![]() Next, a series of bullet points: “More hate crimes recently,” “Ignorance should stop,” and “Enough silence, it is time to have dialogue.” Talking about the swastika’s history in multiple religious traditions, he hopes, will encourage mutual understanding across cultures. One slide read, “Why Swastika?” “As Asian people, we tend to be quiet, but sometimes I feel like we should talk about it,” Nakagaki said. A monk in glasses jumped up to help him with his PowerPoint. Inside, a dozen Buddhist monks and nuns occupied the first row of folding chairs, marked “V.I.P.” Nakagaki spoke in English, pausing to allow for translation into Mandarin. On a recent Sunday, Nakagaki, wearing navy robes, got into his Honda Civic and drove to a Chinese community center in Flushing, Queens, to give his swastika talk. A year later, he quit to pursue a doctorate at the New York Theological Seminary the book came out of his dissertation. But, at a hate-crime conference in 2009, he felt provoked by one of the speakers, who called the swastika “the universal symbol of evil.” Nakagaki replied, “ ‘What do you mean by “universal”?’ The speaker didn’t know anything about Buddhism or Hinduism.” At the time, Nakagaki was a resident minister at an Upper West Side Buddhist temple. “One of the members came up and said, ‘You can’t do this here!’ ” He acceded to the local sentiment for many years. In 1986, the year after Nakagaki moved to Seattle from Japan, he made a swastika out of flowers at his temple, in honor of the Buddha’s birthday. “I’m still working on which way is better to present the topic-to start from the Hitler part and go into the swastika in India,” he said, or to approach it the other way around. He hopes to speak at more challenging venues, such as a Jewish-history museum. “So far, the ones I’ve started with are the safer ones, not the public public-more like the Buddhist community,” he said. Since the release of his book, Nakagaki has been zipping around New York, giving talks. Trump became President, hate crime increased, and more people talk about this symbol, the swastika,” Nakagaki, who is slight and soft-spoken, with a shaved head, said the other day. (A Holocaust scholar had raised concerns.) This April, finding no other takers-he’d brought out a Japanese edition in 2013, without incident-he self-published the book on Amazon. A year earlier, a book he’d written on the three-thousand-year history of the symbol, “The Buddhist Swastika and Hitler’s Cross,” was dropped by his New York publisher. In the Jodo Shinshu tradition of Japanese Buddhism, which Nakagaki practices, the swastika is a sign of peace and good luck. Toshikazu Kenjitsu Nakagaki, a fifty-six-year-old Buddhist priest who lives near Brighton Beach, watched with frustration as swastika flags unfurled in some far-right circles after Trump’s election.
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