This is another in a series of articles discussing the book, Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.

In 1940, John Provoo took up residence at Minobu to begin his studies. While he took instruction from the Lord Abbot Mochizuki Nichiken, Provoo was employed teaching English to the novice students attending Minobu College. His English teaching duties would eventually be expanded to include students in middle school, where he saw evidence of widespread malnutrition.

The world at Minobusan was everything I had hoped it would be. It was the ancient and classical Buddhist training in every sense. It was completely separated from the outside world. It was harmonious, it was beautiful, it was immaculately clean, it was calm; it was so well run that I always knew exactly where I should be at any given moment and what my duties were. There was time for study, there was time for meditation, there was time for work, there was time for ceremony, time for eating, time for bathing and even time, if I stayed up late enough, to write letters home.

The diet provided to novice monks was by design minimal as a part of their often-harsh training. It was barely adequate for the typical Japanese novice, but for my somewhat larger occidental frame it represented malnutrition. As a rare Caucasian, my training was made extra harsh; I was not expected to complete the rigors of the novices’ monastic experience. I was given the daily job of cleaning the toilets for nearly a year. I became thin and frail, and when finally it became apparent that I would persevere even though I was literally wasting away, I was allowed to go to the Tamaya Inn in Minobu Village once a week to eat meat.

Minobu may have been separated from the outside world, but that world still pulled at Provoo.

My dream of monastic utopia and the unification of my own psyche had become a new fitful conflict. I saw it as two distinct choices: To remain in Japan, continue my studies for the priesthood and dedicate my life to peace and enlightenment; or, to return to America, abandon Buddhist training and probably be drafted into the Army.

I did feel a call to action; to somehow use the tools I had gained, however naïve my feeble efforts might be. If I were to remain in Japan, I would have to find a way to publicly counter the officially orchestrated war hysteria with words of compassion and understanding. On a trip to the detached temple of Minobu in Tokyo with several junior monks, I entered Hibaya Park, just outside the walls of the Imperial Palace, and found a spot in the plaza where the traffic of pedestrians converged. With the junior monks holding a banner, which read “Namu Myoho-renge-kyo,” I began to preach peace. Peace depends on one’s state of awareness: Within the turmoil and warmongering that appears on the surface, there is a land of harmony wherein good people worked to ease tensions and resolve conflicts. I exhorted the passersby to uproot the hatred that was being cultivated by propagandists and instead to sow understanding among their families and friends. I emphasized that President Roosevelt was not mad and didn’t want war.

It didn’t take long to draw a crowd, and a few moments later, plainclothes police appeared and led me away to headquarters of the Tokyo police. I was held for several hours and questioned with new intensity. When I was released that afternoon, I went directly to the American embassy and reported the incident.

It was a very disturbing series of events and left me very nearly resolved to abandon my goals to stay and become a priest. The focus of my monastic training at that point was the teaching of Kannon, the all compassionate one, “regarder of the cries of the world”; but outside the monastery, the Japanese Imperial military and propaganda machines were exhibiting the opposite of compassion.

It was in this mood that I spent a restless night in a friend’s house near the river in the village of Minobu. In the morning, I was awakened by the screams of a rat. It sounded to me as if the rat was calling to me for help. I rushed outside to find two villagers with a rat in a wire cage trap, carrying it down to the river to drown it. I ran to them and pleaded with them to show compassion and release it, quoting from the teaching of Kannon. They agreed to let it go and as they did and it scampered away, I realized that some door within my internal conflict had been opened as well. I could return to America and still be a Buddhist priest; they were not mutually exclusive ideas. I would continue in my vows and studies, and return to Japan and Minobu when it was possible. I credited the rat for recalling me to my vows, and saving me from drowning in my own cage.

Still, it was not easy to leave, and in May 1941, I made two trips to Yokohama with my trunks packed for departure, only to return to Minobu. On the third trip, I did in fact depart, with the blessing of the Lord Abbot and the promise that I could return when possible to complete my training.

With each illumination I gained, the world offered a greater darkness. The Buddha had renounced the world to understand the truth of sickness, old age, suffering and death: I had renounced materialism in favor of a deeper knowledge, and through my choices, I was going to learn of racism, suspicion, war, hate, brutality, starvation, treachery, injustice and persecution. From the mud, the lotus grows.

