Re-Weaving the Japanese American Incarceration Experience from the Perspective of Mingei: An Attempt at Buddhist Sociology

By applying a Buddhist sociological perspective, this study reconsiders the worldview of ‘Japanese Americans (especially Japanese speakers) in the concentration camps’ during the World War II. Specifically, two examples will be examined and re-evaluated from the ‘mingei’ perspective by Muneyoshi (a.k.a. Soetsu) Yanagi (Japanese philosopher, 1889-1961) : 1) the contents in the Japanese-language literary magazine Tessaku (Iron Fence), published within the Tule Lakes segregation camp; 2) ‘handicrafts’ created by the unknown inmates within Japanese American concentration camps. Through mingei thoughts, we hope to find an alternative sociological perspective that focuses on relational existence and being (or ‘resonance’ in Hartmut Rosa 2016) in the Nature (World). We will consider the relationship between expressed knowledge and unexpressed knowledge, with Yanagi Muneyoshi's ‘Mingei no Shiso’(philosophy of Mingei) as the axis in which, I believe, the religious and social levels are not antithetical (David Preston 1988).