# "I Grew Up in a Buddhist Temple, But I Chose Islam" | A Japanese Couple Converts to Islam - Language: en - Published: 2026-08-26 - Canonical: https://blog.towardseternity.com/en/blog/i-grew-up-in-a-buddhist-temple-but-i-chose-islam-a-japanese-couple-converts-to-islam - Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b36ybUtO8M - Channel: Towards Eternity This is the cleaned transcript of the source video. The speech is unaltered. --- I really believed in Buddhism. I was part of the youth group at the temple. I was very involved in temple activities. My father was hardcore atheist philosopher, who spent years and years trying to teach me how to debate against theists. You know, I did get kicked out of school. I did have a difficult time. And I did realize at that point, my religion was offering me no direction. The worldview of Islam is so obvious. It solves all the problems. And it's simple. When my wife started catching on that I was Muslim, she became very anti-Islam. She started studying Islam to find things to make me not be Muslim anymore. She got Corona. She's not getting better. You know, her oxygen levels were still like acceptable, so I wasn't like super worried, but I was concerned. I started thinking about all sorts of bad things. I wondered if I was going to die just like this. Then randomly one day, out of nowhere, she says like, yeah, like if I die, I don't want to go somewhere different than you and the kids. As-salamu alaykum (Peace be upon you), brother Shige and sister Lisa. Thank you so much for coming to our interview at Towards Eternity. We are very happy to have you with us. Wa alaykumu s-salam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Thank you. So brother Shige, can you tell us briefly about your life, please? I'm a fourth-generation Japanese American. My father was a hardcore atheist philosopher who converted to Buddhism. My mother was a born Buddhist whose family has been part of a Japanese Buddhist mission in America for four generations. I started out as a Buddhist and pursued a traditional Japanese art form in Japan to reconnect to my roots, and instead, I ended up connecting to Islam. I was born in Japan. My parents, of course, Japanese. Actually, I believed in Jesus. So I did amen. I guess I talked to Isa (Jesus). But like I didn't know about Islam or anything. So, how was your life in regards to faith? I think Buddhism especially was very central in our family. I knew that my, you know, my grandfather was very respected in the community. I knew, obviously my mom worked at the temple, so I spent most of my time, I mean, we're there every weekend. I was part of the youth group at the temple. I was very involved in temple activities. So, like I was surprised because there is Sunday service, like a Christian church, but there is no that kind of thing in Japan. So, I was surprised they have a song about Buddha and singing. I wasn't going every Sunday. Only just a few months, maybe just my father, he wanted to take us to the Christian church. What was the thing that made you question your beliefs? I always questioned my beliefs, actually. I didn't like, I really believed in Buddhism, but I didn't believe in Jodo Shinshu. It's a type of Japanese Buddhism. It's actually maybe the main Japanese, uh, Buddhism. In Japan, there, at one point in time, Buddhism religion was very political. It was like highly political. And there was actually a law passed in Japan that said that every Japanese family had to register their name to one of the Buddhist temples. Like you had to belong to a temple. Once you start studying the history, I just didn't think that any true religion could be making its religious decisions based on like the politics of a specific time in history. There's also a lot of things that didn't make sense to me. And how did your journey towards Islam begin? I got in a lot of trouble in high school. So, I, I got in trouble trying to establish myself or prove myself, maybe too hard, too much. You know, I did get kicked out of school, I did have a difficult time, and I did realize at that point that my, my religion was offering me no direction. It wasn't helping me make good decisions with my life. And that's when I really decided to go all in on learning Japanese culture, because I thought, well, okay, I'm going to give up on religion for a bit, but if I just focus on something positive and just put all my energy there, then I don't have energy to do, you know, other things that maybe I shouldn't be doing. So that's how it all started. So yeah, I came to Japan in 2006 as a foreign exchange student. That's when I met my wife. I guess it was very important for me to feel authentic. And that, I think that's why I went so hard into trying to really immerse myself in very traditional Japanese culture. And that became my religion for a while. Fast forward to 2012, and now a very, he's a very good friend of mine, uh, a guy from Syria, came to Japan during the Syrian civil war. Uh, he had to come as a political refugee. And we just started talking. I asked him like how he conceptualizes God. Like, what is God? Is God the universe? Is God a guy with a beard in a cloud? Like to you, what is God? And his response to me was like, well, actually, he just, he said, "Let me show you something." And he showed me Ikhlas. He said, this is what we believe. And I said, okay. So it's not a guy. He was like, no, obviously, it's not a guy. Is it the universe? No, it's like nothing you can imagine. There is, there's nothing, you know, equal to Him. And