fence and guarded by military police.

A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY PART I: Each family upon arrival at a relocation center was assigned to a single room compartment about 20 by 25 feet. Barren, unattractive. A stove, a light bulb, cots, mattresses and blankets. Those were the things provided by the government.

The families had left most of their own possessions behind. And in many cases, they never saw them again.

GREG YEE MARK: I mean literally, people would then strip their homes of their chinaware, of their furniture, and sell like for a dime on the dollar.

Greg Yee Mark is a professor of Asian Studies at Sacramento State University. He says the homes themselves were often taken over by squatters.

MARK: But also, I know wonderful examples of like here in Sacramento, of a European-American farmer who supported his friends who were interned and watched their farms, and when they came back he gave it back to them.

Before the war, Oakland’s Japanese Americans were concentrated in Chinatown. And many of them were members of the Buddhist Church of Oakland, on Jackson Street.  It’s a burgundy Shinto Shrine with black arching roofs. The current minister is Reverend Harry Gyokyo Bridge. He says when the church members were forced to evacuate, many of them left their belongings here. Friendly neighbors looked after the building.

HARRY GYOKYO BRIDGE: You know and they kept an eye on this place, and were able to prevent it from being vandalized.  

When the war ended in 1945, it was a time of national celebration. The Allies triumphed over the Axis and American soldiers came home to their loved ones.

VE Day VJ Day End of WWII Celebrations 1945 Newsreel and Stock Footage: The greatest, wildest celebration of them all was in New York’s Times Square. Never before or since has there been a crowd like this on the Great White Way. Two million people screamed their elation at the end of the most devastating war in recorded history. For 24 hours, the celebration went on, and not for a minute did it lag. Victory had come. Old glory waved over a happy land.

For the Japanese Americans returning home from internment camps in 1946, the celebration was more bittersweet. They came home to a bleak existence.

NARUTA: People didn’t have their properties to return to, except in some cases where friends held property in their own names for their friends who were interned. Except for those few cases, people virtually lost everything, and the communities that they came from were gone. It’s profoundly painful I think. And I think this is part of why in a way it’s only getting to be now that a lot of people are a little more ready to talk about the effects of the internment, and these whole communities being rounded up and sent to the camps.

The spiritual leaders of the Buddhist Church of Oakland also been interned. Reverend Bridge says they took on the task of helping community members rebuild their lives.

BRIDGE: After everything being taken away from you: your rights, your property, your belongings and then to have a place to come back to. To be able to kind of get your bearings, and figure what you are going to do after the war is over. I can only imagine that you know, that solidified the relationship with the church.

To help revitalize the community, the church added an auditorium, a game room and even a nursery. But those changes were barely completed when the church underwent its second great upheaval. A new freeway was being built – and the church was in the way.

BRIDGE: Kind of like in the cartoons, isn’t there a bugs bunny cartoon where the government comes in and says we’re putting the highway through where bug bunny’s hole is, so he has to go somewhere and he has to fights back. But the reality is, I don’t think you can really fight something like that, so the church had to make decision on what they were going to do.

Their options were limited.

BRIDGE: People were still trying to find their own housing, and there was no way they could build a new church, so they decided to move it, physically move the building.

In June of 1950, the church was literally split in half, placed on trucks, and moved three blocks away, to the corner of ninth and Jackson Streets. Naruta says even though the move saved the building, it disrupted the already wounded community.

NARUTA:Because it is more than a building being moved and a congregation having to stop for a period of time and then return, it’s – everything is changed.

When the Buddhist Church officially reopened in 1951, the members held a celebration. But the impact of a decade of resettlement had affected the community. Members were dispersed throughout the Bay Area.

Today, they still are, but they maintain their connection to the church. Reverend Bridge holds services on Sundays for the roughly 400 members. And he gives tours of the building to anyone who wants one. The church is in the process of being named a landmark – in recognition of its remarkable history and ongoing importance to the Japanese-American community.

In Oakland, I’m Morgan Ross for Crosscurrents.

Morgan Ross is a student in our Public Interest Reporting Program at Mills College in Oakland.

This story originally aired on June 14, 2010 as part of a series on Oakland's Chinatown.