ddr-densho-56-148

GIRL'S LOVE FOR ORIENTAL WRECKS HOME OF HER FATHER

Archdeacon John Emery, Father of Helen Gladys, Who Married Gunjiro Aoki, Leaves City Alone, While Mother of Bride Remains Here -- Lawyer Brings Suit Against Emery

Facts About the Aoki-Emery Marriage

Groom was a house servant in the family of Archdeacon John Emery, of the Episcopal Diocese of California. He is a full-blooded Japanese, and in order to wed his bride he was forced to travel more than 1,000 miles to a state where there was no legal impediment to the union.

Archdeacon Emery, for forty years a minister of the Episcopal faith, opposed the marriage, but to gratify the determination of his wife and young daughter, he brought them to Seattle and registered under an assumed name -- "E.J. Abbott" -- at the Hotel Savoy. His wife and daughter also registered under assumed names.

Ceremony performed by Rev. H.H. Gowen, rector of Trinity Parish, at 11:45 a.m. yesterday.

Rev. Emery leaves wife and daughter here and returns, apparently a heartbroken man, to San Francisco, first visiting kind friends at Tacoma.

Augustus Armstrong, a local lawyer, sues Rev. Emery for legal fee alleged to have been earned in giving father of Aoki's bride advice as to international law and treaty rights of Japanese.

"Please don't let those photographers take a snap shot of me. I have had all the troubles I can endure. I wish to leave here quietly. On principle I was opposed to the marriage of my daughter -- my only child -- with a Japanese. But my daughter and my wife felt differently, so I had to give in. My sense of duty was to see that they were properly married and by one of my own faith. Let me go, now, please."

His face flushed and marked with evidences of intense grief, Archdeacon John Emery, of San Francisco, plead for a respite from further newspaper notoriety, a half hour after his young, fair-haired daughter, Helen Gladys, had stood before the altar of Trinity Episcopal Church yesterday and had plighted her troth to Gunjiro Aoki, a Japanese, formerly a house servant in the minister's family.

In the writing room of the Hotel Savoy yesterday afternoon he made the statement quoted in the foregoing and time and again begged to be let alone. The old man's face showed traces of months of intense suffering -- of the sorrow that comes with the surrender to a will stronger than his own of principles which he says he held as dear as the tenets of his faith -- the belief that his girl should not wed a man of an alien race.

EMERY'S HOME BROKEN UP

It was to his wife's will that Archdeacon Emery, after months of painful struggle, finally surrendered. His home in Corte Madera, Cal., broken up and abandoned, his cherished work among the missions of San Francisco neglected, his wife estranged, the aged minister left Seattle alone, leaving his wife and his daughter, with her Japanese husband, to care for themselves.

"My plans are not made," said Archdeacon Emery. "I cannot tell when I shall return to my work in San Francisco. I will visit friends awhile. I beg of you to cease asking questions." Then the aged minister left the hotel where he had masqueraded under an assumed name, and, alone and unattended went to the dock to board a steamer for Tacoma.

Never in the history of the Pacific Coast states has there been such a stir as was caused by the love-making of Helen Gladys Emery, a cultivated American girl, reared amid refined surroundings in California, and Gunjiro Aoki, who came here from Japan six years ago,a raw immigrant from the land of the Rising Sun. Press associations and newspapers all over the country followed their wooing when the story first leaked but more than six months ago in California. The pair were practically driven out of California by public sentiment.

When the crucial moment came, the aged archdeacon father of the girl, bitterly opposed the proposed marriage of

his daughter with the Japanese Aoki. He discharged the brown-skinned shervant [servant] and forbade him the house.

Then, after months of struggling against the combined wills of his wife and daughter, he surrendered. He saw his home at Corte Madera dismantled. The two women packed up a few personal belongings. They sold most of the furniture and household effects. All the "Lares and Penates" of the household were thrown to the winds save a few cherished trinkets which the girl -- a mere slip of a child -- had treasured, through the few short years that welded her childhood to her young womanhood. And all this to gratify the passion of the girl for Aoki.

