The Picture Bride, A.K.A. the Perfect Bride

During the early 1900s, Japanese women went to Hawaiʻi in hopes of finding a husband and prosperous life, whether by finding a wealthy husband or working hard themselves. Leaving their home countries for economic reasons, or to escape the submission to parental decisions or filial duties, these young women hoped to find a life of ease and more rights. However, when they saw how hard their new husbands worked on plantations and kept their cultural values, these new brides realized their lives would not be as pleasant as they thought. Through the eyes of Riyo in Picture Bride by Kayo Hatta, the characteristics of the typical Asian picture bride were portrayed through her expectations when she arrived in Hawaiʻi and the lifestyle she had on the plantation. Years later, Asian women are still portrayed with similar qualities in the media.

Although picture brides and mail-order brides are similar, they are used by different ethnic groups and time periods. Before picture brides became common, men of the mid-1800s used mail-order brides to find wives while they began their new lives on the American frontier. The men began traveling West when the United States started marketing the empty land that was available after the Civil War. Men traveled in groups or alone to the west and hoped to find financial success by claiming land, starting businesses, farming, and finding gold (Pennington). They did not bring women on the journey so they would not have to worry about being slowed down or providing for them and the future family until they made money. When the men finally did get settled in their new homes, they realized the population of women was close to little in their settlements. They hoped to find women from the U.S. East coast to bring back to marry. Advertising themselves in East coast newspapers and writing letters to churches, the men would wait for women to write them a letter and attach a photo of themselves. They would continue to write and court each other until the women agreed to marriage. The majority of the women wanted to leave their current living situation, gain financial security, and explore the West. In a similar practice, Japanese and Korean picture brides went to Hawaiʻi and the West Coast of the United States.

The picture bride system, particularly in Japan, developed when Asian men traveled overseas to Hawaiʻi and the rest of the United States. Like the American men in the West, the Asian men lived in settlements where there were only men. Many of the men went to the Hawaiian Islands to temporarily work on plantations. As they worked on the plantations, the workers eventually fell in debt to the owners. That meant they had to stay much longer than they planned in order to pay it off (which rarely happened). As Nakamura notes in “Picture Brides,” many of the plantation owners encouraged their laborers to marry so they would permanently stay on the plantation. They also hoped the married men would limit their gambling, drinking, and the use of prostitution, which the film Picture Bride reveals did not happen.

Picture brides developed after Japan and the United States made the Japanese-American Passport Agreement of 1907, which did not allow any more citizens to leave Japan to work in the United States (Nakamura). Since the Japanese men realized they could never go back home, they desired to start a family. The only women who were allowed to leave Japan were married women and ones who had arranged their marriage before their arrival. Since unmarried Japanese women were not allowed to move to the United States, they realized that becoming a picture bride would gain them access while the man got what he wanted, a wife. Most Japanese women became picture brides because they hoped for prosperity in Hawaiʻi and the rest of the United States since they came from poor families. Many of the women hoped to send money back to their families in Japan.

The picture bride practice in Hawaiʻi was similar to the already common practice of arranged marriage. The idea of marrying out of duty or honor for your family was idealized. A woman’s family members and matchmaker selected marriage partners through an intermediary (Nakamura). These meetings (called nakōdo) allowed the family heads to discuss and negotiate the potential unions without considering the soon-to-be spouses. With the exchanging of photographs, there would be a discussion of family genealogy, wealth, education, and health. Some matchmakers or family members lied to protect their party so they would not be turned down. They would leave out illnesses or use old photos for older men. Both of these cases were what occurred with Riyo, the young bride, and Matsuji, her husband. While Riyo’s matchmaker excluded her parents’ death of tuberculosis, Matsuji used a photo of himself when he was young.

While men married “to establish households and obtain the benefits of marriage--home cooked meals, sexual relations and a family,” they also expected and needed their wives to work to help support the family (Bill). The brides’ day would start at four a.m. preparing breakfast and lunch. They began work at five and finished at four thirty, then worked around their homes until the lights turned off at eight p.m. By 1910, one-third of employed Japanese women were working in the sugar cane fields. Like Riyo who worked with a particular group of women, most of the Japanese women were assigned to a “woman’s field gang” as soon as they arrived.

