foxtrot forgeries

First stages of sketches in pencil


After a few weeks of carving


Around the time that I started posting these musings on the Fresno temple and the Obon season in general, I was on the third or fourth week of carving this linoleum block which I *SWEAR* started out rather innocently, with the children leaning into one other as the focal point. I wasn't quite sure what the context was going to be around them (as it must be evident in the way that the background and foreground are very slowly being filled in) and kept sketching and even carving as June, July and August crept in and surrounded me.

It is well nigh into September, and I think I'm only a few steps away from completing the lino, which surprise surprise, ended up as a street scene at an Obon Festival. I concentrated on new styles of making stars and lantern light, while screwing around with shaping shadows. The last few steps will involve me drawing out the silhouettes of the rest of the festival attendees and dancers, which is harder to do when you don't really have good models to work off of.

As for the girl fox, well...she has long been a favorite of mine in Japanese folk tales and superstitions, even if she has a greedy, cunning streak running through her like the wind.

Fate of the Fresno Betsuin Building Project

When I was nine years old, the Sunday ritual was to drive the five miles or so from our home in Tarpey Village in Clovis until we were out where long dirt driveways led to vineyards and farmer homes, where a single oak tree shaded a tiny, unmarked bungalow. Steel grey folding chairs were brought from the closets and the children were instructed to plunk zabuton on each chilly metal seat, candles and thin green rods of incense were lit, as an overhead heater roared to life. That tiny bungalow was where I attended weekly dharma school and even played "Hotokei Sama" on the piano for our very small Buddhist congregation who lived out in the sticks; Sunday School for the outlying areas such as Fowler, Madera, Selma, Dinuba, Kingsburg and Parlier.

I live in Los Angeles now. As news that the historic Jodo Shinshu Buddhist temple located in downtown Fresno was up on the auction block reached the southern California Japanese American community, colleagues began leaving me both physical and digital copies of an article that was published in the Los Angeles Times on August 1, 2011— in the heat of the annual obon season. Being a semi-native Fresnan (I was born in San Diego and raised for the first seven years in Honolulu, but lived in the Fresno area from age eight until seventeen), I was asked for my candid opinion about the temple everywhere I went: over dinner, in the hallways at work, and on my Facebook page. But as the initial spell of dismay over the abandonment of the old for the new washed through the network, I realized what a tremendous piece of my identity as a Japanese American was formed by that very temple and by being raised Buddhist in the Central Valley. Fresno, like so many mid-sized American cities, has expanded expotentially since it was first incorporated in 1847. What were once thriving ethnic enclaves scattered around a downtown base bordering the newly laid Southern Pacific Railroad line has now grown a thousand fold in circumference, as people built outwards from the original central core (where transportation and commerce was once the hub), conjuring up cheaper housing and the mini-malls by the hundreds to support its growing suburban populations. What is left behind in the downtown district is then left to decay.

This story is similar in some ways, but of course different from what happened in Little Tokyo with the Los Angeles Hompa Hongwanji Temple on the corner of 1st and Central street, which happens to be a sister temple to the one in Fresno. In the mid 1950s, the L.A. Hompa Hongwanji, (affectionately known by locals as Nishi Hongwanji) having outgrown the temple that their Issei congregation built in 1925, launched an ambitious fundraising effort to build a new and larger temple further down 1st street to Vignes and subsequently sold their old temple to the City of L.A. The original Nishi temple, like the Fresno church, was a physical testament to Issei fundraising acumen and a manifestation of their determination to put their hard-earned capital into a more productive way of living while remaining on American soil. From the stories I've heard, Little Tokyo and downtown Los Angeles in general suffered during the war years by the two-pronged forced incarceration of the Japanese and the arrival of African Americans, Mexicans and others who were lured to California by offers of work in the US defense industry. This rush of migration resulted in crowded, squalid conditions in the aging historic districts, which is what the Japanese Americans returned to in 1945. As the community struggled to find some sense of normality in their lives in the traumatic years following war, Nishi Hongwanji, in both its physical and spiritual form, sheltered dozens of homeless families and provided the foundation on which the community slowly began to rebuild. By the mid-1950s, the congregation had swelled back to its pre-war numbers and beyond as the Nisei generation reached its marriage and child-bearing peak. Simultaneously with (although most likely not in consideration of) the temple's plans for possible relocation, the Los Angeles Redevelopment Commission had its eye on the entire swath of buildings that flanked Nishi Hongwanji, as city plans emerged in 1963to tear down the so-called decrepit buildings and widen 1st Street. So when decision to rebuild the temple were official ten years later, the City of Los Angeles purchased the historic building, which surely had a part in helping raise funds for the new temple on Vignes. The street widening along 1st Street never happened (I'm not sure why), and thus, the former Nishi building was left standing. There may have been brief periods of habitat, but to my knowledge, the historic building was by and large empty for decades. In the meantime, a resurgence of Japanese American cultural traditions such as Nisei Week and the opening of other nonprofits nearby such as the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and East West Players in the old Union Church building helped establish Little Tokyo as a vibrant, living community once again.