Provoo returned to San Francisco to find a notice that he was to be drafted into the Army. Eventually Provoo enlisted in the Army and, without a day’s military training, he was sent by ship to the Philippines, arriving in Manilla in 1941. There’s a great deal of detail in the book about the period before Japan invaded, but I want to focus on Provoo’s efforts as a novice priest and how these raised the suspicion of his fellow prisoners. This began during the Japanese battle to capture Corregidor.

Outside the tunnels, the once beautiful island looked like a cratered desert. No building remained standing and all the vegetation and wildlife had been completely blasted away.

A change was taking place in me as the fate of Corregidor became more obvious. To assimilate it all, and coming to grips with the impending doom, I had become Increasingly conscious of the description of a perfect world In the Lotus Sutra. Here that thesis could be examined under the most extreme circumstances. Putting my trust in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I found moments during the night bombardments when I felt so calmed by this, I began to leave the tunnel and walk down to a rocky promontory on the south shore and intone my chant as the bombs fell, its meaning never more vivid:

“Beneath the dark surface of this crumbling illusion,
My perfect world shimmers with light.
Though this illusion seems burning,
And these suffering beings lie broken and bleeding,
Believing the end of the kalpa is near.
My perfect peaceful world is here,
And these beings are whole and filled with light.”

I did this dozens of times. And returning calmly to the safety of the tunnels after these sojourns, the MP’s gave me strange and ominous glares. I must have seemed too serene and contented; and why would I leave the tunnel during air raids?

After the fall of Corregidor, the Japanese soon learned that Provoo spoke fluent Japanese, and he was made an interpreter for the prisoners.

Scapegoating is a major pastime of a population preoccupied with its own misery. In a prison or a POW camp situation any individual who is removed from the general population for any length of time has gained the suspicion of all who have been left behind to speculate. In such a situation as this, where so many privations and assaults had no apparent motive or logic, how easy it would be to focus on a scapegoat to make order of it all.

Thousands were in this situation, and outside of a few headquarters personnel and scattered individuals, numbering perhaps 50, if that many, no one knew me personally, knew my character. I was a nobody: a desk clerk. Here I was then, within 72 hours of capture, speaking fluent Japanese, appearing at each event of rising hostility, bowing politely to the guards, wearing an armband with Japanese characters, seeming to have such exceptional rapport with them that I could actually hold small talk and compliment them on their families, while an unfortunate captive’s fate hung in the balance. And when I was successful in ending the danger, the suspicious could make note of the influence I seemed to have with their otherwise intransigent and cruel captors.

Worse, and perhaps most damning of all of the accusations that would be one day hurled at me, was that I would chant a Buddhist chant in Japanese over the bodies of the dead, which I did, of course. “Heathen chants” they would be called, and evidence of something despicable. In the ten years that followed those horrible and chaotic days, rumor and suspicion would be nurtured and embellished, so that by the time these tales were told, vague rumor would become vivid testimony, and dark suspicion would become glaring accusation.

The prisoners on Corregidor were eventually transferred to a prison in Manila and then to the Karenko POW camp on Taiwan. Provoo’s status at Karenko was just one of the lower-ranking prisoners. It was here that Provoo got his one and only chance to escape.

There arrived at the camp one day two Japanese civilians and they called a few prisoners to be interviewed. I was one of those to be called. Apparently when my story about being a Buddhist priest was checked out through Tokyo, the Buddhist authorities of the Nichirenshu at Minobu had discovered I was a prisoner of war. Since that time they had been doing what they could to intercede. The Japanese civilians offered me the opportunity to return to Minobu and continue my training for the priesthood. I could return to Minobu, the misty and serene culmination of my childhood dreams. It was a chance to escape this life of cruel oppression and to return to the life that was of my own choosing. I would be fed, clothed and nurtured again in an atmosphere of wisdom and compassion.

There was no real choice in my mind. I didn’t hesitate to say no. My place was with my fellow prisoners. I couldn’t leave them and abandon my oath of allegiance to the Army. In spite of what my military service had been, I loved the Army. The many fine officers I had met at Karenko inspired me. I admired their devotion to duty in the face of the most humiliating and debasing circumstances. It was my opportunity to demonstrate to myself that I was worthy of being in their company and receiving their tutelage. I had to say no. I was now a sergeant in the U.S. Army, and my loyalties were to my fellow enlisted men, my commanding officers and my country.

