Working Toward a "Pacific Era": the Transnational Peace Movement of Jodo Shinshu Youth Groups

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I am researching a monograph about how the leaders and members of Jodo Shinshu youth groups in pre-war Japan and the Japanese diaspora made sense of their national and sectarian identities in relation to their nations’ imperialism and militarism, as well as universalist goals like ecumenicism and world peace. For this project, I have collected dozens of primary materials, including oral history interviews, photographs of archived periodicals, and publications by various Jodo Shinshu organizations in Japan, Hawaii, California, and British Columbia.I presented some initial results of my research at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (in March 2018) and at Kyushu University (in April 2019). The Kyushu presentation was a draft of an article, titled “Ethnonationalism and Buddhist Youth Groups in the Japanese, British, and American Empires, 1880s-1930s,” that has been accepted for an upcoming special issue of Journal of Global Buddhism (pending review). I will give another research presentation at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, which will be a chapter in the final monograph. At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (in November 2018, where I presented on a related subject), I spoke with an academic publisher who is interested in reviewing the full manuscript when it is complete.