ABSTRACT
The chief early source of Buddhism on American territory was Japan, in the form of Japanese plantation workers in the Hawaiian Islands. It then spread with Japanese immigrants to the West Coast. The disenchanted view of Buddhist missionaries offered by Kiyoshi Kawakami (1875-1949), a Tokyoborn journalist who pursued his career from an American base, arose from his sense of the difficulty of maintaining toleration of religious and cultural pluralism amongst Americans if religious groups behaved in an aggressively separatist fashion.