Moreover, Archdeacon Emery went through even sadder days. The impulse of the cultivated man to furnish forth a wedding feast for his daughter when she should arrive at marriageable age -- the natural wish to proudly proclaim her approaching nuptials and the manly desire to provide a fitting celebration of the nuptials of his only child -- all these were foregone and abandoned by the minister when he found that his wife's will was stronger than his own and that her determination, as well as that of the daughter's, could not be overcome.

Aoki and Bride Disappear.

So the strong willed, square-jawed wife and mother won. When the ceremony was over, Aoki and his bride quickly sought shelter in a down town hotel, and then disappeared as if they had been pursued by some evil thing. There was no wedding breakfast at which congratulations of friends and relatives could be given and received. There were no congratulations of any kind. Nothing but the hurried and frightened desire to seek a place remote from humanity and away from newspapers and their reporters.

No one save the mother and father of the bride, and the wedded pair themselves, know where the honeymoon will be spent or where Aoki and his bride will make their home. In some place in the country, far remote from her own kith and kin, 'Helen' Emery Aoki will spend the first few weeks of her married life. Then after that, according to her own statements and those of her mother, will begin the test of the man Aoki -- Japanese house servant -- as to his ability to maintain an American wife on a scale benefiting her birth and breeding.

What the Young Bride Says.

And this is what the girl herself is quoted as saying regarding those intimate problems resulting from this curious union:

"A great many people seem to worry about any children that we will have. There are not many children of mixed marriages in this country, so they have no experience on which to found their evil prophecies. I do not fear for the future of any children that we may have. What is good enough for their father is good enough for them.

"All my friends have told me that none of these mixed marriages turn out happily. Perhaps that is so. Other American girls will perhaps become enamored with Japanese, and if our marriage proves a failure it will serve to warn other girls. So you see I will be doing some good after all.

"You know that there is no real happiness without some sacrifice. I have been annoyed and humiliated. I feel badly about losing all my friends and my home. I know if people knew what mother and I have been through they would not be so cruel to us, but I feel that having endured all that I will be happier in the end.

"There is nothing wrong about my marrying Gunjiro. My friends only dislike him because he is a Japanese. My attachment for him is not a sudden fancy. It has been growing since I first met him at the Japanese mission. I have studied and debated this thing with myself for a long time, and feel perfectly assured in doing what I am. I am sure that any other girl that felt toward Aoki as I do would not condemn me.

"Perhaps I am doing a foolish thing, but time alone will tell."

Lawyer Sues for Fee.

Augustus Armstrong, a lawyer, with offices in the New York Block, added the last sensation to the Aoki-Emery love affair yesterday afternoon when he filed a suit in the superior court for $4,999.99 against Archdeacon Emery, father of the bride of the Japanese. Armstrong alleges that he furnished legal advice to the parents of Mrs. Aoki prior to the ceremony, regarding the treaty rights of Japanese in America, and international laws governing the movement of Japanese between this country and British Columbia. He says that his fee can justly be estimated at anywhere between $5 and $4,999.99, in part of which the defendant, Archdeacon Emery, has paid. Plaintiff asks judgment against defendant.

"Archdeacon Emery came to my residence about 6 o'clock Friday evening," said Attorney Armstrong last night. "He did not give me his name, but introduced himself under another, and said that he represented Emery. He explained that he had met a friend of mine at the Hotel Savoy and that I had been recommended to him.

"I am not at liberty to go into the details of our conversation, nor can I tell just what information he sought. Let it suffice that he wanted to know the law relating to the intermarriage of whites and Orientals, and having been satisfied he departed.

Did Not Know Caller's Identity.

"I did not know until today, after reading the newspapers, the identity of my caller, that is why I put so many alaises [aliases] in my complaint, and asked particularly that Archdeacon Emery himself answer.

"We did not get service this afternoon, and I have not yet decided whether I shall seek that by publication. I know nothing of him, and he did not seek my advice in my capacity as United States commissioner. It was a plain legal transaction."