Fresno did not have this same experience. While the population of Fresno proper soared in the second half of the 20th century and continues to experience dramatic increases into the 21st century, downtown continues to suffer. In 1992, Fresno City Hall itself moved out of the heart of downtown, re-envisioning itself as a futuristic neo-architectural swoop on the edge of downtown. I first heard of the new/old Buddhist temple quandry about a year and a half ago, when I found out that my family had donated funds towards the new temple. It isn't sheer coincidence that the proposed new Buddhist temple will be built on a swath of land out by Clovis that, if the stories I've heard are accurate, is land that the Buddhist community purchased decades ago, perhaps with this kind of shift in mind. This area was once all grapevines, fig orchards, strawberry fields and cow pastures, but today it is filled with tract houses lined by advertising banners that whip in the wind and achingly new elementary schools. It’s where the new generations of Japanese American community lives. It is a mere stone's throw from where that lone oak tree and the tiny Buddhist bungalow I practiced in once stood.

I felt a terrible yearning for the old Fresno Betsuin Buddhist temple when I heard that it might be replaced, and that sense of nostalgia has slowly eaten away my heart. Like so many other generations of Japanese Americans from the valley, our central identity was rooted in the old temple on the corner of Kern and E Streets, and with little effort my mind was flooded with memories of the numerous funeral services, Hanamatsuri, and especially the annual Obon festivals, when stopping in at Komoto's Department Store and Central Fish were all part of an organic experience of visiting West Fresno. Granted, much of those Buddhist services were actually exercises in controlling our gasps of air and giggles when the sound of unearthly priests chanting in incomprehensible Japanese struck our dumb yonsei ears. Yet it was sorrow I felt, that certain kind of mourning, upon realizing the end of a previously unbroken line of history. Up until now, every single couple in my family had been married at that temple; in fact, my maternal grandfather, Johnson Kebo, was even the temple board chairman in 1956. (Johnson married Miyeko Okamura on July 18, 1938 at the Fresno Betsuin Temple, which was a double wedding with Johnson's younger brother George and his wife Evelyn. I even investigated getting married there this past May, but opted to have the ceremony at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles.)

But the inherent reality of the congregation's 21st century needs became apparent when I was asked to participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Buddhist "Dharma Family Center" last spring. The Dharma Family Center is a spanking new gymnasium/community center that is currently standing in for the temple services while the new one is being constructed adjacent to the gym. I certainly couldn't refuse. I arrived with the rest of the family, and as I saw dozens of tables groaning with tupperware dishes and watched row upon row of chairs fill with three generations of Central Valley Buddhists, it dawned on me. Man, everyone here is so over it! What is alive in Fresno today isn't something held to a fixed point on the map or even housed within sacred walls. The needs for ritual and to teach tolerance and humility, and well...even the need for basketball gyms and potlucks in a place where people conveniently congregate---that is where the community thrives. I was one of many people that day who held a pair of scissors and symbolically snipped the ribbon at the ceremonial breaking of new ground. It genuinely moved me to witness this transition, even as I stood behind a row of Nisei, Sansei and Yonsei, whose families had undoubtedly contributed to our way of life and whose shoulders we were standing upon that day.