Minobu would still be there if I survived the war. Minobu would shimmer in my dreams and the face of my Lord Abbot, my master, would beckon, but awake I felt more strongly about Colonel Menzies and General Wainwright and the many friends I had found amidst starvation and brutality. It was a decision I never regretted during the final years of the war. It wasn’t until my own government turned against me after liberation, that I would ever even doubt that I had done the right thing. Even so, it was the right thing.

Table of Contents

This is another in a series of articles discussing the book, Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.

For my purposes I want to gather everything about John Provoo’s mentor into one spot since he comes to Provoo’s aid in his journey to becoming a Nichiren priest at several places.

In Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo the name of Provoo’s mentor is said to be Aoiyagi Shoho, who later became Bishop Nippo Aoiyagi Shoho. A photo at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church, where he served from 1964 to 1968, is captioned Rev. Nippo Aoyagi Syaku.  His photo is displayed in the anteroom inside the entrance to the temple along with the 12 other priests and priests in training who served the Sacramento church since its founding in September 1931.

However, a history of Worldwide Propagation of Nichiren Buddhism written by Ryuei Michael McCormick, spells his name Nippo Shaku. This spelling helps explain where John Provoo later got his Buddhist name. He took Nichijo from Archbishop Nichijo Fujii, his master when he was studying at Minobu after the war, and Shaku from Nippo Shaku, the teacher who guided him on his journey to Minobu. See note at end.

In 1935 Provoo gave up his lush life as a radio entertainer and took a lowly clerk’s job at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco in order to focus on his Buddhist studies. For several years, Rev. Aoiyagi and Provoo studied.

Reverend Aoiyagi had written to the temple authorities in Japan, telling them of my conversion and desire to enter the monastery there. It was Reverend Aoiyagi’s wish to accompany me in order to introduce me, sponsor me and facilitate my entry into formal training. I gave notice at the bank and paid my fare on the NYR line to Yokohama, Japan.

In March of 1940, the day of my embarkation arrived, several robed priests came to my house, a temporary altar was erected in my living room, and incense and prayers were offered. The entourage left in a caravan of automobiles, stopping at several temples on the way. When we arrived at dockside, several hundred well wishers, many of them Japanese, were there to see Reverend Aoiyagi and myself off.

During the cruise from America to Japan, Provoo developed a deep feeling that his mission would be to bridge East and West, an ambition that would end up getting him tried by the U.S. government on charges of treason.

Our arrival as young priest and master in Yokohama was on one of those rare days when Mt. Fuji is visible. The lower slopes were covered with clouds, and the ancient volcano shone brightly above giving it the appearance of floating in the air. There was a reception for Reverend Aoiyagi and me at the hotel in Yokohama where we spent the first night. The following day we made the 100-mile train ride to the beautiful valley on the far side of Mt. Fuji.

We arrived in the town of Minobu in the late afternoon and found a room in the Tamaya Inn. In the morning we arose long before dawn to climb Mt. Minobu to the temple to arrive in time for the morning otsutome, the worship service conducted each day in the founder’s hall.

Following the service, Provoo was coached on what would happen when he had his audience with Mochizuki Nichiken, the Lord Abbot of Minobu.

I was then taken to a huge reception hall. At the far end of the hall the Lord Abbot was seated on a raised dais. I was required to make several bows as I proceeded down this long, massive hall toward him. I felt as though I were growing smaller and smaller as I approached and the Abbot loomed larger and more formidable. Finally I reached the dais and made my last bow and looked up. The Abbot said to me, in Japanese, “It is well you have come. You are my disciple. Now get out.” It was not until that moment that I knew that I would be accepted. It was a great honor to be accepted as a novitiate by a master who was over thousands of monks and priests.

Before Rev. Aoiyagi left to return to the United States, he and Provoo explored the temple complex together.

We climbed the mountains behind the main temple. We were going to a small temple very high up the slopes of Mt. Minobu.

I had gone on some distance ahead, since my legs were much longer than Aoiyagi’s and reached the temple a few minutes before him. The priestess of the temple bowed as I approached but as soon as she could see me closely, her eyes grew large, and her expressionless face could not mask her anxiety. I bowed and greeted her in Japanese. As she made tea and prepared oranges for her guest, she did not turn her back or take her eyes off of me for one second.

Soon Aoiyagi approached the temple and the priestess looked anxiously back and forth as between he and I as we conversed in English. When Aoiyagi explained to the woman that I was a priest from America, she asked, “What’s that?” Aoiyagi replied that America was a land far across the ocean, and she said, “But his eyes … They’re blue.” Aoiyagi explained that there were many in America that looked like me. Only then did the priestess relax. She said that when I first walked up, she had thought that I was the fox-god. I was the first Caucasian she had ever seen. Imagine, she thought she was in the presence of the fox god, and she served him tea and oranges.

