Globalization intensifies the range, intensity, and diversity of interactions among world societies, but along with phenomena of hybridization, glocalization, or creolization it is just as likely to produce counter-reactive phenomena of resistance or conservative radicalization. In the case of the major Japanese Buddhist tradition of Shin Buddhism, the interactive possibilities that could have been theoretically imagined for its modern encounter with North American society were overwhelmed by the ethno-chauvinism which became embedded in the nikkei population particularly in the context of early twentieth-century competition between the Japanese and American empires. The chauvinism took form, in Shin Buddhism as in certain other domains of nikkei life, as a pervasive, persistent pressure for an “equal but separate” structuring of nikkei relations with White society. The analysis suggests that in at least some instances—although North America is a quite major instance—issues of race consciousness and racial formation need to be given more attention in globalization studies.
