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3 seattle฀sanba฀and฀the฀creation฀฀ of฀issei฀community At 10:00 a.m. on a rainy January day in 1927, Toku Shimomura drove the family Ford to the house of Mrs. Okiyama, who safely gave birth to a baby boy five hours later.1 It was a typical, uneventful birth for Toku, a sanba who delivered about twenty babies that year in her hometown of Seattle, Washington. The birth of a baby, however, accounted for only a fraction of Toku’s time. She also spent many hours every day making house calls, during which she would check on clients and perform various aspects of prenatal and postnatal care. Most of her days were filled with home visits and caregiving , activities that were less quantifiable, but nonetheless meaningful, aspects of her work as a health-care provider to birthing women and their babies. Meanwhile, like other working mothers, this thirty-nine-year-old midwife also did the laundry, cleaned the house, and cooked the meals for her family, which included three young children: son Michio (age three), daughter Fumiko (age eight), and son Kazuo (age thirteen).2 In between attending to clients and her household, she ran errands, went shopping, and even took the car to the garage for repairs. Somehow, she also maintained an active social life: She spent time with friends, enjoyed dancing with her husband, went to Bible classes, sang in the choir, and attended service at the Japanese Methodist Church. In 1927, as in most years, family, friends, and church occupied much of her time. The life of midwife Shimomura was like a tapestry in which the birth of a baby was but a single, if bold and continuous, thread. The history of midwives like Toku Shimomura presents a vision of Japanese American womanhood that challenges the stereotypical image of the unchanging, servile, reserved, and deferential figure. Although women were expected to exhibit such traits, they did not necessarily do so.3 For example, seattle฀sanba฀and฀the฀issei฀community 61 Toku was strong-willed and fiercely independent. Midwifery, as well as immigration, seemed to attract Japanese women who were self-sufficient, ambitious, and entrepreneurial. These qualities certainly characterized Toku, who was an imposing woman in many ways. Not only was she tall for a Japanese woman, but she had a grand tone and style with which she ran her family. According to her grandson Roger Shimomura, she was best described by the Japanese word chanto, meaning proper, righteous, and respectable. She did everything that was expected of a woman of her status.4 The Washington State approach to midwife regulation, as discussed in the previous chapter, enabled midwives like Toku to conduct midwifery with relatively little interference. Still, health officials’ response tells us little about midwifery’s significance within immigrant communities. What were the meanings of midwifery in the lives of the sanba, their family members, and clients? What was the impact of gender relations, racial politics, and class dynamics on their health-care work? How did midwifery shape Japanese immigrant communities? Government records are not forthcoming about these unofficial meanings of health-care work, and so we must supplement them with oral histories, interviews, and diaries. The history of the Seattle sanba illuminates the meanings of midwifery to Japanese immigrant communities in general and to Japanese immigrant or Issei women in particular. It demonstrates that midwives, moving in and out of their homes and those of their clients, contributed to the creation of Issei women’s culture and community.5 Young immigrant women, most of whom had left both mothers and mothers-in-law behind in Japan, were especially eager for the emotional and social support provided by midwives during pregnancy and childbirth. Each midwife developed an individual reputation in the community. At the same time, the midwives shared an approach to childbirth that maintained modern Japanese cultural practices, while developing new business opportunities for themselves. The sanba, along with family members and clients, broke Japanese traditions as well as safeguarded them. Their history extends the arguments of scholars who have shown that there is much more to the story of American midwifery than merely its demise.6 The sanba, like midwives throughout the United States, were not simply denounced and eliminated—they continued to care for mothers and babies well into the twentieth century. Nonetheless, even though individual midwives remained meaningful to members of the next generation, the American-born Nisei, midwifery was a health care and cultural...

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