The second picture bride appears in Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada is Mrs.
Hana Murata, who came from Ooyabu (大藪), a small old town in Inukami-gun (犬上郡), Shiga Prefecture (滋賀県). Nowadays, Ooyabu is amalgamated into the city of Hikone (彥根 市). Like Oshima Island, where Mrs. Maki Fukushima was born and raised, Ooyabu had been a village of emigrants, thanks to its geography and location as well. Ooyabu was located on the eastern shores of Lake Biwa. It was a purely agricultural district before Japan’s rapid urbanization and industrialization in the 1950s. For centuries, people living in Ooyabu had used water from the lake and depended on the streams from it to irrigate their farmlands. Yet, the lake occasionally flooded, causing severe damage to farmlands around the lake.
According to Makabe, because of the floods, many people in the east basin of Lake Biwa left and became temporary workers or trade men in Osaka and Kobe. Also, a few of them applied to be the government-sponsored contract workers to Hawaii in the late 1880s. It was the great flood of 1896 that led to a massive emigration to North America from the eastern shore of Lake Biwa and made this district the so-called “East Lake emigrant villages” (Makabe, 71).
Indeed, based on the statistics provided by Lake Biwa Comprehensive Preservation Liaison Coordination Council and Lake Biwa Comprehensive Preservation Promotion Council, the flood of 1896 caused serious damage, including 111 casualties and 7,885 collapsed houses (5).
Makabe explicitly points out that because of the flood of 1896 which transformed “the entire village zone” “into a lake,” residents there “found themselves forced to abandon their homes”
and “from 1897, emigration continued to increase, especially to Canada” (72). Indeed, many Japanese emigrants to Canada were from Shiga Prefecture, especially from Ooyabu and its neighboring villages, Hassaka (八坂) and Mitsuya-mura (三津屋村). As many migrant workers and their families from these villages moved to North America in the early twentieth century, their home villages transformed into “American Villages” and the emigrants there developed their specific lifestyle (Makabe, Picture Brides 73).
Remarkably, Mrs. Hana Murata’s life stories foreground some typical characteristics of
“East Lake emigrant villages.” Mrs. Hana Murata’s father and her uncle were the migrant workers who left as a consequence of the flood in 1896. As Mrs. Hana Murata stated, she grew up in an ordinary migrant family: her father went abroad, working as a fisherman, while her mother stayed in Ooyabu, taking care of the children. The whole family mainly relied on the remittances her father sent back. Despite the fact that this was a common pattern of life in many emigrant villages in the early twentieth-century Japan, Makabe particularly underlines the emigrants’ monetary support for their hometowns in the East Lake American villages. As Makabe indicates,
It is certain that the East Lake “American Village” profited by the money sent by its emigrants. Though it was a remote fishing and farming village, almost all the residences had tile roofs, and it ranked at the top in the prefectural tax records up to that year, 1931; and on three occasions, it had received a certificate for full
payment of national taxes. Bank savings in 1931 were reported to be more than
2,500,000 yen. (73)
Clearly, compared with other districts of Japan, the East Lake emigrant villages were relatively wealthy because of its emigrants’ remittance. Mrs. Hana Murata’s experience verified Makabe’s historical research. In Mrs. Hana Murata’s oral testimony, she described her childhood, stating that “[t]hanks to my father doing that work overseas, I grew up without wanting anything. There was more than enough rice at home, and we always had enough to eat” (75). Additionally, her family even rebuilt their house with the money her father made in Canada. Since working abroad was indeed a better choice than being a farmer in Ooyabu, it is no wonder that the emigration craze broke out in Ooyabu. According to Mrs. Hana Murata,
“it was unusual to find a family in her village without a man who had emigrated” (72).
Significantly, the considerable amount of money the early emigrants brought back from Canada to the East Lake emigrant villages represent their absolute determination to return to their hometowns. As Makabe indicates, “[t]here was some competition in remitting money, so that there were even people who ended up sending nearly half of their income. This may have been the habit of the ‘returning type of immigrant’ who aims at going home in the course of time” (73). Also, Ayukawa in her Hiroshima Immigrants in Canada 1891-1941 also mentions this feature of emigrants from the East Lake emigrant villages. According to Ayukawa, “[t]he money these people earned in Canada, mainly by labouring in sawmills and by operating shops around Vancouver’s Powell Street, did much more than keep their relatives alive.
Almost 70 percent of the Shiga immigrants . . . returned to their villages, bought land, built majestic homes, and donated money to the local Buddhist temple” (xix).
Interestingly, even though Mrs. Hana Murata suffered from her two failed marriages and strove to live in Canada as a career woman alone, she closely followed the custom of the East Lake emigrant villages—keeping sending remittances home and made preparations for her return to Ooyabu someday. As Mrs. Hana Murata indicated, she began sending money home
as soon as she started to work in Canada. And her mother deposited part of the money into the bank under her name and also bought some land in her name. Moreover, after her younger brother, who went to Canada as a temporary worker for more than twenty years and
repatriated to Japan during the war, died in 1964, she constantly provided financial aid for her brother’s family. Mrs. Hana Murata claimed that she actually went back to Ooyabu in 1969 and planned to “stay for a good long time” (90). However, she found that the land her mother bought for her was appropriated by the Japanese government during the wartime because she was recognized as “an absentee landlord” (85). She even went to court but still failed to reclaim the land. She stated that she had originally planned to “come back to Japan when I was old and live on my pension from Canada” (90). Yet, because of the loss of her land as well as the fact that her mother and brother were dead, she could only live with her in-laws if she wanted to stay in Ooyabu. She claimed that “the feeling was completely different, so it wasn’t the country that I used to know” (90). Although Mrs. Hana Murata finally chose to return to Canada, she still had the dream to go back to her hometown one day. As she
proclaimed, “I’m always thinking of my home town. I want to see it again. My family’s grave and my own grave are over there. . . . Every day I think I’ll go and see, but I can’t travel alone.
