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Japanese War Brides Tell Their Stories
Southern Campus Professor Discusses Her Recent Book
Although there are many Japanese-Americans who know of their heritage from both America and Japan, there are those who may not know the whole story. Japanese War Brides in America: An Oral History provides a look into a deeper story that has largely been hidden away in the memories of the women who created history.
Miki Ward Crawford, one of the authors and associate professor of communication and faculty coordinator at the Southern campus, is particularly close to the book’s subject matter because her mother is a Japanese war bride. The term “Japanese war bride” has been applied to Japanese women who married American servicemen after World War II. Many of these women feel that “Japanese war brides” has a negative connotation. However, there has not been another term that readily identifies these women.
“My mother didn’t talk to me about her experience until I was an adult," Crawford said. "She always said she didn’t want to talk about ‘the bad things’. I think that they [war brides] were trying to protect their children.”
Crawford came up with the idea for the research in 2005 after traveling to Washington, D.C. with a group of honor society student to their national convention. The guest speaker at the convention encouraged students to take part in the National Veteran’s Project, which collects oral history from American veterans of various wars and catalogs these into the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. The Ohio University Southern Campus students provided videos of ten local servicemen.
After hearing the veterans’ experiences, Crawford decided to tell another, lesser known, part of the story – the one from the Japanese brides’ point of view.
While Crawford felt it was time the war brides’ stories came to light, finding women open to sharing their stories with her was not easy. Many of the women profiled in the book were telling their stories for the first time.
The women Crawford spoke to came from all parts of America; she met some through mutual friends, some through the Nikkei International Marriage Society and others purely by chance while conducting interviews and doing independent research.
“I think that many of these women are at the age where they’re ready to tell their stories,” Crawford said. “When I was conducting interviews, I had my mini DVD and my mp3 recorder and I just let them speak. At some points, I think they forgot that they were being recorded.”
Crawford and her co-authors explore the different aspects of the women’s lives: their lives in Japan, how they met their husbands, their journey to America, and life after their assimilation into the U.S. culture.
While it was difficult for the wives to move into a completely new setting that wasn’t accepting of their culture, many of the women also had children with their husbands and found their children faced new challenges, as well. Some of the wives shared their children’s experiences of growing up in America as half-Japanese, half-American.
One woman in the book told Crawford that her sons were teased mercilessly and had a very difficult time growing up and being accepted.
“They said to her, ‘America is not my country and Japan is not my country; where is my home country?’” Crawford said.
Crawford, whose mother is Japanese-born and father is American, said she was lucky. She did not have an especially difficult childhood because she grew up in the same neighborhood and attended the same school system as her peers. with all the kids she went to school with. There was teasing when she entered into middle school, but she felt, overall, that she had grown up in an accepting community.
The stories of the women in Japanese War Brides in America: An Oral History and the hardships they faced are heartbreaking and unforgettable. But through many of their stories shines a particular courage and hope for a better life for themselves and their families.
To date the book, Japanese War Brides in America is in 160 libraries in five countries. Most of these are academic libraries.
Author Miki Crawford's mother, Fumiko Tomita Ward, married Louis Ward in 1947 and again in 1950, after a special bill was passed by Congress allowing her and their son to move to the United States. Prior to this, the 1924 Immigration Act prevented Japanese brides of American soldiers from immigrating to this country; some states had miscegenation laws which made interracial marriages illegal. Those laws later were repealed or found to be unconstitutional.
Photos: Right - Louis Ward and Fumiko Tomita (1947), provided by Miki Ward Crawford.
Top of page - Book Cover
Related article:
Faculty members filming documentary about Japanese war brides - Sept. 2009, Huntington Herald-Dispatch
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