Ryūsaku Tsunoda, retired curator of Columbia’s Japanese Collection and former lecturer in the Department of Chinese an Japanese, died in Honolulu on November 29, 1964. It was an appropriate place for him to take his departure—where he had first set foot on America and where he still had family, friends, and former students. It was also an appropriate time; though he had hoped to spend his last days in Japan, in retirement at home, one could hardly imagine such an active life dragging slowly to an end. And it was in an appropriate manner—in transit between America and Japan. Had he not, in body, mind, and spirit, been a constant voyager between his native land and his adopted home in America?
I say “adopted home” because he adopted America in a way that America could never adopt him. From first to last, Ryūsaku Tsunoda was a son of Japan, never a refugee or an expatriate. He had come here to learn “the meaning of America,” a modern representative of those pilgrims who, from Japan’s earliest history, ventured overseas in search of whatever new learning, new arts, new truth the outside world could offer Japan. His predecessors were scholars, statesmen, artists, and monks, mostly traveling to China but some hoping even to reach India. Mr. Tsunoda told their stories often, and their resemblance to his own could not have escaped him.
But more especially, Ryūsaku Tsunoda was a son of Meiji Japan, born within the decade following the Restoration of 1868, which plunged Japan headlong into the modern world. His was a remarkable generation—eager to learn, adventurous, facing the future with great hopes, yet still close enough to its peasant roots to draw strength from the soil, taking its first breaths from an atmosphere still permeated by samurai ideals of self-reliance and self-sacrifice, and surrounded still by an ancient culture that prized creative intelligence and refined sensibility.
All this is reflected in his early education. The youngest son of a farmer in the Tone River country, he was sent to Tokyo for advanced schooling at a new Western-type college later to become Waseda University. That he alone in his family received this opportunity is a tribute not only to his promise as a scholar but also to the industry, thrift, and cooperative spirit of his family. But the next step after college was not, as one might suppose, study abroad. As an undergraduate, his introduction to the scholarly study of Buddhism came from a Western missionary, Arthur Lloyd. It was a shock and a challenge to him that the Japanese should have to depend on a foreigner for instruction in their own religious traditions. He turned back, then, to rediscover Japan, before going on to explore the West. For him, the route to America lay through Kyoto, the traditional seat of Japanese culture. There he spent years in study and teaching at Buddhist seminaries. Significantly, his first published work was a study of the popular seventeenth-century novelist Saikaku, whom he judged rather severely according to the categories of Tendai Buddhism. It is as if an American critic of the early twentieth century had chosen to evaluate Henry Fielding in terms of St. Augustine’s philosophy or Dante’s structuring of human life. But later, in America, he was able to draw on this experience to convey an appreciation of both Saikaku and Tendai.
And here we see one important difference between Ryūsaku Tsunoda and his pilgrim predecessors. He came not only to learn but to teach. He came with something of Japan to give and at the same time a greater capacity to receive. Having absorbed the best of his own culture, he was better able to appreciate what was best in ours. Thus to Hawaii and New York he brought his knowledge, his books, his search for truth, and his love for other seekers of learning. On one of his trips from Japan he brought to New York a valuable collection of books, contributed by Japanese friends, businessmen, and the imperial family, with which he founded in 1928 the Japanese collection at Columbia, the first of its kind in America. This pioneering work reminds us again of those early Japanese monks Saichō, Kūkai, and Ennin, who brought books back from China and with them founded the great centers of monastic learning in Japan. Let us hope that his work endures as theirs did. His collection has continued to grow, under the care of devoted students, but to the end of his life it remained an intimate concern of his. As he set out on his last homeward journey, Mr. Tsunoda expressed the wish that he might with such strength as he had left do something more for that collection. I am glad to say that others have volunteered to help fulfill that last wish. Professor Keene will be heading a committee to establish a book fund in his name.
As a teacher, Mr. Tsunoda was known to all as “Sensei.” It is a common enough term in Japanese, and there are thousands of senseis in the world, but there was only one Sensei at Columbia. In him, this name for teacher found unique expression. You can put away the thought that it meant, in his case, something like “Master” or the Indian “guru.” This unpretentious, undogmatic teacher had no special message, claimed no special authority, demanded no obedience to his person. Like Confucius, he forgot himself in his wholehearted devotion to study. There was never a class or lecture that he did not spend hours in preparation for. There was never a student in whom he did not take a personal interest, though he could be severe as well as sympathetic. There was hardly a day on which he did not make some intellectual discovery for himself and joyfully share it with anyone around the office or library who might understand. His prodigious memory held not only facts and ideas but persons as well in its tight embrace. My own memory has failed the test he put it to at our last meeting, as he recalled student after student to whom he would have liked to say farewell and in some cases offer a final word of advice. “Tell Miss So-and-so,” he said of a student who had written on the affinity between the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Japanese poet Basho, “not to forget what a difference it makes that Du Fu was a Confucian and Basho a Buddhist.” A typical comment from a man who had such a holy respect for both sameness and difference.
By ordinary academic standards, Tsunoda Sensei was no great scholar. He produced no monument of original research. He wrote much but published little. Though kindly and constructive in judging the work of others, he could not satisfy his own high standards. Part of the difficulty, I suspect, lay in the fact that his natural medium of expression was poetry. His poetic eloquence came through as he talked and lectured; it came through in hundreds of haiku and tanka as he walked and traveled through life. But it rarely pleased him to find what he had said in print, after the moment of inspiration had passed.
