What started in 2015 as a passion project by journalists Kathryn Tolbert, Karen Kasmauski and Lucy Craft — all daughters of Japanese war brides — has grown into a touring Smithsonian exhibit.
Now on display at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, Japanese War Brides: Across A Wide Divide, is accompanied by a companion exhibit titled Women of Yamato. Both run through Sunday, Sept. 28.
After World War II, between 1947 and the early 1960s, more than 45,000 Japanese women married American servicemen and became known as “war brides.”
Despite being on opposite sides during the War, and a climate of American xenophobia, in 1952, the U.S. passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, ending Asian exclusion laws and giving Asians, including Japanese immigrants who had been incarcerated in this country during the war, the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens.
The Japanese war brides became the largest migration of Asian women to the U.S., increasing the Asian-American population by 10% by 1960, according to the Smithsonian.
“I hope viewers come away from the exhibit with a sense of the strength and resiliency of the war brides and the diversity of their experiences,” says Tolbert in the museum’s exhibit. “These are universal stories of women building lives, finding identity, and forging community.”
Among the personal stories featured is that of Tolbert’s mother, Hiroko Furukawa Tolbert, from an upper-class Tokyo family, who came to the U.S. in 1952, married a chicken farmer from Elmira, N.Y., and became an “egg lady.”
Interviewed in 2016, Hiroko Tolbert says in an interactive video display as part of the exhibit, “I feel 100 percent American. My ideas, my thinking, my action — I’m American. I divorced myself from being Japanese.”
She died in 2021 at the age of 90.
Another war bride, Mimi Fumiko Ishikawa Langley, who married Airman First Class David Langley in 1958 and moved with him to the U.S. says, “I don’t have to pretend. I can be myself wherever I am.”
Unlike other immigrants who settled into ethnic enclaves with other transplanted nationals, the war brides came alone and settled across the country, without linguistic or cultural support. Many worked in or started their own small businesses, in real estate, hair salons and restaurants.
The exhibit highlights how, despite barriers of race, language, religion and culture, these women created families and lives for themselves, embodied resilience and left a legacy in their adopted country.
To receive approval to marry and travel with their husbands to the U.S., Japanese women were subject to extensive screening and offered classes by the American Red Cross that educated them in traditional roles, responsibilities and behaviors of the American woman, even offering cooking classes on making the perfect meatloaf.
In the years after World War II, U.S. immigration policies were harsh towards Asian immigrants and the war brides played a key role in opening the U.S. to Asian immigration, challenging anti-miscegenation laws.
Carla Stansifer, the Morikami’s curator of Japanese art, reflects on the courage of these intrepid women.
“The bravery of these women is what strikes me every time I walk through the exhibit,” Stansifer says. “They came to a new country with customs and cultures that were foreign to them. In addition, most didn’t have a Japanese community for support. They had to forge new community ties on their own.”
In a time of renewed debate over immigration, such as the U.S. faces currently, Stansifer feels that these stories resonate.
“It’s a wonderful example of people contributing to and enriching their new homeland,” she says.
Complementing the Japanese War Brides exhibit is Women of Yamato, which chronicles the lives of early 20th-century “picture brides”— Japanese women who immigrated between 1907 and 1924 to marry men they had never met.
By 1920, more than 10,000 picture brides had moved to the Continental U.S., according to the Smithsonian, to marry men based solely on photographs.
Some of the men sent old or retouched photographs of themselves, or posed in borrowed clothing with fancy accoutrements, to give the illusion of being wealthy and well-established. Many women, once they arrived and saw the reality of these men, returned home or ran away from the marriage.
Yet others stayed — among them were Etsu Oishi, who married Yamato Colony co-founder Henry Kamiya; Sada Sakai, who wed fellow co-founder Jo Sakai in 1907; and Suye Kobayashi, who married Oscar Susumu Kobayashi in 1922.
Told not to pack her kimono, Suye Kobayashi came to Boca Raton to join her husband at the Yamato Colony, co-founded in 1905 by Jo Sakai and Henry Kamiya, where she would wear Western-style dress suited to the South Florida climate and allow her to work on the farm.
Unlike the Japanese picture brides to arrive on the West Coast of the U.S., the ones who arrived at the Yamato Colony came with no support and defied stereotypes of the submissive Japanese wife.
They adopted Western styles despite still wearing their hair in traditional Japanese buns and took to housekeeping, although many came from upper-class families with servants to cook and clean.
And, due to limited options for Japanese food, they learned to cook American-style food for their newly born American children and shopped for toys and children’s clothing in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
“The main theme of the exhibit is strong women,” says Stansifer. “Despite the hardships and culture shock, none express any strong regrets.”
Stansifer says that despite their difficulties, these women would choose their same path again.
“Like the Yamato women, I hope we can all live lives with few or no regrets about our choices,” she says.
Sada Sakai, one of the original Yamato women, had six children and eventually returned to Japan, dying in 1980 at 93. Kobayashi moved to Illinois and lived to 100. Etsu Oishi, Kamiya’s great-niece, settled in Jacksonville, helping run family businesses.
And, although the Yamato Colony disbanded after the entry of the U.S. into World War II to make way for a military training base where Florida Atlantic University now sits, Stansifer says its legacy — and that of its pioneering women — lives on through the Morikami Museum.
“Their stories exemplify resilience, tradition, and adaptability,” says Stansifer. “The legacy of the Women of Yamato is alive and well.”
Japanese War Brides: Across A Wide Divide, and the companion exhibit Women of Yamato runs through Sunday, September 28. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with The War Bride Experience, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and The Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens is located at 4000 Morikami Park Road in Delray Beach. It is open from 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $15; seniors, $13; children, $9. Call 495-0233 or visit morikami.org.