Provoo did not hear from Bishop Nippo again until 1950. In the interim, Provoo had spent three and a half years in Japanese prison camps. Following the war, he had been held for eight months without charges or counsel in postwar Japan. He had been honorably discharged from the Army and re-enlisted only to spend three years under a cloud, the last six months of which he was held without charges or counsel in military stockades. He would spend a full three years at West Street federal detention center in New York City without bail awaiting trial for treason.

Another event [in 1950] raised my spirits even further. One day I heard a familiar voice chanting on the sidewalk outside West Street. It was the voice of Bishop Nippo, my beloved master. “Namu Myoho-renge-kyo,” he chanted, finding a tone that resonated against the grey brick walls. Inside, I began chanting, too.

Nippo had come all the way from Argentina, having heard of my plight through the international press. He had come as soon as he found out that I was in trouble. He had gone to the authorities at West Street and identified himself as my spiritual advisor, but had been told that they had spiritual advisors on the prison staff, a Protestant and a Catholic, and that was all that were allowed in the facility. In their minds, that seemed to cover all bases. Nippo returned to Argentina without seeing me, but just our voices resonating through the brick walls and iron bars had been an uplift.

Bishop Nippo, according to Provoo, spent the war in the Tokyo area, often living in subway stations, caring for homeless children, orphans of the American bombing raids. After the war, he had returned to the United States, had started a temple in Salt Lake City, and then one in Argentina.

Even though the Army had investigated Provoo’s actions during his captivity immediately after the war and cleared him of all charges – they’d given him an honorable discharge and even allowed him to re-enlist – the federal government tried Provoo on four counts of treason.

I held little hope that I would ever escape my situation alive. It was being a prisoner of war all over again. But, understanding that, I knew how to deal with it. I had spent three and half years as a prisoner of the Japanese brutal military machine, never believing that I would live to see the end of the war; and so, I had learned to function with goals that didn’t assume that I would survive. There is a certain freedom in actually abandoning your own physical existence. I had done so over and over again since 1941 and now, I found myself in a dire predicament again. Each time, finding that I had survived, the cloak of mortality had descended over me again, renewing my attachment for living, and with it, the belief that I had something to lose. Now I was free again, free to act fearlessly, the freedom of the doomed.

The book details the delays and missteps of the prosecution. Eventually he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on Feb. 17, 1953. His conviction was overturned on appeal on Aug. 27, 1954, and he was finally released on March 14, 1955, after the judge in his second trial tossed out all of the charges.

In 1965, Provoo received an invitation to return to Minobu.

It had been over twenty years since I left Minobu, and the Lord Abbot who had been my master had passed away and there had been several others in the meantime. One day, I received a message from Murano Senchu, a priest of the Nichiren school in Japan. The message announced that the present Lord Abbot, Fujii Nichijo, was coming to America as a representative of the world’s Buddhists to a special session of the United Nations. The message outlined the Lord Abbot’s itinerary and invited me to join his entourage.

I was unable to join them at the special U.N. session in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, or at the conference with top Mormons in Salt Lake City. When the party arrived in New York, I caught up with them in the lobby of the Waldorf Hotel. I kneeled on the carpeted floor before the Lord Abbot. The Lord Abbot helped me up and greeted me warmly. I was invited to join the entourage on their trip to Canada, where the Lord Abbot was to conduct services for a large Japanese community there. The services were followed by a banquet and sitting with a magnificent Japanese feast before me, I was handed a note, written in the Lord Abbot’s own hand: “We are waiting for you at Minobu.”

Of course I wanted to go, it would take a little while to prepare myself but I definitely would go. Returning to Pennsylvania I quickly settled my affairs and got in contact with my old master, Reverend Aoiyagi Shoho, now the Bishop Nippo. I had last seen Nippo at Minobu in 1941. In 1951, while I was being held at West Street, Nippo had come all the way from Argentina but hadn’t been allowed to see me. I had heard Nippo’s voice chanting from the sidewalk below. Now, in 1965, Nippo was in Sacramento, California, and I arranged to join him there.