And there’s nobody asking me to come back” (91). Preparing her own grave in Ooyabu’s temple, wishing to be buried with her ancestors, and moaning that “there’s nobody asking me to come back,” Mrs. Hana Murata obviously considered herself a forgotten member of the Ooyabu community.
Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa and Mrs. Tami Nakamura
Both the third and fourth picture brides introduced in Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada, Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa and Mrs. Tami Nakamura, came from Hiroshima Prefecture (広島県). The former was from Yuki (油木町), a mountain area in the district of Jinseki-gun
(神石郡) and the latter was from Hiroshima City (広島市). According to the statistics provided by Ayukawa, among the first three groups of the government-contract workers who embarked for Hawaii in 1884, the largest number were from Hiroshima Prefecture: 963 out of 2,859 (Hiroshima Immigrants 9). Just like Oshima Island and the east basin of Lake Biwa, Hiroshima Prefecture was also known as a major source of emigration to North America during the prewar period. Significantly, unlike Oshima Island and the east basin of Lake Biwa, where people left for migrant work because of its limited natural resources, Hiroshima has been one of the prominent regions in Japan since the late sixteenth century, and it was the destination for many internal migrants and even immigrants in the early twentieth century.13 As early as 1589, Hiroshima was founded by Mori Terumoto, a great warlord who made it his capital and constructed Hiroshima Castle. In the Meiji Era, it developed as a major urban city.
During the 1880s, Hiroshima constructed its harbor and thereafter became an important port in Japan. Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa and Mrs. Tami Nakamura were born in this period as Hiroshima grew into a prosperous urban center of Japan. In this section, I attempt to underline Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa and Mrs. Tami Nakamura’s schooling in Hiroshima with a view to presenting how picture bride experiences may enrich our understanding about the regional education system in Hiroshima.
In 1872, the Meiji government declared a four-year compulsory elementary education for all children. Mrs. Maki Fukushima, who came from Oshima Island, went to the primary school in the village until the sixth grade, and then her father contacted a schoolteacher to organize a night school for the children in her family. They learned abacus, reading, writing, and ethnic. However, as Mrs. Maki Fukushima stated, since the night school was not formal education, “[p]ersonally, it didn’t amount too much at all, and that’s why I’m uneducated”
13 In her Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, Lisa Yoneyama points out that
“[f]ollowing the devastation caused by Japan’s colonial takeover of Korea in 1910, large numbers of Koreans began to migrate to Hiroshima. . . . Because Hiroshima had grown into a modern, industrial city of the colonial metropolis, many from North and South Asia migrated to Hiroshima to seek opportunities for employment and education” (152).
(45). She further indicated that “I’m sure that when I was born in 1892, there was compulsory education. But the people in the village never used writing, so they thought they didn’t need an education. Around then, a lot of the women hadn’t ever gone to school. . . . And some girls came to school carrying small children, their younger siblings, on their backs” (45). Through Mrs. Maki Fukushima’s testimony, it is suggested that the compulsory education was not adequately implemented in her home village and female education was remained neglected in Oshima Island. Similarly, people in Ooyabu did not underline the significance of female education. Mrs. Hana Murata received only four-year primary school education. If children in her home village attempted to continue their education, they had to take a long tramp to Hikone. Thus, Mrs. Hana Murata quit her education after the fourth grade, and according to her, “there were only one or two children from the village every year who went on the girls’
high school in Hikone” because “in those days, studying wasn’t as important for a girl as needle work” (75).
While both Mrs. Maki Fukushima and Mrs. Hana Murata claimed that they were
“uneducated” (45; 75), Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa and Mrs. Tami Nakamura had relatively good education in Hiroshima. Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa stated that she graduated from “the upper primary school course” and after that she went to supplementary classes for a year (104). She originally planned to pursue further studies in a medical school, but because her grades were not good enough, she finally went to a school for midwives in Osaka for two years. In addition to formal education, she also learned how to play the lute, the chikuzen biwa. Mrs.
Yasu Ishikawa’s good education greatly affected her life in Canada. First, her education accounted for her dissatisfaction with her picture bride marriage. She fiercely criticized her first husband: “he wasn’t smart. We didn’t have anything in common to talk about. . . . I could have put up with an ordinary man, but really, this one was below average” because he “didn’t have anything between his ears” (104-05). Additionally, her schooling as a midwife rendered
her economically independent in Canada and enabled her to leave her first husband.
Compared with Mrs. Yasu Ishikawa, the other Issei woman from Hiroshima City, Mrs.
Tami Nakamura, had even higher educational background. Her father being a lieutenant, Mrs.
Tami Nakamura lived in the center of Hiroshima, the Fifth Divisional Headquarters near the Hiroshima Castle, and received free education for the officers’ children there. After
completing six-year education in the primary school, she passed the exam for the prefectural school for girls and then studied in the girls’ high school for four years. According to Mrs.
Tami Nakamura, the girl’s high school was a place providing “a bride’s education,” and she learned sewing and the koto (a Japanese harp) there (130). Interestingly, as Mrs. Tami Nakamura indicated, students in the girls’ high school could even take either English or Embroidery as their optional subject. People in Hiroshima City as such not only maintained their Japanese traditional culture but also relished on western culture in the early twentieth century. Briefly, the four Issei women’s cases bring to the fore Japan’s regional disparities in educational development in the turn of the twentieth century.