I first heard the name Nichijo Shaka in 2017. It came up in a discussion about a one-time shami of Rev. Kenjo Igarashi of the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church. As far as I know this was Rev. Igarashi’s first and last attempt to train an American to become a Nichiren Shu priest. It did not end well. When the shami left, he became a follower of Nichijo Shaka of Hawaii. The impression I was given was that Nichijo Shaka was a Nichiren priest who sought to strip out everything Japanese from Nichiren Buddhism and to create an American Lotus Sutra teaching. He called his effort the Buddhist School of America. I imagined a renegade Japanese priest running an unsanctioned operation. I was wrong on several counts.
Wanting to know more, I found Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, a book published in 2014. Reading the book in 2021, I learned that Nichijo Shaka, who was born John David Provoo on Aug. 6, 1917, in San Francisco, had another connection to the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church. Before Provoo sailed to Minobu in 1966 to complete his training as a Nichiren Shu priest, he spent the last five months of 1965 studying with Bishop Nippo Aoyagi Shaku, who served in the Sacramento Church from 1964 to 1968. According to the book, Provoo conducted Sunday school in English at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church, lectured to English-speaking groups outside the church and worked at a local hospital during that period.
I have tried to find collaborating information on the life of John Provoo and especially Nichijo Shaka’s efforts to create an American Buddhism, but I haven’t found anything. No one who attends the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church today remembers a blue-eyed Caucasian priest-in-training running the Sunday school 55 years ago. Rev. Igarashi, who came to Sacramento in 1989, dismisses Nichijo Shaka as a trouble-maker. I’m told followers of Nichijo Shaka still gather, but I’ve been unable to find one who who is willing to talk to me about his teachings. Nichijo Shaka died in 2001.
But these connections to Sacramento are not what makes John David Provoo famous. As the book’s back-cover blurb explains:
This is the personal saga of John David Provoo. In 1940, the young American Buddhist studying at an ancient monastery in Japan was urged by the U.S. Embassy to return home. In 1941, he enlisted in the US Army in San Francisco, and was soon stationed in the Philippines. Within six months of the outbreak of war, he was captured along with thousands of others on the island fortress of Corregidor, in the mouth of Manila Bay.
In the early months after capture, the Japanese used him as an interpreter, a role that created suspicion in the minds of some that he had become a collaborator. After years of privations in POW camps in Taiwan, he was moved to Bunkwa Camp in downtown Tokyo, and forced to make propaganda broadcasts with others, including Iva Toguri, from Radio Tokyo, until the end of the war.
In the post war years, he was continually harassed by the FBI throughout a second Army enlistment. In 1949, he was discharged, taken immediately into federal custody and charged with treason for events on Corregidor and taking part in radio programs. His trial was foreshadowed by the conviction of Iva Toguri, cast by the government as the non-existent “Tokyo Rose”.
This book is his personal narrative of the events that led up to his prosecution and his final return to the training for the Buddhist priesthood.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo is written as a first-person tale told by John David Provoo, but the final version of the book was rewritten by John Oliver. Here’s the About the Author blurb:
John Oliver earned Bachelor degrees in Political Science and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1969. In the 1970s, he discovered his passion for homebuilding, and has spent most of his life as an artisan building contractor in California and Hawaii. In a chance encounter with Bishop Nichijo Shaka on the rural Big Island in 1983, he found a direct use for his liberal arts education. His collaboration with Rev. Shaka resulted in the biography, “Nichijo”, copyrighted in 1986, but never published. In 2014, living in semi-retirement in Sonoma County, California, he finally found the time to complete the thoughtful rewrite that was begun nearly 30 years before. “Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo” was released in October of 2014.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p248
Having read the book for a second time, I’m going to attempt to set aside by journalistic skepticism, and accept as fact what is written in Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo. There are some fascinating aspects of how Provoo came to be a Nichiren Shu Buddhist priest.
Table of Contents
Nichijo: The Path to the Lotus Sutra
Nichijo: The Disciple Finds His Master
Nichijo and Nippo
Nichijo: A Novice Priest at War
Nichijo: The Right Reverend
Nichijo: The Buddhist School of America
Nichijo: The Missing Piece of Provoo’s Story