Picture Bride Stories by Barbara F. Kawakami (review)

Picture Bride Stories, by Barbara Kawakami, is the culmination of nearly four decades of research on the lives of Issei women in Hawai'i. This text provides invaluable insight into the picture-bride practice in the early twentieth century, which involved immigrant workers marrying Japanese women on the recommendation of a matchmaker who exchanged photographs between the prospective bride and groom. Through interviews with these picture brides, Kawakami explores their motivations and experiences, as arranged marriages were not unusual in Japan, and women had different reasons for becoming picture brides. Kawakami's book represents an invaluable contribution to the history of Japanese Americans in Hawai'i because it gives voice and agency to women who are often a silent presence in historical accounts. As the experiences of picture brides are often romanticized and little understood, Kawakami's book illuminates their experiences and shows how these women helped establish the foundations of the Japanese community in the islands.

Between 1885 and 1924, both single and married Japanese immigrant men came to Hawai'i to work on plantations under a three-year contract with the goal of returning home with more money. Due to the exploitative plantation environment, many found this goal to be impossible, and, rather than return to Japan as failures, they decided to establish families in Hawai'i. Some wrote home to their families, asking them to join them, while others asked relatives to find them suitable young women as wives. While the motivations of these men are clearly understood, it is often difficult to discern the reasons why young women would leave their families and communities for a distant island home to marry strangers. Kawakami's interviews with sixteen former picture brides illustrate the diverse circumstances under which picture brides came to Hawai'i. Some, like Kishi Oki Tsujimura, married a neighbor, as both families knew one another and her husband's family had watched her grow up to become a hardworking, efficient young woman. Others, like Tei Saito, had her mother plan her marriage without her consent, but with good intentions. Regardless of the reasons why these women married men that many had only seen in photographs sent across an ocean, after arriving in Hawai'i, numerous women experienced great hardship, doing backbreaking field labor on Hawai'i's sugar and pineapple plantations. Many also faced a "double-shift" or "double day": after laboring in the fields all day, they returned home to a series of domestic duties that included raising children, cleaning, and holding multiple jobs to make ends meet, such as cooking and doing laundry for bachelors. In recounting her experiences on the plantation, Soto Kimura recalls that she "work[ed] all day, without eating anything. When I think about those days, I wonder how I managed to do it. … How many times I cried myself to sleep. I thought … I should have stayed in Japan" (65). Due to the financial and physical hardships that were compounded by the fact that her husband drank and gambled, Kimura could only gaman (persevere) and endure what must have seemed to be overwhelming circumstances.

Kawakami, who began her research in 1979, conducted some of her interviews as late as 2001 when one of the last picture brides, Kishi Tsujimura, was 103 years old. Her book represents a lifetime spent documenting the lives of Issei women in Hawai'i, research that is no longer possible with the death of these women who came to Hawai'i more than a century ago. To contextualize their stories, Kawakami also contacted the families of these picture brides and was able to unearth historical artifacts, like an interview with Hisa Kawakami (no relation) done in 1976 that the family had forgotten about until Kawakami contacted them for more information about their mother. Kawakami's book is unusual because it is not a traditional oral history collection but instead is a series of narratives based upon conversations that Kawakami had with the picture brides as...