American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is not only a tale of injustice; it is a moving story of faith. In American Sutra (Belknap/Harvard), Duncan Ryuken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation’s history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American. In the face of discrimination, dislocation, dispossession, and confinement, Japanese Americans turned to their faith to sustain them, whether they were behind barbed wire in camps or serving in one of the most decorated combat units in the European theater.