They married the enemy, then created uniquely American lives

She married my American GI father barely knowing him. She moved from Tokyo to a small poultry farm just outside Elmira, N.Y., and from there she delivered eggs all over the county and into Pennsylvania. My sister describes her as having a “core of steel.” She raised us as determinedly as any mother could, and yet, looking back, I barely knew her.

Some people think the film I co-directed, “Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides,” is a paean to loving Japanese mothers. When one interviewer suggested as much to me and fellow director Karen Kasmauski, we exchanged a look that said, “Shall we tell him the truth?” The film, titled after a Japanese proverb, is about strong women, for sure. Warm and loving mothers? No.

So who are these women and what do we, their children, know about them?

They are sisters and daughters of the ferocious enemy that attacked Pearl Harbor in the “day of infamy,” an enemy that surrendered four years later after waves of firebombing on Japanese cities and the dropping of atomic bombs. They married men who occupied their country and came to the United States. And then? They disappeared into America. There were tens of thousands of them, yet they vanished from public awareness — Japanese women who were barely a blip in immigration history, who married into families of North Dakota farmers, Wisconsin loggers, Rhode Island general store owners.

They either tried, or were pressured, to give up their Japanese identities to become more fully American. A first step was often adopting the American nicknames given them when their Japanese names were deemed too hard to pronounce or remember. Chikako became Peggy; Kiyoko became Barbara. Not too much thought went into those choices, names sometimes imposed in an instant by a U.S. officer organizing his pool of typists. My mother, Hiroko Furukawa, became Susie.

How did it feel to be renamed for someone in the man’s past, a distant relative or former girlfriend? My mother said she didn’t mind, and others said it made their lives easier to have an American name.

The brides, as many as 45,000, landed in the home towns of their husbands, places where Japanese people had been visible only on World War II propaganda posters. Was their skin really yellow? One war bride in South Carolina was asked to pull up her sleeve since no yellow was visible on her hands and wrists.

In making the film with Kasmauski and Lucy Craft, I began to understand that my mother’s struggles as an immigrant woman who was alone in this country were mirrored in the lives of tens of thousands of other Japanese women of her generation who came as wives of Americans. As a journalist, I felt compelled to talk to some of them before it was too late. As a daughter, I wanted to know my mother’s place in U.S. history and perhaps my own. I received a grant from my alma mater, Vassar College, to travel the United States and interview Japanese war brides and their families, to capture their voices in audio stories and scan their old photographs, to create an oral history archive. Over the course of a year I recorded some 60 conversations.

Sometimes the women, now in their 80s and 90s, were reluctant to be interviewed and were coaxed into being recorded by their families, especially their children, who wanted to hear the stories themselves. But once they started to talk, these women remembered some of the most startling details of their early lives — the small lies they told their mothers, the sudden glimpses of temper in the men they would marry, the sweetness or bullheadedness of American men trying to communicate with future Japanese fathers-in-law. They showed me albums with wonderful treasures — photos of striking young couples, of themselves in glamour poses perhaps influenced by the Hollywood films that were so popular in Japan, of beach outings with their soldier boyfriends.

These are the stories they and their families tell.

The bombs fell, the emperor surrendered, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops landed on the Japanese homeland by troopship and transport plane, to prevent starvation and social collapse while they remade the defeated nation.

The Yamamoto family was respectable, and for a daughter to date a GI was a big blemish on its reputation. Some families disowned daughters, striking their names from family registries, the all-important record of ancestry.

Hiroko’s father died when he was struck by a truck while riding a bicycle, and she hid her Montgomery Clift look-alike boyfriend, a Marine and cook for the officers club, from her mother for quite a while.

As for my family, my Japanese grandmother opposed my mother’s relationship with Bill, and neighbors gossiped pointedly. My mother didn’t care. Neither did she care when my grandmother warned her with an old proverb: “He’s like the bones of an unknown horse.” My grandmother was saying: Before you marry a man, you must know his family, his circumstances, his values. The soldiers were an unknown quantity in a society where lineage is all-important.

The U.S. government was not in favor of these liaisons either. The men faced tremendous legal hurdles to bringing home Japanese wives. The Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigrants through a quota system by nationality, also excluded any person who was not eligible for citizenship, and that meant Asians. Several temporary laws in the late 1940s allowed servicemen to marry their Japanese girlfriends and bring them home if they could complete the paperwork in time. The system was designed to make marriage difficult to accomplish, and easy for the young man to change his mind.

Passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 removed the legal obstacles, although paperwork was still considerable. Commanding officers continued to discourage the relationships, not just out of personal animus but also because they anticipated the unions might be deemed illegal in the men’s home states. In 1952, interracial marriages were still banned, at least on the books, in more than half the nation. The Supreme Court declared those laws unconstitutional in the 1967 decision for Loving v. Virginia.

It seems incomprehensible to me, as a mother, to let a daughter go so far away with a foreign man, knowing communication would be difficult and coming home almost impossible. But I also know that some families were large, and poor, and to send a daughter off with what they thought was a rich American was a tough but practical decision. America meant a brighter future.

The young women were ill-prepared for their lives in the United States. As one family liked to joke, their mother went from life in Tokyo with a maid to life in Florida with an outhouse. And women who married black GIs entered an America segregated to a degree they did not imagine.

“My husband told me about it. He mentioned to me before I left Japan,” said Chizuko Watkins, 88, of Los Altos Hills, Calif. “He told me when you go to the States, you see something, funny things like that.” But she didn’t think much about it until she traveled by train to meet her husband in Atlanta, where she unknowingly checked into a “white” hotel and her husband, Clifford, couldn’t join her, or even meet her there.

And what about the men? What did they expect? Probably wives who would be more submissive than American women, but also, paradoxically, wives who would run American-style households, cook American meals, raise American kids and impart American values to those children. The Red Cross in Japan ran popular “brides schools,” where Japanese women were taught how to make beds, bake cakes, wear makeup and walk in high heels. Toyo Swartz, 92, of Vallejo, Calif., showed me glossy photographs of herself in those classes and recalled being taught how to make meatloaf. Such photographs were taken to show Americans that the Japanese women were going to fit right in.

In many cases the men were unprepared as well. After all, my mother knew she was going to a farm. My father probably never suspected he was bringing home an opinionated, strong-willed woman who could never be content as a chicken farmer’s wife.

The more my father wanted to settle for what he had — a house trailer and low-level farm work — the more my mother fought for what she wanted. And for years, that was the pattern. She says it made their marriage worse, and she blames herself as much as him: she wasn’t the right wife for him. Not because she was Japanese, but because they were poorly suited for each other. In temperament. In outlook. After more than 30 years together, they got divorced.

He remarried and died more than 15 years ago. I wish I had asked him why he chose my mother, what made him think he should marry her and bring her home to the farm, whether he believed in the obedient Asian wife stereotype. I do know that as the years went by, he resented her ambition, her desire to expand the grocery store, build a new home, push her children to apply to the best colleges possible. And because of their personalities, she got her way.

Never once did she consider going back to Japan. No war bride I’ve interviewed felt they could go back to Japan. When they left, they recalled, they were warned: Don’t come home crying. And certainly don’t come home crying with children.

Some descended into bitterness and depression. Most simply moved forward as best they could — raising kids, finding solace in friendships or faith; reinventing themselves to fit their changed reality.

There were many exceptions, of course. Great love stories, solid partnerships, loving families; men who cared about their wives’ Japanese roots. More than 12 years after his wife, Kiyoko, died, 82-year-old Joe Sexton of Philadelphia still sends a large box of gifts every Christmas to her relatives in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, and calls them annually, using an interpreter. He treasures his favorite ramen broth that they send to him in return packages, and he shares the bounty with his children.

Women married to career military men more easily found other Japanese war bride families to form friendships. But they also endured husbands absent for long stretches — including duty in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s. During that period, the Japanese wives left behind near the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md. formed a social group that continues to this day.

About a dozen of the women meet every month, often at the Golden Corral for the all-you-can-eat brunch, loading their plates with fried chicken, macaroni and potatoes. They trade Japanese books and magazines, teach each other how to make new origami ornaments, go to cheer the Japanese youth baseball team that comes to compete in the Cal Ripken World Series.

When my parents divorced, my father offered my mother the choice of keeping either their house or the country store — assuming she’d take the home. It only went to show how much he still misjudged her. My mother took Tolbert’s Store and made an unlikely success of it — also demonstrating a kind of feminism by employing only women, from Ellie, who worked the deli, to “Betty, my butcher.”

In fact, Betty Maramack became my mother’s closest friend and business confidante — teaching her how to control inventory and also persuading her to get her first flu shot. Betty advised my mother when to sell the store — a sale that made enough money to usher her into comfortable retired life.

