Michihiro Ama

Department of Languages

afhh@uaa.alaska.edu

Dr. Michihiro Ama received his M.A. in Buddhist Studies from Otani University, Kyoto, Japan and a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Irvine. His two main research areas are: the transnational study of modern Japanese Buddhism, and literature and Buddhism in modern Japan. He is the author of Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898-1941 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011) and the guest editor of the featured articles on “Natsume Soseki and Buddhism” in The Eastern Buddhist vol. 38. Currently he is working on his second book project, tentatively entitled The Awakening of Fiction: Literature and Buddhism in Modern Japan 

Immigrants to the Pure Land, 2011

Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898-1941, investigates the early period of Jodo Shinshu in Hawaii and the United States sets a new standard for investigating the processes of religious acculturation and a radically new way of thinking about these processes.