To acknowledge the well-intentioned appeals by preservationists and historical monument supporters, I know that objects steeped in memory are the artifacts we seek out for telling stories. The temple has tremendous power as a historical site of conscience and has hundreds of entry points for reflecting our community's history, having borne witness to decades of community life, especially when it carried the weight of the Japanese forcibly ousted from the once crowded West Fresno neighborhood in 1943. Yet for all of the value we place on the Fresno temple's marble stairs which we all walked up, and the 3,000 lb bronze bell that carried our prayers, perhaps that weight, those seemingly permanent structures are not what they simply appear to be. Isn't that what Buddhism teaches us, to lose our attachment to earthly belongings, and that all things are impermanent? To not hold on?

So what is the elegant solution to this most complex personal /community/ economic/spiritual conundrum? Perhaps the old Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple could be purchased and moved across town as some people are suggesting. But is there another way of thinking about the tenets of honoring ancestors and impermanence? Maybe the old temple can be converted into something like a center for alternative medicine to heal the homeless population that now camp beneath its cloud-shaped gates or into a legal center to represent the myriad immigrants that still pour into the valley everyday, searching for work and a home and a strategy for survival. Do not do any evil and cultivate good, the old temple reminds us. Which brings me to the last part of my story in relating the history of the L.A. Nishi Hongwaji temple with the experience we are living today in Fresno. After lying fallow for nearly twenty years, the historic Nishi Hongwanji building was riddled with holes and bore the worst evidence of neglect. It wasn't until 1987 that the unimaginable happened and the future of the temple was revived. On that year, the City of L.A. signed a lease with an emerging non-profit to open a national museum dedicated to the history and experience of Japanese Americans. Exercise and honor the power of a community's strength and perhaps someday we can make the beloved home another home for others.

Today, we dwell upon our dead

I just unearthed this piece, which I wrote in August/September 2009 in Taos, NM. I had forgotten all about it until now, and though the 2011 Obon season has just passed, it is especially apropo for me to share it since Bachan died this spring. In addition to my gratitude and thanks to Nanao Sakai (December 2008), Arthur Okamura (July 2009), Joe Holt (July 2009), I dedicate this article to Miyeko Kebo (April 10, 1917-February 7, 2011. She was 93 years old!)




About a year ago my mother called, urgency burnishing a discernable edge to her voice, to tell me that Bachan, my grandmother, had stopped eating. It was expected that she would rapidly deteriorate in the coming weeks, maybe days. Come home, she said, it was time to say goodbye. Within a day, I found Bachan in an armchair in her bedroom at my aunt’s house in Fresno. As I held her fragile hands between my own, I was especially sensitive to feeling her bones swimming beneath the skin, its surface freckled with age and blue with veins, still delicately vital. We were alone in her bedroom, yet I struggled mightily to contain my emotions, seeking privacy even from her intimate audience. It was August, and the dry, blasting heat of the desert bore onto the blacktop roads, the dusty grasses between the house and the curb. Her chair faced out a curtained window onto the driveway, where I imagine she could watch the comings and goings of the house. Looking around her room, I recognized all of the familiar articles that I had memorized from the time that I was a child, although she had moved residencies at least three times since her husband had died. A faded color portrait of her with her husband, Johnson, in a white polyester jacket and a brown patterned dress shirt sprouting lapels of a ridiculous wingspan; she in large plastic framed glasses, her graying hair a singular crest of curl undulating over her head, a gleaming tooth from an easy smile.


Most prominent in her room was the family butsudan, the solemn, lacquered shrine devoted to ancestor worship. Non-Asians aren’t as familiar with having something within the household that needs regular upkeep like a butsudan- its caretakers feed it a tiny mound of cooked rice, a glass of water, a piece of fruit or a sweet bean manju to satiate the hunger of ghosts, and as a small reminder that we are indebted to our forebearers for the life we have. Butsudans are a bit like books to me- with two sets of shuttered doors, one paneled, one solid, that opened to more tiers where candles and photographs of the deceased are placed. Before the butsudan sit its accessories: a pert, gilded cushion sat atop a carved pedestal, a resonating bowl for awakening distracted ancestors, Bachan’s crystal ojizu with its rich purple and white tassel. In this fashion, she visited with the departed everyday and remained connected to the worlds of the living and dead. As we talked in gentle voices, I hoped my love would be conveyed more through my touch than through my words. I sat in fear that this was the last chance to thank her for the immense, infatigable love she surrounded me with throughout my entire life. We fluttered around the subject of life’s great rewards and all the good times. As I stood to leave, she patted me again reassuringly, clear-eyed and chirped, “You’ll see me again!”