it's, it's not like a, has nothing to do with the Christian beliefs. Like, no, he wasn't, he wasn't created, you know, he didn't give birth to anything. Nothing gave birth to Him. Again, it was just obvious. I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, yeah, okay, I can, I can vibe with that. I was like, okay. When I met this Syrian guy, this just happened to be at a point in my life when I was rethinking how I was living. And, you know, I actually realized that I already believed in God. And looking back on my life, I think I realized that I believed in God my entire life. But it was something that I was pushing away for whatever reason. Maybe I was pushing it away because my father was a very hardcore atheist philosopher who spent years and years trying to teach me how to debate against theists and how I should respond to them and how I could, you know, belittle their beliefs in God, how to fight back against Christians who are trying to, you know, tell me about the message, the word of Jesus. So I think from a very young age, like literally, you know, 10 years old or so, I felt like I wasn't supposed to be, it's not a good thing to be believing in God. You're not supposed to believe in that. And as I got older and more committed to the temple, I felt more and more like I can't believe in God because I have to be committed to this temple, or I have to be committed to the Japanese community here, and they don't believe in God. So my spiritual journey was actually really short. The spiritual journey itself. I met this guy, he told me about Islam. I kind of remembered all these little bits and pieces from my life, and I was like, yeah, actually, I mean, if I'm honest with myself, that's what I believe in. It wasn't that hard. It was actually very fast. I knew I was Muslim very quickly. The worldview of Islam is so obvious. The second someone, I think if someone tells you, if you're honest, it's so obvious, it's hard to not see. It solves all the problems, and it's simple. But the reason it took me a long time and I had to study and research and look into this and that and this and that is because I'm thinking of all the people that I'm going to have to explain this to later on. How am I going to talk to my philosopher father? How am I going to talk to my Buddhist mother who's working at the temple? How am I going to talk to like the family and the community, you know, that I grew up in this temple? Like they know my grandfather, my mother and then me and... How did your family, your wife, react to your reversion to Islam, your families, the thing that you feared the most? Have you noticed something? While watching this video, you don't see any ads. Since Towards Eternity is a nonprofit organization, we can only produce these videos through your support. If you want to be a part of this good deed, donate to Towards Eternity and don't miss this golden opportunity. How did your family, your wife react to your reversion to Islam, your families, the thing that you feared the most? So this was the real reason I was studying, because I knew what I was in for. I knew that my, first of all, my wife was not going to accept it. Uh, her family was definitely not going to accept it. My family was not going to accept it. You know, my father, my mother were not going to accept it. I just knew already no one was going to be happy. So as just to a survival technique, I guess, I mean, I was just trying to hide it as best I could. I didn't pray in front of people. If I was fasting, I didn't tell people I was fasting. I would just make like excuses like, I've got a doctor's appointment after this, or I have to keep like an empty stomach, or I'd just pretend to drink something and not actually drink it. For a long time, I think it was just very hidden. I thought that with my wife, I would just make small changes, and eventually if I just became a better person, or if she saw our family life getting better, maybe, you know, she would be, asked me like, "Oh, hey, why are you such an awesome husband now?" Like, what happened? That didn't happen though. So every little, small change I had to introduce very, very carefully. For example, praying, waking up for Fajr (dawn prayer). How quiet could I be? Like, and not, and so even now, it's kind of funny, like people laugh, like when my alarm goes off, I'm trained so that like I can jump up so fast, I can turn off the alarm before the first beep finishes. So like, like, if it goes... I can be like... and then I can get it. When my wife started catching on that I was Muslim and I was fasting because of Islam and I was not drinking because of Islam and I was asking her not to cook with pork anymore because of Islam, she became very anti-Islam. She started studying Islam to find things to make me not be Muslim anymore. And then it was kind of going okay, but then like I started growing a beard. Oh, yeah. So any of the women in my life, basically, anytime they saw my face, they would tell me, "You look like Osama bin Laden. Like, if you want to join ISIS, then why are you in Japan? Like, shave your face, like you look dirty, like you need to like go shave. Like, do you need me to buy you a razor?" Like, and this is like, every time I met... -I'm sorry. -It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. It was always like this. And then how did your wife become Muslim? Uh, so again, things were going very bad. It was getting to the point where we were actually talking about separating. Obviously, I didn't want to. And she said, "Fine, we