John David Provoo was a gay man. Much of the Post War effort by the federal government to convict him of treason was inflamed by institutional homophobia. But none of that is discussed in Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.
John Oliver, who co-wrote the book with Nichijo Shaka and who revised and published the book after Nichijo’s death in 2001, says plainly:
He was gay, of course. He had enjoyed relations with several serious girlfriends, including three marriages, but he made no secret that his preference was for men. “Gay as a tree full of owls!” he would say of himself. I don’t quite understand the reference, but I quote it here faithfully, as his self-portrait.
We decided to skirt the gay issue in the telling of his story. In the decision of the Appellate Court, “…No authority has been cited that homosexuality indicates a propensity to disregard the obligation of an oath. The sole purpose and effect of this examination was to humiliate and degrade the defendant and increase the probability that he would be convicted, not for the crime charged, but for his general unsavory character.” It was prosecution dirty tricks that tried to connect the facts of his sexual orientation with treasonous acts, and should never have been part of the trial and, hence, not part of the chapters we call “The Testimony of John Provoo.” In a more enlightened time, it would not have mattered.
Today is that “more enlightened time,” and I believe that removing Provoo’s sexual orientation from his testimony distorts the picture of the life presented in the book, especially Provoo’s journey to Minobu.
In the 1930s Provoo started a lucrative career in broadcast radio:
This was 1933 and 1934, at the end of alcohol prohibition, a time when a speakeasy in San Francisco was easier to find than a water fountain. I floated into my brother’s high life of big paychecks, flashy cars, smoke-filled studios and highballs for lunch, with ease. I did my parts at KFRC, learned that I had affinity for debauchery, scattered the money like flower petals, spent too much time in those nightclubs.
I continued with my Buddhist studies but two parts of my nature were developing, at odds with each other. Just when I had taken vows accepting poverty, I had been steered into San Francisco’s fast lane. I was the sincere, searching, scholarly mystic … a Buddhist Priest; and I was the flamboyant and theatrical prodigy of materialistic America. I was becoming a man with two heads, irreconcilable heads.
At the time he conquered this “affinity for debauchery” by abandoning his radio career and taking a clerk’s post in the San Francisco Federal Reserve.
Nichijo’s book alludes to this conflict between the material world and the spiritual one, but readers are left without a realistic understanding of this complex man if the impact of Provoo’s closeted gay life is left unexplored.
Recalling the overturning of his conviction, he says:
I hadn’t been victorious, I hadn’t won acquittal; I had merely maneuvered the government to a stalemate. In the public eye, I had gotten off on a technicality. In my own mind, I had deserved to win an acquittal: it was the government that had gotten off on a technicality.
The ten years following my release from legal jeopardy was an unhappy odyssey, which I would come to describe as dragging an enormous shipwreck of a reputation through the hostile swamps the government and the media had created for me.
Following his release from jail, Provoo describes his inability to keep jobs each time his past is brought to light. He married only to divorce a few years later. But the depth of his misery during this period is absent from his telling.
ONE Magazine, self-described as the first gay magazine in the United States, reported in its June-July 1956 issue that the Baltimore Sun had reported Provoo was assaulted and robbed by a youth he invited to his apartment one morning.
One year later, on Sept. 8, 1957, the New York Times printed on page 58 an Associated Press article reporting that Provoo, then 40 years old, had pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
“He blamed a ‘misguided conscience’ for leading him to accompany a 16-year-old Annapolis, Md., youth who ran away from home last week.
“He said the youth had a home life that ‘leaves a great deal to be desired’ and he felt sorry for him.
“Provoo and the youth, Robert H. Lane, were found at a rooming house here [Lincoln, Neb.] about midnight last night.”
On Aug. 30, 1958, the New York Times published on page 32 a single paragraph from an Associated Press story under the headline, Treason Trial Figure Jailed. The Times reported that Provoo, then 41, had been sentenced to three years in the Nebraska men’s reformatory on a morals charge that involved an 18-year-old Lincoln boy. (The discrepancy in the age of Robert Lane is unexplained.)
