Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki was a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism to the non-Asian world. Many outside Japan encountered Buddhism for the first time through his writings and teaching, and for nearly a century his work and legacy have contributed to the ongoing religious and cultural interchange between Japan and the rest of the world, particularly the United States and Europe. This third volume of Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki brings together a diverse collection of Suzuki's letters, essays, and lectures about non-Buddhist religions and his thoughts on their relation to Buddhism, as well as his reflections on the nature of religion itself. Some of these writings have been translated into English for the first time in this volume. As a long-term resident of the United States, a world traveller, and a voracious consumer of information about all forms of religion, Suzuki was one of the foremost Japanese mediators of Eastern and Western religious cultures for nearly seven decades. An introduction by Jeff Wilson and Tomoe Moriya analyzes Suzuki's frequent encounters with texts and practitioners of many religions, considers how events in Suzuki's lifetime affected his interpretations of Christianity, Shinto, and other traditions, and demonstrates that his legacy as a scholar extends well beyond Buddhism.

Rich in primary sources and featuring contributions from scholars on both sides of the Pacific, Issei Buddhism in the Americas upends boundaries and categories that have tied Buddhism to Asia and illuminates the social and spiritual role that the religion has played in the Americas. While Buddhists in Japan had long described the migration of the religion as traveling from India, across Asia, and ending in Japan, this collection details the movement of Buddhism across the Pacific to the Americas. Leading the way were pioneering, first-generation Issei priests and their followers who established temples, shared Buddhist teachings, and converted non-Buddhists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book explores these pioneering efforts in the context of Japanese diasporic communities and immigration history and the early history of Buddhism in the Americas. The result is a dramatic exploration of the history of Asian immigrant religion that encompasses such topics as Japanese language instruction in Hawaiian schools, the Japanese Canadian community in British Columbia, the roles of Buddhist song culture, Tenriyko ministers in America, and Zen Buddhism in Brazil. Contributors are Michihiro Ama, Noriko Asato, Masako Iino, Tomoe Moriya, Lori Pierce, Cristina Rocha, Keiko Wells, Duncan Ry\u00fbken Williams, and Akihiro Yamakura.

Hawai'i at the Crossroads tells the story of Hawai'i's role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai'i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai'i's Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This volume, based on papers presented at the 2001 Crossroads Conference by scholars from the U.S., Japan, and Australia, explores U.S.-Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai'i--truly the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War. From the 1880s to 1924, 180,000 Japanese emigrants arrived in the U.S. A little less than half of the original arrivals settled in Hawai'i; by 1900 they constituted the largest ethnic group in the Islands, making them of special interest to Tokyo. Even after its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, Japan viewed Hawai'i as a largely sympathetic and supportive ally. The Islands represented Japan's best opportunity to explain itself to the U.S.; here American and Japanese diplomats, official and unofficial, could work to resolve the growing tension between their two countries. While hopes on both sides of the Pacific were shattered by the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japan-Hawai'i connection underlying not a few of them remains important, informative, and above all compelling. Its further exploration provided the rationale for the Crossroads Conference and the essays compiled here.