While Japanese picture brides have gradually gained their visibility in North American history from the 1970s on, their connections with their country of origin, Japan, remain marginalized, if not overlooked, in most picture bride texts and studies. Since the existing picture bride narratives are usually written within the framework of American nationalism, one goal of this thesis is to open up that framework by adopting a transnational view to understand picture brides’ position in-between Japan and North America. In this thesis, I have tried to bring to the fore Japanese picture brides’ significance in making Japanese North America cross-Pacific history. In an attempt to provide an alternative reading of picture bride stories, and present Japanese Canadian history from a different perspective, I study two picture bride narratives that involve the cooperation of Issei women, and pay particular attention to how these women’s Japanese memories and experiences are reconstructed in their life stories.
In Chapter Two, I investigate Obaachan’s Garden, in which Linda Ohama, a Japanese Canadian Sansei, adopts profuse images of Japan to represent her grandmother’s hidden past.
Through revealing her grandmother’s Japanese past, Ohama interweaves picture bride stories with Japanese national history as well as establishes Japanese Canadians’ affiliation with their ancestral country. In Chapter Three, Tomoko Makabe’s Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada in the form of oral history records five picture brides’ life stories. As a Shin-Issei, Makabe considers Japanese picture brides significant figures in the making of both Japanese and Japanese Canadian history. Reading the five Issei women’s testimonies along with Makabe’s geohistorical research on their home villages, we comprehend picture brides’
transnational experience as an integral segment of Japan’s history. Additionally, the
knowledge of Japan’s customs and regional developments in the early twentieth century immensely enriches our understanding of picture bride history.
Concentrating on how Japanese picture brides relate to their country of origin as well as how the images of Japan are presented in picture bride narratives, this thesis projects a study of larger scope in the future. For instance, future work could pay attention to Japanese
American cases since the two texts I scrutinize here are both Japanese Canadian picture bride narratives. As for the relationship between Japan and Japanese picture brides immigrating to Hawaii, one could look into Alice Yun Chai’s “Hawaii’s Early Picture Brides’ from Japan, Okinawa, and Korea” (1986) wherein Chai recorded twenty picture brides’ interviews. Also, since Okinawa and Korea were both Japan’s colonies during the early twentieth century, Chai’s work may offer useful materials for further investigation on how Issei women from colonizer and colonized areas held different point of views towards their origins. In addition to Japanese American cases, I also plan to delve into other picture bride narratives in Japan.
Portrayals of picture brides’ life stories could be found in Miyoko Kudo’s 写婚妻：花嫁は一 枚の見合い写真を手に海を渡っていった (Picture Brides: Brides Went across the Sea with a Piece of Matchmaking Photograph) (1983) and Ikumi T. Yanagisawa’s “ハワイに渡 った日本人「写真花嫁」たち : 最初の「写真花嫁」から最後の「写真花嫁」まで” (“Life Histories of Japanese ‘picture brides’ in Hawaii: From the First ‘Picture Brides’ to the Last”) (2006).14
Japanese picture bride narratives should be comprehend beyond the scope of North American minority discourses. Through analyzing Obaachan’s Garden and Picture Brides:
Japanese Women in Canada, hopefully, my thesis has reconsidered picture brides’ complex affiliations with their country of origin even after they immigrated to North America.
14 The English title of 写婚妻：花嫁は一枚の見合い写真を手に海を渡っていった provided here is my translation.
Moreover, this thesis also hopes to take Japanese picture brides as one case among many to rethink how Asia is represented in Asian American narratives, particularly in those
delineating pre-1965 immigrants’ transnational experiences. Finally, I expect this study of Japanese picture bride history may help us better understand the foreign bride, or the mail-order bride, phenomenon in Taiwan. Nowadays, more and more Taiwanese males choose to marry foreign brides who mainly come from Southeastern Asia, and the mail-order marriage has drawn much attention in both the public and academia. In her preface to the Chinese version of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, Pei-Hsiang Li, a foreign bride from Cambodia and also the executive secretary of TransAsia Sisters Association in Taiwan, indicates that there are similarities shared between foreign brides’ and picture brides’
transnational experiences. For example, both Japanese picture brides and foreign brides face communicating difficulties as they try to adapt themselves to different cultures. Moreover, as Christine S.Y. Chun in her study of the mail-order industry points out, “[t]he modern
mail-order bride industry in some ways mirrors the arranged marriages of the past, where families sent ‘picture brides’ from their homelands to lonely men in foreign countries” (1155).
Here, I certainly do not claim that mail-order brides’ experiences should be read in analogy to Japanese picture brides’ experiences. Despite the fact that Japanese picture brides in the early twentieth century could be regarded as the archetype of the current mail-order brides, there are differences between Japanese picture bride practice and Asian mail-order bride system since they developed from two distinct historical contexts. Indeed, while Japanese picture brides were married to their compatriots, contemporary mail-order brides commonly enter into marriage with foreigners. Being aware of the similarities and differences between Japanese picture brides and mail-order brides, I plan to extend my research to mail-order brides and inquire into more female immigrants’ transnational experiences in the future.