Kathryn Tolbert

Keno in Reno (5:28)

Kazuko Watanabe Jordan

Kazue Jordan – born Kazue Shibata – was a jitterbugging bobby-soxer who danced nights away with black GIs at a cabaret in Yokohama. She married one of those soldiers, Sidney Jordan, and accompanied him to the United States. Her California life, cleaning houses for the rich and famous, was a kind of immigrant success story. But she also lived in a smaller universe of Japanese women who married black GIs in the aftermath of World War II and had to negotiate an especially difficult racial and cultural divide.

Grateful for Women’s Lib (5:00)

Faith Nobuko Araki Barcus

It took the 1960s women’s movement to make a Japanese war bride see that her view of what it meant to be an American wife did not need to be so limiting. Because, in fact, she had already enjoyed a more liberated life in Japan than she did in the US.

Caring for Kimiko (4:57)

Kimiko Kasahara Drake

Being alone and old in an adopted country, Kimiko Drake might have died in lonely isolation. She had no children and her husband passed away years before. Like so many Japanese women who married American servicemen, she didn’t feel she could return to Japan, that Japan would not be a welcoming place for her. But Kimiko had Karen, the daughter of another Japanese woman, who put herself in Kimiko’s shoes.

Keeping the Ties (3:47)

Deacon Joe Sexton

There is little to suggest in Joe Sexton’s Philadelphia upbringing that he would be so connected to Japan into his 80s. His Japanese wife died of cancer a dozen years ago. But in Joe’s case, his wife’s roots are also his, and the impact of one young Japanese bride is that a retired Catholic deacon is a connoissuuer of ramen broth and treats as relatives a family in northern Japan, despite the barrier of distance and language.