don't have to separate, but like you can just go live at a different place." Like you can live in a different room, get a different apartment, and you can be Muslim there. I don't care officially, legally, we can be married. You can come see the kids on weekends and stuff, but you just, just go be Muslim somewhere else. Leave us out of it. Like you're making life difficult for us. It was getting bad. We were just fighting all the time. I remember coming home one night and we live on the second floor. And I got to the bottom of the stairs outside of my apartment, and I didn't have enough energy to step up to the first step. And I stood in front of the staircase and I was just so tired. I was so tired of fighting. I was so tired of defending my beliefs. I was so tired of people telling me to shave my face. I was so tired of, of so many things. And I just stood there for, and for the first time turned to Allah. And I said, like, I'm, I can't do this anymore. So please, whatever's best for me, I don't, you know, if it's, if it's with my wife, please make this work. If it's not, then please just, you know, I'm asking for something better. But I can't do this anymore. Like I'm just so tired. Right then, it was very, very early in Corona. Like it's like after day five or something, like the people who get better, get better, and then the people who get worse, they just start to get worse. And this is on the news when you're seeing like, you know, so many people dying from this, and the hospitals are, you know, they're at capacity or whatever. It's like peak fear. Everyone is peak fear of Corona. And very early on, I got Corona. So this was at a point in time where if you got Corona, the hospitals wouldn't accept you, and ambulance isn't going to come pick you up. Like you don't want to tell people you have Corona because there's still like a, you know, a stigma about it, where, you know, it's like you have the black plague or something. And so, you know, I was locked in a room. I had to lock myself in a room for a while. And, uh, you know, we didn't know what was happening. But I started to get better. But as I started to get better, my wife got sick. My fever wouldn't go down, I kept coughing, I couldn't taste or smell anything, and since people around me were scared, I had to stay isolated. It felt like I had caught some strange, incomprehensible disease. So I thought, "If this goes on, maybe I'll really die, and then I won't be able to see Shige-san again, or my children anymore" And she's not getting any better. Okay, well, it's, it's going on like two weeks now, and she's getting worse, and her cough is getting worse, and it's going on three weeks, and it's like, okay, well, yeah, okay, this isn't, this isn't good. And then from my perspective, I was worried. You know, her oxygen levels were still like acceptable, so I wasn't like super worried, but I was concerned. Even though my husband recovered, I wasn't getting better at all, and I started to worry more and more. Since I was isolated in my room, I couldn't see anyone, and suddenly I had so much time to myself. Because I'm naturally a worrier, I kept overthinking and imagining bad things, like, "Maybe I'm going to die like this." Then randomly one day, out of nowhere, she says to me like, "Hey, so you need two people, two witnesses for shahada (declaration of faith), right?" I was just like, wait, what? I was like, is this a question you're asking for a friend? Like, and she's like, "No, for me." I was like, wait, what? Shahada (declaration of faith)? Two people? Yeah. Wait, what? You, you want to become Muslim? If I was really going to die, I had been saying I didn't want to be Muslim, I didn't want to take my shahadah, but I didn't have time for games anymore. So I asked for a shahada. And she looked at me and she says like, "Yeah, like if I, if I die, I don't want to go somewhere different than you and the kids. If I die, I want to go to the same place as you guys." So I called my boy and I was like, I'm like, "Yuki, come, come here, man. I need you. I need you. I need you." Like, you know, he's still a kid, so maybe it doesn't count, but it was Corona, we're in lockdown. It was the best we could do. I said, "I need you to be a witness with me, buddy." And so we stood there and she gave her shahada from the quarantine room and that was it. I felt relieved — as if the danger had passed, as if even if I were to die, it would be alright. I didn't die, and maybe it wasn't actually life-threatening, but inside me, there was an enormous sense of relief, and I remember being so happy that I could truly turn my heart toward Allah. Several weeks after that to realize like, wait a second, I had given up and it only took two weeks. Like I should have given up like eight years ago. Like, you know, what was I doing this whole time? Like how many hours did I waste? You were accumulating... accumulating a lot of good deeds. This whole time. No, this whole time. Like if, if there's any lesson that anyone can take from this, and this is why if when people ask me my reversion story, I always say mine isn't that important. The most important reversion story is my wife's because I could not do anything for eight years with the amount of hardship that was in that relationship. And all I had to do is just give up and say, Allah, ya Allah (O Allah), please take this off of my hands. I can't do this. And you know, two weeks later. From my perspective, it was just so sudden and it took me a really long time to process that she'd become