It wasn’t until later, on my train ride back to Oakland that I pondered one of the enigmas of being raised Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, and the weight of Bachan’s comment. We are taught that with death, the unenlightened are reborn into this world, again destined to seek nirvana. Most of us don’t contemplate the reincarnation wheel with much regularity let alone consider when we’re going to bump into the recently deceased next, and whether they might be disguised as a roundworm , a morning glory vine, or even a ghostly human. What I failed to remember on that journey home was the fact that it was early August, and I was unwittingly speeding directly into Obon season.


The Obon festival has been held annually in Japan since 657 A.D. and even today, between July and August 15th, millions of Japanese living in metropolitan cities flock to their hometowns to celebrate . “Obon” is an abbreviation of “urabon”, the Japanese transliteration of the Sanskrit word Ullambana which literally means "to hang upside down”, implying the unbearable suffering born when you’re hanging upside down, or forced to bear the discontent and unfulfilled desires of your earthly life. The legend of obon proportedly is as follows: Mokuren Sonja, a disciple of the Sâkyamuni Buddha, gifted with supernatural powers bestowed upon his priestly devotion, visits his mother who has passed to the spirit world, only to discover that she has fallen onto the path of hungry ghosts and is in great suffering. To release her from her wanderings, he brings her food and makes offerings at his local temple, then bursts into spontaneous dance when she and seven generations of ancestors are released from their earthly desires. Obon then became a ritual of both filial piety and to offer gifts of food to the deceased, coinciding with the end of summer and the beginning of the harvest season. Obon was established as a major festival in Japan in the 7th century, but it wasn’t until the onset of the Meiji period (1868-1912) and shift to the solar calendar that Obon officially fell on July 15 and in some places, August 15.


Thus, at the peak of summer’s intensity, when the skies boil with humidity and a witching shrill of dying cicadas, the spirits of our ancestors descend back to earth to visit kin. To pay respect and homage to who they once were, offerings of rice, cakes, fruits and vegetables—usually the most splendid and choicest, symbolizing the fruition of the family’s efforts— are laid at the butsudan and occasionally at the front door of the household. In order to properly guide the spirits of one’s ancestors, lanterns or mukaebi, small bonfires, are lit on the night of Obon, filling the night with the soft pulse of light suffused through paper. Additionally, in the Hiroshima area where both my maternal and fraternal great grandparents immigrated from, elaborate hexagonal paper lanterns, both multi-colored and white, are placed at the ancestral graves. The white lanterns are for those who passed away during Aug. 16 of the previous year till Aug. 15 of the current year. Although an exact evolution of Obon cannot be definitely traced, the festival has become synonymous with ritual folk dancing performed at night by the light of lanterns. Bon Odori (dance) is itself an offering of joy and celebration, a magical twilit evening when one can literally dance in tandem with the dead.


It was likely in a fit of nostalgia for ancestors left in distant villages in Japan that Obon became one of the predominant Japanese traditions that survived the centuries old lag between United States and the home country. The first Bon Odori in U.S. Territory was performed in Hawaii in 1910 (which technically wasn’t an actual U.S. state, but was the earliest immigrant community of Japanese migrant workers. Twenty years later, the Jodo Shinshu priest Reverend Yoshio Iwanaga introduced the Bon Odori to temples in California, Oregon, Washington and Canada. The first organized Bon Odori in the continental United States was held in the auditorium of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco in 1931. Bon Odori is still performed outdoors, the dancers clad in summer yukata, moving in concentric circles of flickering fans and sweeping hands around a raised platform called a yagura. Although I grew up attending the Obon festival annually in West Fresno, I never participated in the odori itself, and was more content just to prowl the stalls for dollar plates of somen salad, deep-fried Okinawan donut holes on a skewer, teriyaki sticks, paper cones of shave ice, or to spend quarters playing carnival games. Death and the observance of the past were the furthest things possible from my mind. For all of my hours throwing rings at rows of old coke bottles at the Fresno Obon as a child, it wasn’t until I moved north to Oakland for college, that I took my first flailing steps towards learning the folk dances of Obon odori.


