Colorado Women: A History

6. Breaking with Tradition

123 In comparison to states on the Pacific Coast, relatively few Chinese or Japanese were living in Colorado in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The1880censusrecordedonly593Chineseand19Japaneseinthe state. For men looking for a wife, the prospects were bleak. Female Chinese and Japanese comprised less than 4 percent of the total number of both populations . The 1910 US census revealed no better news for single Japanese men. Japanese women still made up less than 5 percent of the 2,300 Japanese recorded as living in Colorado. There were more than 2,000 Japanese men for every 100 Japanese women, in contrast to the situation for whites and blacks, where there were 116 males for every 100 females.1 Picture brides became the solution. The 1907–1908 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” prohibited further emigration of Japanese laborers but allowed wives and families to join Japanese men already in the United States. Based on the omaiai-kekkon, or arranged marriage custom, women in Japan exchanged photographs with S i x Breaking with Tradition (1901–1919) DOI: 10.5876/9781607322078.c06 124 B r e a k i n g w i t h T r a d i t i o n prospective husbands in the United States, had their names entered into their spouse’s family registers, and then applied for passports to join husbands they had never met. Twenty thousand Japanese women immigrated to the United States prior to 1920, when the Japanese government prohibited further female emigration because of growing US anti-Japanese sentiment. As a result of the picture bride system (shashin kekkon, or “photo-marriage”), the percentage of Japanese American women in Colorado skyrocketed, from less than 5 percent in 1910 to 35 percent in 1920.2 One picture bride was Some Kosuge. In 1912 the teacher disembarked from a ship in Seattle, Washington. In the waiting crowd was her intended husband, Shichirobei Nakane. Like Some, Shichirobei was a college graduate from a successful family. In Japan, his family members were prosperous farmers and manufacturers of shoy (soy sauce).3 Nakane and Kosuge were married on June 11, 1912, with Shichirobei taking Kosuge’s last name, as she was the oldest daughter in a family with no sons. This practice was known as yoshi. Nakane had older brothers to carry on his family name; the Kosuge family had none.4 From Seattle, the Kosuges took the train east. They stopped along the South Platte River at Merino, eleven miles southwest of Sterling, where he began a farming venture with two other men. Merino, located on the high plains of Colorado, was once home to buffalo and antelope, hunted by Native Americans before their removal to reservations in the 1870s and 1880s. Both Kosuges worked in the fields during planting and harvesting seasons. Kosuge labored even when she was pregnant. The couple had ten children, all born at home. Dr. W. B. Lutes, the Merino physician, helped deliver some of the infants. The Kosuges farmed their land in Merino until 1938. They then spent five years in the Iliff area and three years at Kersey. Tiring of drought and dust, they sold their farm and moved to Denver.5 Immigrants Between 1901 and 1920, immigration to the United States peaked, with nearly 1 million newcomers in 1907 alone. Midwestern and western states lured countless immigrants with advertisements in the eastern states and in Europe. In Colorado, Italian men arrived to work on the railroads, in the mines, and at the smelters. Russian Germans settled in eastern Colorado, while Japanese men, immigrating without wives or families, moved to both the southeastern and northeastern plains. Some Japanese men, no longer needed by the railroads, were recruited to work in the steel mills in Pueblo. 125 B r e a k i n g w i t h T r a d i t i o n During spring and summer layoffs, they worked in sugar beet fields in southeastern Colorado or worked their homesteads along the Arkansas River, growing melons and other crops for city markets. Mexicans also migrated north to southern Colorado to work in the beet fields. They lived in tents during the work season and moved back to Mexico in the off season. Sometime around 1910, sugar beet companies built camps in which the workers and their families lived year-round. The camps were rows of adobe-walled rooms with common walls. At first, the sugar companies...