Temple In Transition -- According To A Member Of The Seattle Buddhist Temple, `It'll Become An Americanized Institution, Or It'll Become Extinct'

With a few exceptions, it was a typical Sunday service at the Seattle Buddhist Temple. The giant bell rang, and the congregation filed into the worship hall, gray-haired ladies and dignified old men, arm in arm, no one in much of a hurry.

The sun was out. That was the first novelty. The second came a few minutes later, inside, when the predominantly Japanese-American congregation looked to the pulpit at its first-ever Caucasian head minister, the Rev. Donald Castro.

This was his first Sunday as head minister. He had served at the temple for 13 years under the Rev. Yoshiaki Takemura. When the elder minister retired last week, Castro took the reins of the state's oldest and largest Buddhist temple.

Castro is tall, prim and, at 51, a youngster in the temple. He is thoughtful and self-effacing. He calls himself "a mongrel," with a Spanish surname, an Anglo lineage and a Southern California upbringing.

In Japanese, he is simply "hakujin," a white person.

His is the face of the future for the temple - if it has a future.

From its start in 1901 in what is now the Chinatown International District, the temple has been a distinctly Japanese institution, carefully imported here by first-generation Japanese immigrants, called issei.

With the issei almost all gone, and the second generation, called nisei, now dying off, and their children marrying whites and moving to the suburbs, the temple - a fixture in the Japanese-American community for a century - has reached a do-or-die crossroads.

To survive, its leaders say, the temple must attract non-Japanese, and to do this, it must become less Japanese and more American. Not an easy conclusion to arrive at, leaders say, but the only realistic one.

Longtime temple member Alan Hoshino sums it up like this: "It'll become an Americanized institution, or it'll become extinct."

Japanese Buddhist temples all over the country - the Seattle temple has 60 sister temples, most of them on the West Coast - face the same predicament, signaling something deeper and broader taking place among Japanese Americans as a whole. The community as a distinct cultural group seems to be disappearing into the great American melting pot.

The temple sits on a quiet stretch of Main Street, a sprawling brick building with elegant lines and tidy gardens. Painted over the front entrance are the words "Seattle Buddhist Church." Calling it a church was a concession to white Christian society way back then, when calling it a temple would have sounded un-American.

The temple was a refuge for the issei who came to this country to work the railroads and sawmills, and later, a community center for nisei who wanted to stay connected to their Japanese heritage.

During World War II, the temple stored the belongings of local Japanese forced into internment camps, and after the war became a temporary shelter for internees who had lost their homes. At its peak, in the 1950s and '60s, the temple had an estimated membership of 1,500, including 250 to 300 kids in Dharma school, the equivalent of Christian Sunday school.

"It used to be that we all lived around the neighborhood, and we'd walk to the temple every Sunday," says Fumiko Uyeda Groves, a nisei and a member since 1938. "Basically, it was the center of the community."

Today, the official dues-paying membership numbers around 600, but on this particular Sunday, only about 100 people attended the main service, most of them Nisei in their 60s, 70s and 80s. The sanctuary was two-thirds empty.

Last year, the temple had 47 funerals. Within the next 10 years, according to membership chairman Jim Warrick, the temple will lose 60 to 70 percent of its sangha, the Buddhist term for congregation.

Some Japanese-American leaders with ties to the temple blame the declining membership on a failure of the institution to remain relevant to the third and fourth generations of Japanese Americans, the sansei and yonsei.

"It's sad, but for whatever reason, the temple has not been able to resonate with them," says retired Microsoft executive and millionaire philanthropist Scott Oki, 50, a sansei who attended the temple as a child.

Even the temple's associate minister, John Iwohara, 36, a newcomer from California, admits the temple has been slow to adapt. The major writings of the founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, the tradition followed by the Seattle Buddhist Temple, were translated into English only last year.

In addition, Buddhism is generally not an aggressively proselytizing religion compared to Christianity. Buddhist philosophy lays out a path to enlightenment by cultivating detachment. The practice involves chanting, meditation and study. The emphasis is self-transformation; the focus inward.

