Internment Camp Diaries Shine Light on American Buddhist Experience

July 2, 2007

Source: University of California, Berkeley

http://ls.berkeley.edu/?q=node/505

For Duncan Williams, the cream-colored volumes on his bookshelves in Dwinelle Hall are anything but ordinary accounts of life in the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were held prisoner during World War II.

Totaling some 1,600 pages, these paper-bound diaries written in Japanese are windows into the interior lives of Buddhists in the camps, particularly of Buddhist priests and community leaders who carefully chronicled their responses to incarceration and to the question of what it means to be American and free during war-time.