Picture Bride Stories by Barbara F. Kawakami (review)

While reading Barbara Kawakami’s book Picture Bride Stories ahead of reviewing it, I had the chance to see an actual kimono owned by one of the women featured in the volume. The kimono was on display at an exhibition entitled “A Painting for the Emperor,” which was held by the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, from February to May 2018. Its owner, Ayako Kikugawa, was originally from Menodake-mura, Kumamoto Prefecture. When she arrived at the Haleiwa pineapple plantation on Oahu to start a new life with her husband, Shitoku, in 1918, she could not have imagined that her kimono would travel across the Atlantic Ocean exactly one hundred years later and that it would leave an impression on the people of Europe.

It is estimated that over 20,000 young women crossed the Pacific in the period from 1908 to 1923. A great majority of them were so-called picture brides, who were betrothed to their husbands from afar after an exchange of photographs. Kawakami chose 16 such women (4 from Okinawa Prefecture; 3 each from Fukushima, Yamaguchi, and Hiroshima; 2 from Kumamoto; and 1 from Fukuoka) from among the 250 picture brides she interviewed over the course of her thirty-year research project. Having been born in Kumamoto, Japan, but raised on the Waipahu sugar plantation on Oahu and having worked as a seamstress for thirty-eight years, it did not take long for Kawakami to gain the trust of her informants, who opened up to her about their journeys from Japan to Hawaii and from youth to retirement in the postwar period. While her first book, Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii 1885–1941 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), depicted the lives of first-generation Japanese immigrants (issei) through the lens of the working clothes and the formal attire they wore on various occasions, the current book demonstrates the emotions and thoughts of picture brides across the different stages of their lives in a more individual, direct, and intuitive way.

The Hawaiian Islands have a rich culture of oral histories documenting the lives of local people of different generations, locations, occupations, and ethnic backgrounds. Such efforts to collect and record these voices for the sake of future generations have been encouraged by the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, which was established in 1976—three years before Kawakami launched her own interview project. Although her work is undoubtedly located in this stream, it stands out as unique because of the three decades she spent on her research, during which she patiently captured the picture brides’ journeys across an unusually large sweep of space and time.

Each chapter tells the story of a different picture bride, beginning with her life in her homeland of Japan. Quite a few of them, including Kaku Kumasaka and Ushii Nakasone, were excited about going to “paradise,” while one, Tei Saito, was strongly opposed to the idea, decided upon by her mother, of her going to Hawaii without continuing on to medical school as originally planned after graduating from high school. The case of the aforementioned Ayako Kikugawa is unique in a different sense: she volunteered to go to Hawaii out of sympathy for her beloved aunt, whose son had been jilted by the woman originally intended as his picture bride. Thus, the interviews reveal a variety of different feelings, responses, and motives at work for the women in the process of their becoming picture brides, with each decision made in the immediate context of considerations such as familial responsibilities, household financial difficulties, and educational attainment or lack thereof. In this sense, the interviews underscore the significance of local context in the study of “international” migration. Although picture brides crossed the border from the Japanese to the US empire (Hawaii was under US rule from 1898), the interviews recorded by Kawakami demonstrate that notions of social relationships and surroundings were locally rather than nationally or imperially constructed. Accordingly, one of the interviews begins...