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This contribution focuses on narratives and experiences of belonging and exclusion among convert members of Three Wheels, a Japanese Shin Buddhist temple in London, to investigate how difference is incorporated into transnational Buddhism. Three Wheels, whose members include both diasporic Japanese and con-vert Buddhist Europeans, occupies a marginal position within both transnational Shin Buddhism and the UK’s Buddhist (and broader religious) landscape. By embracing individual and collective marginality, I argue, priests and members foster affective connections that allow for a shared minority space to emerge where its diverse members can feel at home. To explore the dynamics of this ‘home- making’, I focus specifically on how convert members negotiate their own space in the community and the processes of inclusion and exclusion through which they navigate the linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers they encounter as convert members of a Japanese Buddhist tradition. This discussion of home-making within Three Wheels as a shared minority space highlights the complex dynamics of minority status and marginality in transnational Buddhism. It also shows how, in this case, convert Buddhists have worked with Asian migrants to build what appears to be a successful mixed local Buddhist sangha that accommodates the diverse needs of its members.

This article investigates how things given to local temples generate material, karmic, and emotional excess in contemporary Japan. What, how, and why people “store” at local Buddhist temple tell a story of a community and how people’s individual material histories become matters of communal concern and local heritage-making practices. While walking a fine line between memory and decommissioning of care, the stories of burdensome inherited materiality map out the material and affective networks of community preservation in Japan’s depopulating regions. By stepping into the shoes of a local Buddhist priest at a True Pure Land Buddhist temple in Hiroshima Prefecture, I focus on the tensions between decommissioning of care and the moral and practical conundrum faced by rural Buddhist temples entrusted with the responsibility of meaningful disposal and safe keeping of inherited things. I thus argue that decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality helps us understand better the fragility of Buddhist care structures and how people strive to maintain and, in turn, make sense of the anticipated decline in their depopulating regional communities.

This report outlines the context, methods,data, and findings of the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council funded project British RitualInnovation under Covid-19 [BRIC-19]. Theproject ran from August 2020 to September 2021,with the aim of documenting and analysingchanges to British communal religious lifeduring the Covid-19 pandemic and associatedlockdowns, and of providing best practicerecommendations for religious communitiesadapting their practice to address similar crisissituations in the future. Particular effort hasbeen made to include data that reflects, to theextent possible, the geographic and religiousdiversity of Britain, by focussing on questionsof religious practice rather than on theologicalquestions or issues of belief which are specific tofaith traditions.

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