Watanabe says he plans to step up youth outreach by sponsoring Boy Scout and Girl Scout programs. As for drawing adult members, Watanabe says he will promote efforts to attract the curious to Buddhism by using temples for popular Japanese cultural activities, like taiko drumming performances.
Already the Nishi Hongwanji has made commitments to endow a ministerial training program -- tentatively named the Jodo Shinshu Center on Contemporary Shin Studies -- alongside the Institute for Buddhist Studies.
"There's a strong direction to [make the IBS] more sectarian," says Sasaki, "more traditional Jodo Shinshu."
To that end, conservatives in the BCA have taken steps to sever the IBS's membership in Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, the nation's most successful interfaith graduate educational institution. They have also engineered the departure of ecumenically minded Buddhists Ronald Nakasone and Kenneth Tanaka from faculty positions at the IBS. Conservatives also led the move to abolish, as of March, the BCA's Department of Buddhist Education, the office Carol Himaka has run since 1989.
Religious institutions are not immune to losing agencies in lean budget times. But religious education is arguably the most important function for any national religious organization. A Bay Area minister says that when the BCA terminated the education department, they said that ministers could serve that function.
"But I think that's impossible," the minister says. "Ministers have their own church commitments." In fact, "they wanted to get rid of her ... for political and personal reasons."
If the aim is to recover the lost sansei generation -- with its postmodern sen-sibility, its cultural perks, and its as-pirations for a more authentic spiritual experience -- the sectarian turn toward Japan seems counterintuitive. Even before Watanabe and his supporters gained con-trol of the BCA, the Buddhism of the BCA represented "the most conservative element of Japanese-American society," says ousted IBS Professor Nakasone. "The dharma that is being taught was a dharma developed in the past. There is quite a bit of tension here between keeping Buddhism Japanese and [making] it more universal, more palatable to Americans."
And while estranged third-generation Japanese-Americans may come to expose their children to the traditional religion, such allegiances may not take for long.
"That's still a vision that is possible," says William Masuda, sansei minister of the Buddhist Temple of Marin in Mill Valley. "But it takes teamwork to do it, and our energies are scattered. We need to get refocused. But we haven't had a real good forum and a real good discussion of our mission."
Sasaki -- the San Francisco minister who can chant open the gates to the Pure Land, but doesn't do hymns -- puts it this way:
"It's very difficult to be a Dalai Lama or a Thich Nhat Hanh. But in a lot of ways Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, they don't do what I do. All they do is meditate, study, and lecture. That's easy!
"In order for us to teach Buddhism, we have to get the people to be here. That's very difficult. ... Our Buddhist people are no different from Methodist people or Catholic people or Greek Orthodox people. They come from 1995, and they are all kinds of people. How are you going to reach all these different people?