Riyo was a city girl who thought earning money in Hawai'i would be easy since her husband wrote “money was earned with ease.” However, when Riyo began living on the plantation she realized that it was quite the opposite. Earning money was nearly impossible with the low wages (hers was even lower since she was a woman) and the deduction of the pay for buying essential items from the plantation store. As Bill notes, female sugar plantation workers worked ten hours a day for fifty cents, six days a week. Their month’s pay of thirteen dollars was sixty-six percent of the of Japanese men’s wages. The majority of the picture brides worked on the plantations and did similar tasks to the men while continuing their household chores and taking care of the children. Mothers, like Riyo’s friend, Kana, who could not afford to leave their children with someone else had to bring their babies to fields as they worked. They would have to strap the child on their back or have them sit on the side and move them so they would be nearby as they worked in the fields. Some of the mothers left the fieldwork to cook, clean, do laundry, and make clothes for the bachelor men of the plantation.

Most of the pictures brides were unhappy about their situations in Hawaiʻi. Brides like Riyo and Kana show the trials they faced on the plantations. They encountered culture shock and the possibility of exploitation in a new country (Nakamura). Some of the husbands turned out to be alcoholics and beat their wives, as Kana’s husband did. While Kana’s husband was not abusive towards her when she first arrived in Hawaiʻi, he eventually became aggressive towards her as time passed by on the plantation. Despite these harsh realities, many of the brides stayed with their husbands. They stayed with them not only to avoid bringing shame to their families in Japan, but because they would not be able to live on their own. If a wife rejected her husband then she would be deported back to Japan. Another possibility of escaping their unhappiness on the plantation was through suicide. In Picture Bride, it was interpreted that Kana commits suicide after she spoke to Riyo about “going back to Japan.” While Riyo accepts her life on the plantation with her husband, Kana gives up on life when her child dies in a burning cane field.

Since the United States did not agree with the idea of picture brides, Japan stopped giving passports to picture brides on March 1, 1920 (Pennington). The majority of the United States was starting to turn against Japan; they came up with many negative connotations with the picture bride system. Many in the United States thought the act of picture brides was uncivilized since it did not involve love or pay attention to their idea of morality. They called it a disguise for a prostitution trade since the women went to Hawaiʻi to simply satisfy their husbands and bear children if they did not go into the actual prostitution business. As Lee notes in “Prostitutes and Picture Brides,” some immigrant inspectors thought the picture bride practice was a cover for the prostitution trade. There is no way of knowing the exact number of Japanese women who were forced into prostitution or temporarily worked in it to support their family when their were few choices available for them. However, “the pattern of family settlement” that was found after the Gentlemen's Agreement indicates that most of the Japanese women came to the U.S. to start families. It was also believed that picture brides were treated more like workers rather than wives by their husbands. Americans were also afraid that children born to picture brides would not be a good addition to the population since they would be able to buy land for their parents in the future. This left about 24,000 bachelors without any way to get a Japanese wife.

The portrayal of picture brides in film and literature shows the common stereotypes that are expected of Asian women. Western history has portrayed Asian women as “erotic and exotic beings” (Chun). The Japanese women were sent to the United States to satisfy the large numbers of Japanese males who had relocated there. As Chun notes, the Asian woman was continuously stereotyped as the subservient "china doll;" a silent, dutiful, sexually accommodating object devoted to serving her man. While these women in films and literature listen to what their husbands say, they also show they can be treated in a horrible manner and not do anything to stop it. Despite the poor treatment, films show the picture bride eventually loving her husband when they have endured a hardship together or as time passed (Sakamoto).

Although the early history of Japanese immigrants in Hawaiʻi was dominated by Japanese men, picture brides had an important role in the spread of Japanese people across the United States. Thousands of women arrived in Hawaiʻi, risking their well being in search of greater personal and economic opportunities through marriage to unknown men thousands of miles away. Despite their hardships, these picture brides were able to pull through and survive in a new country. Even though our current culture depicts picture brides as weak women, they have truly shown that picture brides were able to make the best of their situations and start the pathway for their future generations.

Works Cited

Bill, Teresa. "Into the Marketplace Picture Bride." Women and Work in Hawaiʻi. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.

Chun, Christine. “The Mail-Order Bride Industry: The Perpetuation of Transitional Economic Inequalities and Stereotypes.” University of Pennsylvania Law School. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.

Lee, Catherine. “Prostitutes and Picture Brides: Chinese and Japanese Immigration, Settlement, and American Nation- Building, 1870-1920.” University of California, Los Angeles. 2003. Web. 10 March 2015

Nakamura, Kelli Y. "Picture Brides." Densho Encyclopedia. N.p., 27 May 2017. Web. 1 Mar. 2015.

Pennington, Laura. "Marriage Migration, Citizenship, and Vulnerability: The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA)." (n.d.): n. pag. Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Web. 2 Mar. 2015.

Sakamoto, Taylor. "The Triumph and Tragedies of Japanese Women in America: A View Across Four Generations." The History Teacher 41.1 (2007): 97-122. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.