The conviction and prison sentence aren’t mentioned in this book, but their impact was clearly felt:
It was the winter of 1964, and I was unable to keep up the payments on our car by myself, so I let it go. I had no money and worse, I had no inspiration. I just left one day heading north. I had enough bus fare to make it to Washington, D.C., and that’s all. I stayed overnight in a gospel mission there, and the next day hitchhiked north to Baltimore, where I had found work before. I checked the situation at all the hospitals with no luck. I spent the night in a rescue mission again. The next day I continued hitchhiking north into Pennsylvania. I was dropped off near the town of Williamsport and began walking, I didn’t know where to. It was snowing and my clothes were inadequate for the cold and my shipwreck seemed especially burdensome. I was walking along the road in the snow reviewing all the times someone had been trying to kill me and I began entertaining the idea that it would have been just as well if I had allowed it to happen… if I had been killed long ago. If a bomb had fallen on me running across the smoldering moonscape of Corregidor, if I had been judged a spy by the Japanese tribunal and shot down like Captain Thomson; if I had been beheaded for offering ice water to a Japanese field marshal; if I had succumbed to the injection given me in Malinta Hospital; if I had died of beri-beri at Karenko; if American bombs had fallen on Radio Tokyo; if I had burned in the electric chair at Sing-Sing like the Rosenbergs. Finally, there was no other motive to put one foot in front of the other, and I stopped. I moved myself a short distance off the road and lay down in the snow. Snow fell lightly on my face and began to cover me and I just let myself go.
A family that lived nearby found me several hours later. They had seen my shoulder sticking out of a mound of snow by the roadside. I was stiff and nearly dead. I awoke in a warm bed piled high with blankets and hot water bottles. I was in the home of a family of devout Christians more than willing to nurse a helpless stranger back to health. I remembered the icy heart with which I had resolved to die, but I could not prevent it from thawing in the warm bed of their unselfishness. I had truly been reborn. …
Their love was all that I had needed. Like all of my darkest moments, help had appeared from an unexpected source. I had reached the bottom, the very bottom, and it had found me there, too. I found a job at the Polyclinic Hospital in Williamsport, sometimes working in the emergency room and on ambulance runs, and life was slowly rebuilt in the material sense; my inner strength had been totally renewed by the family of good Samaritans.
On April 26, 1968, before Nichijo Shaka had established his temple in Puna, Hawaii, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin published an interview with him. As a retired newspaperman, I find this article a fitting way to conclude my exploration of Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo
Buddhist Priest ‘Towed Shipwreck’ Many Years
Photo of Nichijo Shaka that accompanied the article.
By Nadine Wharton
Star-Bulletin Writer
A man who spent many of the years of his life “towing a shipwreck” is bringing the teachings of Nichiren Shu Buddhism to Hawaii.He is Shaka Provoo Nichijo, an ordained priest in the Buddhist sect, who teaches classes each Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the Temple of the Eternal Buddha, 32-A Kepola Place, in Nuuanu.
The “shipwreck” belongs to John David Provoo, a U.S. Army Sergeant who was convicted of treason against the government of his country.
They are one and the same person.
Provoo was confined, off and on, from the end of World War II until 1955 — 10 years. Six of those years he spent in the concrete basement maximum security cells of the West Street Detention Center in New York City.
He won his freedom in 1955 on the treason charge. But his lengthy and sensational trial made him a marked man. In the years after his release from prison he had great difficulty in getting and keeping a job.
“It was like towing a shipwreck after you,” he said.
“It was extremely difficult living with it and there was no living without it,” he said of the years between then and now.
He made no attempt to change his name. And he said, “I have never really been estranged from my country. I was disenchanted with the jury that convicted me of treason, but I never gave up faith in America. I never had any idea of changing my allegiance to my country.”
Perhaps the story should begin when Provoo, now about 51, started studying Buddhism at a small temple near his home in Burlingame, Calif. He was 11 years old.
“I am no convert. I have always been a Buddhist,” he said.
As the years went on he studied in Japan. And he studied in Hawaii with the Rev. Ernest Shin Kaku Hunt for several summers.
During the war, he was captured by the Japanese when Corregidor fell. He was later accused of collaborating with the enemy, when he was a prisoner of war and he was convicted of treason.
Nichijo is in Hawaii for several reasons. He feels there is a definite need for
Buddhist teachers who are competent in English. He says the University of Hawaii “is such a live force in the community.”
“Hawaii really has a kind of civilization that is unique in many ways,” he said. “Life generally is better here for everybody than on the Mainland.”
Every night except Wednesday, Nichijo works at the Lavada Nursing Home. “I tend the sick,” he said. “I have been doing that for many years.”
He said he hopes to build a temple and a “dojo” or retreat temple here. “I work so I can make a temple for the people,” he said.
Nichijo said he is not dependent on anyone, and does not ask for contributions. He said he does not require much money. “I lived most recently in Japan on an income of $14 a month.”
He said he hopes to dispel some of the popular illusions about Buddhism. “Buddhism is no ism,” he said. “It is not a system of ethics or dogma and it is not a creed—it is a way of life, the aware way of life,” he said.
And the man who once felt his life consisted of “towing a shipwreck” said: “My heart is overflowing with gratitude for the way things really are.”
Nichijo Shaku died Aug. 28, 2001, at the age of 84. He was inurned Oct. 8, 2001, at the Hawaii Veterans Cemetery No. 2.