It is early evening in July, a year after my trip to visit Bachan, and I am standing in a stately white Victorian in Alameda, California with a cluster of other Nikkei, clutching fans, tenugui, and kachikachi. A Victorian is the least likely building to ever house a Buddhist temple, but despite appearances, the Alameda Buddhist Temple has housed itself in this turn of the century clapboard since 1916. Tonight, we are here to practice for Obon. Amongst the middle aged mothers with young children who wheel about in the middle of our dance circles, there are teenagers in shorts and tees (one girl wears a YBA or Young Buddhist Association t-shirt that shows a lean athlete reaching for nirvana under the words, JUST DO IT), and a couple of older folks like myself. We never tear our eyes away from Sensei Eileen, who leads us through the repetitive step point, step point, back step, back step clap! which occasionally leads to run-ins with the dancer directly in front of you. Warbling from an ancient boombox at the front of the room pipes the age-old drums, flutes and synths of the “Tanka Bushi”, “Tokyo Odori”, the “Baseball Odori” and this year’s new dance, a hybrid samba number that incorporates some suspiciously Nikkei Brazilian cha-cha shakes. (Why do I dance Obon now? What draws me to it?) At the end of the rehearsal, the reverend blesses us and we all gassho before hustling round uchiwa fans and other dance props into minivans and scooting off till next time.


A cursory look at the Hokubei Mainichi newspaper in mid-July will give the reader a listing of half a dozen Obon festivals scheduled in Northern California alone: Palo Alto, San Jose, Mountain View, Oakland, San Francisco, Walnut Creek. If you were to add the Central Valley and Southern California Buddhist temples, you could count close to three dozen Obon celebrations to choose from on any given year. Beyond California’s borders, Obon is celebrated in Hawai’i, Seattle, Chicago, as well as in Sao Paulo, Lima, and Manila. Today I am in Berkeley, and since I never quite remember how to bind myself properly into my yukata, I arrive early at my friend Kimi’s house to have her help me tuck the yukata tightly, followed by three under sashes tied tight as a boa! around my waist before the wide obi is wrapped and tugged into a neat bow around the back. My yukata for the past ten years has been an mustard green patterned with black summer grasses and purple tombo dragonflies, accented with a knockout purple and metallic gold obi. However, as I near 40 years of age, I am considering retiring this flashy attire for a more somber pattern and color of yukata more suitable for a woman out of her youth. The professional dancers who circle in the center of our concentric rings of amateurs wear uniform indigo and white yukata of a decidedly modern style. It is the girls who provide the candy-colored pyrotechnics of the evening, wearing fuschia tipped yukata cascading with grape, tangerine and jade profusions of chrysanthemums, koi, irises and even fireworks on their hems and sleeves. The dancing begins at seven, and many people arrive early for the teriyaki dinners and to get dressed with the assistance of several obasans who truss you into your yukata mercilessly. As the day wanes, gem-like lanterns strung along the block are lit, glowing in the crepuscular light. Berkeley cordons off the entire block in front of the temple for Obon Odori, giving the dancers and spectators ample room. Up on the yagura, a microphone squeals. The reverend welcomes the crowds to Obon and calls us to remember those who have passed in the recent year. We bow our heads, breathe, and somewhere the music starts. We shuffle forward, always in a circle, returning to where we began.


We are taught that Obon is a time to appreciate all that our ancestors have done for us and to recognize the continuation of the influence of their lives upon our own lives. Obon is a time of self-reflection; not only from the happiness of getting what you want and desire, but the joy of awareness, a reminder to love and care for others, especially our parents. It also encourages the practice of dana, selfless giving, to all beings, and to reflect the universal experience that in living life, we must know loss. However, in knowing true loss, we begin to understand the meaning of love. Bachan didn’t, in fact, expire quickly as we had feared. In fact, at age 91, she’s still tottering about with the aid of a wheelchair and the occasional donut to satisfy an insatiable sweet tooth. When last I saw her, at a banquet dinner in Fresno celebrating her birthday, she seemed genuinely surprised at the cake placed before her, ablaze in candles too many to signify anything beyond a life well journeyed. With candles amassing in coronas of gold reflected in her eyes, she clasped her hands in sheer delight, exclaiming, “Is this for me?” before gathering every ounce of energy left in her and blowing with all the breath that she could possibly muster. In an instant, the room went black.