In McCormick’s history of Worldwide Propagation of Nichiren Buddhism, he offers this summary of Nippo Shaku’s propagation efforts:

Nippo Shaku (1910-1991) was another missionary to the United States who established temples and actively taught Odaimoku. He was one of the first Nichiren Shu ministers to attempt to teach Nichiren Buddhism to the general population of the U.S. He came to assist the Los Angeles temple in 1935 and then became the head minister of San Francisco in 1936. In 1954 he established the Salt Lake City temple. Beginning in 1962 he began to teach Nichiren Buddhism in the southwestern U.S. In 1969 he established the American Buddhist Center in San Francisco and also taught at the California Institute of Asian Studies and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from 1969–1981.

For purposes of my own narrative, I assume Nippo Shaku’s 1964 to 1968 stint in Sacramento was part of what McCormick calls his teaching in the southwestern U.S.

I’m clearly wrong when I suggest that Nichijo chose his second name, Shaka, from Nippo Shaku. No excuse. Not paying attention. Other sources suggest Shaka stands for Shakyamuni and that’s why he chose the name.

Table of Contents

This is another in a series of articles discussing the book, Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.

Sometime in 1936 John Provoo’s search for someone who could teach him about the Lotus Sutra led him to Bishop Ishida Nitten, who helped found the Nichiren Hokke Buddhist Church at 2016 Pine Street in San Francisco.

Bishop Ishida spoke very little English, and in the style typical of teacher-student relations in the East, he would put me off, saying, “Go away,” or “I am much too busy,” or “Come back another time.” A prospective disciple is tested and prepared in this way. I kept going back. Finally the Bishop gave me a collection of letters that he had laboriously translated from the Chinese into English. I had been accepted and instruction had begun, but slowly.

But Provoo had the good fortune to find another Nichiren teacher.

A traditional saying in the East is “when the disciple is ready, the master will appear.” I came across another smaller temple in a two-story house with the garage underneath made into an orthodox Nichiren temple. The priest was a cheerful round-faced man with glasses named Aoiyagi Shoho, who later became Bishop Nippo. He was from a priestly family whose ancestral home is at Ichinose, not far from one of the major temples of the Nichiren sect. This time my reception was entirely different. On my first visit the priest welcomed me warmly. “Please come, come in,” which was practically the extent of his English. It was a relationship that seemed to be fully developed at the first meeting, although neither of us could speak the other’s language, and the relationship would last with the same strength for our lifetimes. We taught each other our respective languages, and night after night we studied the Lotus Sutra, often until after midnight. My understanding of this highest teaching was intertwined with the learning of the Japanese language and most of the realizations came to me without first being translated into English. I had quickly reached the stage where I could think in Japanese. I could think and express my deepest thoughts in Japanese. At times I felt that East and West were unified within me, but in the external world events were pulling East and West apart. The Lotus seemed the only thing that resolved all contradictions. I memorized the 16th chapter in Japanese, and often chanted it from that day forward. In it, Buddha says to his audience:

Beneath the dark surface of this crumbling illusion,
My perfect world shimmers with light.
Though this illusion seems burning,
And these suffering beings lie broken and bleeding,
My perfect world is here,
And these beings are whole and filled with light.
I have revealed the fate of the world:
That all beings shall be illumined.”

Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p28-30

At this point I need to renege on my promise to set aside my journalist’s skepticism.

I’m puzzled by Provoo’s quote from the gāthās of Chapter 16. There are verses similar, for example Senchu Murano’s translation offers:

The [perverted] people think:
“This world is in a great fire.
The end of the kalpa [of destruction] is coming.”
In reality this world of mine is peaceful.
It is filled with gods and men.
The gardens, forests and stately buildings
Are adorned with various treasures;
The jeweled trees have many flowers and fruits;
The living beings are enjoying themselves;
And the gods are beating heavenly drums,
Making various kinds of music,
And raining mandārava-flowers on the great multitude and me.

[This] pure world of mine is indestructible.
But the [perverted] people think:
“It is full of sorrow, fear, and other sufferings.
It will soon burn away.”

Because of their evil karmas,
These sinful people will not be able
To hear even the names of the Three Treasures
During asaṃkhya kalpas.

None of the English translations of the Lotus Sutra has verses similar to those Provoo offers referencing the light of the Buddha in Chapter 16. Is this because he is translating the Japanese into English rather than translating Kumārajīva’s fifth-century Chinese translation into English? I like the sentiment expressed in Provoo’s verses, but I’m too much of a literalist to allow this discrepancy to stand without comment.

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