"You recognize that the problems of the world start with you, so the focus, the work, is in you," says Sadie Yamasaki, a nisei member of the temple. "We don't proselytize; it's almost anathema to proselytize."

Between 70 percent and 90 percent of issei were Buddhist or came from a Buddhist background. Today in the Seattle area, there are three Japanese Buddhist temples compared to eight Japanese Christian churches.

The decline of the Seattle Buddhist Temple points to a broader change occurring nationwide, namely the gradual disappearance of the Japanese-American community as a distinct ethnic and cultural group.

The main causes: low immigration from Japan and a high rate of intermarriage with whites. Recent studies put the intermarriage rate among sansei at about 70 percent, one of the highest of any ethnic group in the U.S.

Japanese-white marriages have become the norm, according to Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley and an author of several books on Asian-American history.

He says in a few more generations, there may not be a Japanese-American community. Japanese-Americans will blend into the mainstream, just as ethnic European immigrants eventually did.

The local numbers seem to reflect the national trends. The Japanese-American population in Seattle, around 10,000, is not that much higher than before World War II, when the number was about 7,000. The growth has been in King County, where the Japanese-American population has more than doubled to about 21,000.

Essentially, the sansei, or third generation, took non-Japanese spouses and moved to the suburbs. They have become, to use Hoshino's term, "Americanized." Like many modern Americans, they lead hyper-busy lives - often too busy to attend worship services. When they do, they're more likely to attend Christian services.

Oki, the retired Microsoft executive, married a Catholic and attends Seattle's Sacred Heart Church.

Charlene Mano-Shen, 38, a sansei who grew up at the temple, married a Lutheran and for a while alternated between the Buddhist temple and a Lutheran church. Now, both she and her husband are so busy with work and, for her, graduate school, they say they don't have time to attend either.

"Life is so full," she says. "We can't fit a whole lot more in."

Last fall, the temple surveyed its membership with one basic question: "Do we want the temple to continue, or do we want it die?" Those who responded said they wanted it to continue, and most agreed that attracting non-Japanese was the only way. But how to do it?

Temple leaders haven't yet figured out the specifics. Certainly, part of the strategy will be to tap into the growing American interest in Buddhism, particularly Tibeten and Zen Buddhism. An estimated 1.5 million Americans now call themselves Buddhists, making it one of the fastest growing religions in the country.

The changes at the temple and in the Japanese-American community are not inherently bad, although, to be sure, some nisei lament the Americanization of their traditions and bemoan the lack of cultural loyalty in the younger generations. But most concede that changes were inevitable, and many see them as hopeful.

At the temple on this particular Sunday, there was a palpable sense of a body of people that had found one way to transcend race. In fact, only a visiting reporter seemed fascinated by the visual snapshot of a white minister leading an Asian congregation.

The sunshine outside was more a topic of conversation in the sangha than the new head minister.

"He's been around so long and gets along with all of us so well, we don't even notice he's white," says Fumiko Uyeda-Groves.

Sadie Yamasaki points to her longtime friend and fellow temple member Ellen Hale and says, "I forget that Ellen is white."

Hale, in turn, tells the story of her daughter, one of the few white girls who grew up at the temple, coming home from school one day and asking her mother, "How come I'm the only Japanese in class?"

At the children's service down the hall, 35 kids sat on cushions listening to the Rev. Iwohara quote from the Buddha's teachings. The faces were markedly different from those in the main service. Nearly half were mixed-race children, part Japanese and part something else.

"In a significant way, the issue of race has been forgotten here," Castro says. "Overcoming racism is essentially a forgetting process. The more an issue is brought up, the more it becomes an issue. As America matures, and as people spend more time with each other, and learn to trust each other, race will be forgotten, and other issues will come up."

Alex Tizon's phone number is 206-464-2216. His e-mail address is atizon@seattletimes.com