Muslim. And you know, I'd wake up at like Fajr (dawn prayer), and like I was unsure if I should wake her up or not. I'm like, like, should I, should I let her sleep? Is she going to be mad if I wake her up? Is she really Muslim? Is it, you know? But I would, you know, I would, you know, I'd like be like this, and then she'd open her eyes and she'd be like, "Fajr?" I'm like, "Yes." So we would pray. You were part of a certain culture for years, your relatives, loved ones as well. You were a stranger to the Muslim community. Wasn't it hard to leave what you had been used to for years? Uh, yes, it was very hard. I had sacrificed everything, whether it's my money, my time, my energy, even my relationships with other people. But when I left that world, I've done nothing else. Like I don't know how to do any other business. I don't know how to do any other work. I don't have any other, you know, like real helpful business degree or any knowledge about anything really. Yeah, it was very difficult. And I was just saying, I was, the only thing I kept with me was Allah says if you give something up for the sake of Him, He will replace it with something better. And so my right hand I had this, and in my left hand I had everything else in my life. And I just had to let go and just trust that something was going to work out. Alhamdulillah (praise be to God), I really honestly believe that Allah just put this, this belief, this iman (faith) in my heart, and that's it. After becoming Muslim, I think I became more open —maybe even liberated. Since we were now a Muslim family, it felt like we needed to join the community, make friends, and do it also for the children's sake, I knew I still had my own biases, and in Japan, you can't really live with prejudice, so I felt I had to overcome that somehow. That's how I was thinking back then. After she became Muslim, she had her first Ramadan (the month of fasting) with me. My Ramadan (the month of fasting) is very, a very lonely, sad… It's a very sad, lonely event. It's just, it's just difficult and hard and, uh, you're totally alone. You break fast by yourself, and you fast by yourself, and it's like, it's not, it's not fun. On the other hand, she was like on Instagram, and she's seeing all these posts of people having these like really amazing spreads for like iftar (breaking of the fast) parties and, uh, you know, people like really enjoying Ramadan as like a festival. And, and she's so mad at me. She's like, "No, I want Ramadan like this." Like, this Ramadan is terrible. And so, since that time, basically, she's been working with, you know, JDC. We got involved with, here, we are right now, we're at the Japan Muslim Association, JMA. We're part, you know, we do, uh, we help out with like events around the Tokyo area with here, with JDC, with our local masjid (mosque) in Yokohama. And what do you admire most about each other? What I admire about her, a lot of things actually. So I, ever since we met, there are many things that she was naturally doing that as a Muslim you should be doing. You know, I'm coming from like this revolutionary American background where it's just like, if I have someone telling me what to do, my first initial reaction is just to be like, yeah, forget you, you know, yeah, get out of here. Like, and it doesn't matter if it's my parents or anything. Astaghfirullah (I seek forgiveness from Allah). But, uh, with her, you know, she's, she's always been, I don't know whether she felt if, uh, you know, Jannah (heaven) was at her mother's feet, but she's always acted that way. And so I respect that about her very much. She's always been very family-centric. She's always cared about our children, uh, been very involved with their lives. I respect that about her. His constant kindness — even when I must have been really difficult — he never gave up on me. I've always been grateful for that, even before becoming Muslim. I think I actually like him even more after he became Muslim. It's like his personality changed. He started valuing family more and more — calling his parents on his own, without me reminding him. Things like that improved a lot. When I said I wanted to see my family, he would simply say, "Then we should go see them." That was such a wonderful change. The way he came to value family so deeply made everything so much better. Even though I don't think I'm explaining it very well... So… Basically nothing. He's kind. She said I'm a nice guy. He's kind. Was that the only thing she said? Yeah, basically. What impressed you the most about the Prophet (peace be upon him)? When he talks about saving his dua (supplication) for the last day for us, when we're standing in front of Allah, he's saved his dua (supplication), his one dua that will definitely be, be granted. He saved that for us. Now when, when, when I hear things like this, I actually feel like it's actually us, you know, he actually, when he saw through time, maybe he was looking at me. Maybe he was looking at you. He was looking at this generation. So, yeah, for me, I guess this, his ability to see through time and his compassion for people he's never met is the most impressive thing. Brother Shige, sister Lisa, thank you so much for sharing your story sincerely with us. May Allah reward you, and insha'Allah (God willing), keep you steadfast on this path, on the straight path until your last breath, insha'Allah (God willing). And reunite you in the hereafter, insha'Allah, in Jannah. JazakAllahu Khairan (May Allah reward you with goodness). Thank you so much.