Professor Goodrich, chairman of our department during much of his long tenure, recalls the near tragedy that occurred in December 1941, when Tsunoda Sensei suddenly found himself an enemy alien, herded off with other Japanese to Ellis Island and possible internment. When his case came up before the court, Columbia people were there to speak for him, but it was probably Tsunoda who spoke best for himself. Midway in the interrogations, after he had been asked several questions requiring extended replies, he was interrupted by the chairman of the court with a question that needed no answer: “Mr. Tsunoda,” he said, “you are a poet, aren’t you?”
In the light of what was to follow, this experience was perhaps the least of the sufferings that came with the war between Japan and the United States. One can imagine the conflicting emotions of a loyal Japanese who thought himself also a true friend of America. Tsunoda Sensei could only suffer helplessly as he watched his students go off to do their military duty, destroying the land he loved. At his age (in 1942 he was already sixty-five), there was little he could do, while others donated blood and rendered similar noncombatant services. With his extremely modest means, what contribution could he make? He resolved to give up his only luxuries in life, smoking and drinking, for the duration of the war. But the “duration” for him ran well past August 1945. While Japan lay prostrate and devastated in the postwar years, he felt no less deeply the sufferings of his people. Did he perhaps wonder if, after all, internment might not have been a better way to share their sufferings? If so, we can only be grateful that he did not choose this way out but stuck to his duty as a teacher and thereby redeemed much that was lost.
It is comforting to think that, while he could never be an American, his being a Japanese did not prevent him from becoming a true New Yorker and a loyal Columbia man. True, of course, in the sense of being truly and uniquely himself in these surroundings. Was there ever a more devoted fan of the New York Giants? Who but this Japanese gentleman would regularly sit alone in the bleachers, so that he could weep freely and anonymously when they won and lost? What resident of Washington Heights was so faithful to his early morning walk in Fort Tryon Park? Who else knew every tree and flower there as intimately as did this nature-loving son of the Tone River country? Who else at the end of his morning rounds stopped outside St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in salutation to the statue of the Virgin Mary? Who but he knew where to hike across the George Washington Bridge and find the tender warabi ferns growing atop the Palisades?
And who knew better than he all that Columbia could mean to an insatiable student? From the days when he first came to hear the lectures of John Dewey to his last years on the campus, he was constantly slipping into the classrooms of other teachers. Though he may never have taken a course for credit and certainly earned no degrees, he had unquestionably learned more from one great teacher after another than anyone else I know. But, then, it was knowledge assimilated and recreated by him in his own fashion. And it was quite in order that this achievement should have been recognized in a special way, two years ago, by the university’s conferring on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. He coveted no such award or rank. The man who had always been content as just plain “Sensei” or “Mister” must have experienced some kind of identity crisis on finding himself suddenly a Doctor. But surely it pleased him that his love for Columbia was fully requited. And surely it was good that we had the chance, at the convocation in his honor, to tell him before his death what so often is only said after.
I turn finally to the religious significance of his life’s work. Unquestionably, his teaching had such a significance, though he was no missionary in the traditional sense. He was his own kind of Buddhist, unaffiliated but not disaffiliated. His independence and skepticism were a sign not of rebellion but of a deeper religious commitment. He used to say that he was not a Buddhist, but what he meant was that few men could claim really to meet the demands of the Buddha, to live the life of the Buddha. He hated the gimmickry and satori salesmanship of the popular purveyors of Buddhism in this country. A man of the strictest moral standards, he was indignant that Buddhism should be degraded by the Beats in behalf of self-indulgence and sensuality. A gentle and kindly man, he nevertheless identified himself with the Bodhisattva Fudō, the fierce avenger of sin and injustice.
But he continued to ponder the true meaning of Buddhism and to wonder how it would survive in the modern world. He wondered, for instance, if madhyamika skepticism were not too negative a basis for Mahāyāna Buddhism and if this negativism had not fundamentally impaired Buddhism’s response to modern life. On the other hand, like John Henry Newman, who was led by that “kindly light amidst the encircling gloom,” he had great faith in the “inner light” of Buddhism. In one of his few published lectures, delivered as the Mary Keatinge Das Memorial Lecture on this campus, Tsunoda Sensei explained that this “inner light” consisted of the three L’s: Love, Law, and Labor. “Love,” he explained,
is the core of religion. Law is the basis of government. Labor is the backbone of industry. As religion, government and industry are inseparable and equally essential to the well-being of civilization, so are the three L’s for the peace of our life. Love without law is madness, and without labor it is a midsummer night’s dream. Law without love is tyranny, and without labor it is a scrap of paper. Labor without love is servitude, and without law it is warfare. Only together and in harmony will the three L’s be the light of life.
Let all men here mourn the passing of their friend, Ryūsaku Tsunoda. But let Buddhists rejoice that the dharma was transmitted in these halls dedicated to the glory of Almighty God, and let Christians thank God that the inner light of this Bodhisattva has shone among us. In lumine tuo videbimus lumen. In thy light we see light. The Columbia motto.
