"Building The WWII National Japanese American Incarceration Monument:
A Buddhist Approach to Transforming The Racial Karma of America"
During WWII, Japanese American Buddhists (the largest group of Buddhists in the U.S. during that period), were targeted by the U.S. government due to their religion and race for forced removal and indefinite incarceration in America’s concentration and internment camps. Healing the intergenerational trauma of that experience is the focus of the Irei Monument Project, a Buddhist-inspired national names monument for the WWII Japanese American incarceration. This presentation focuses on how this monument project draws on Buddhist notions of impermanence, interdependence, and alleviating the racial karma of a nation as well as on Buddhist traditions of memorialization and monument construction.
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