The Japanese war brides were determined to raise what they imagined were all-American children. And they did. Their children are American, and they have little connection to Japan. Most do not have Japanese names.

I don’t think of myself as Asian American. In my Upstate New York upbringing, there weren’t other Asians, certainly not other Japanese Americans, with whom I might have felt some affinity. But I was surprised to find that even children of Japanese war brides on the West Coast — with its deeply embedded Asian communities — did not think of themselves as especially Japanese American.

I think that’s partly because the Japanese war brides so rigorously suppressed their former identities to become American. Their departures on the arms of American men were viewed with sadness, by the women and their families alike, because they were probably leaving forever. And there was an underlying tinge of shame that they had turned away from Japan or that Japan could not provide for them.

The women don’t view their families today as a branch on their Japanese family tree; they started from scratch. “I came here alone, and today I have 28 family members,” one woman told me with quiet pride.

Bill and Hiroko Tolbert owned Tolbert's Market just outside Elmira, New York. After their divorce, Hiroko ran the store on her own, but had invaluable help from a veteran of the grocery business, Betty Maramack. Betty worked in the meat department and Hiroko always referred to her as "Betty, my butcher." (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)

My mother didn’t speak Japanese to us. Very few war brides used Japanese at home. Their husbands didn’t want them to, fearing it would become a shared language that excluded them. And the women viewed it as counterproductive to their efforts to become real Americans and to have their children be seen the same as other kids.

Some of their children who later learned Japanese or who were able to spend time in Japan found it gave them unexpected insights into their mothers.

Rodney Yoder, of Boston, was a Harvard student spending a year at Doshisha University in Kyoto when his mother, Itsuko, came to visit. Decades later, sitting in his Back Bay apartment, he choked up at the recollection. “I could understand my mom for the first time. I could hear her speak, I could hear her sense of humor. My home-stay family told me how bright and cheerful my mother is. So in a way it was like getting to know her for the first time.”

The women often stayed away from Japan — perhaps taking only one or two trips “home’’ during 60 years. Sometimes it was because of the expense. But also, Japan had changed, become unrecognizably rich, and they themselves had become strangers there.

My mother enjoyed more regular visits to Japan — sometimes as a member of the local delegation in the “Sister City” exchanges between nearby Corning, N.Y., and the city of Kakegawa. Japan may have changed, but the food she loved was the same. Her mother, brother and sister always welcomed her. Her nieces took time off from work to go around with her. She was lucky.

But she never told her mother that she was divorced; she couldn’t bring herself to undermine the picture of her American life that she had painted over the years, of a good marriage and wonderful family. She also didn’t want to concede that her mother had perhaps been right more than six decades ago with her warning about the bones of an unknown horse.

Hiroko Tolbert on the family poultry farm in the early 1950s. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)

She herself knew she did not make a mistake. She has said over and over that it was the right decision to leave Japan. She bounced back from a hard landing, made a life and is satisfied with how it turned out.

America has been perfect for her in that sense, because she was entrepreneurial and the harder she worked, the more she could get ahead. That brought her immense satisfaction.

And she raised four children, not with warmth or expressions of love, but with a fierce determination.

The language my mother used when we were growing up was always about hard work and studying, getting ahead. Like Japanese mothers in general, she was obsessed with education. She paid for tutors. She read my history chapters when I was in junior high so that she could ask me questions before a test.

She wanted us to succeed because that would mean she succeeded. That was extremely important to her. She said she didn’t want people to say, “Look what happens when a Japanese comes to this country.”

Her mothering didn’t include saying to her children, “I love you.” To this day she doesn’t say it, although she now returns goodbye hugs, if stiffly.

I am the oldest child, the custodian of her story. I tell my mother’s story, and those of other Japanese women like her, to give them recognition for what they endured and what they achieved. For their extraordinary resilience.

I have learned Japanese and taught it to my daughter. I also hug my daughter every time I see her, and I always tell her I love her.

Hiroko with her daughter and granddaughter during a Christmas 2008 visit to Washington. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)

To see the complete collection of audio stories produced with the Time Out grant from Vassar College, go to www.warbrideproject.com.

The film “Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides,” will be screened on Sept. 29 at 6:30 p.m. at the Japan Information & Culture Center in the District.

For other ways to view the film, see here.