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MR: Another question I have is about the marriages. The Chinese immigrants, lots of single men, they didn't marry so much. What was different about the Japanese that they managed to get married and bring their wives?

HY: Well, Margaret, I don't know about how it was with the Chinese. But with the Japanese system, it was customary, in fact, traditional that in Japan, the parents chose the bride particularly for the men, for their son. I suppose it worked both ways. But in the ancient days and up until the Meiji era which is in the 1868 and further on, the family chose the bride for their oldest, for their son. So in many cases in Japan, they never knew each, the bride and groom, the putative bride and groom never knew each other until they met for the first time at what they call an omiai which is the first meeting, and then they exchange gifts and pleasantry and so on. And then if both the potential bride and the potential groom agree, say, well okay, it makes sense, so we'll get married, then they got married, but it was not a romantic love letter and flowers and movies and dates and car rides and things like that in Japan. And even when my parents came over, it was not like that because in Japanese thinking -- and again as I say I suppose it's true in Chinese thinking too -- the family was paramount. The individual was not nearly as important as the family. So whatever was good for the family was good for their kids. So that's why they had this kind of "picture bride" meeting. In many cases, when -- well, not in many cases, most cases, when the Issei, young Issei men came to the United States, they didn't have enough money to go back to Japan. So what they did is they talked to a friend or a trusted relative, not the parents, but some trusted relative, asked them to find a bride for them. So they'd get all the statistics and what they're interested, and so they would find someone, and then they'd exchange pictures. The groom would take a picture and send it back to the... the guy, the middleman is called a nakoudo. It's commonly known as baishakunin, is the middle man, the matchmaker, the Jewish matchmaker. And he would get a comparable photograph from the woman and find out her vital statistics and education and social background, financial background, and so on, and send it to the potential groom. So they'd exchange these photographs at the beginning. And after a while, usually they would initiate some correspondence between the woman and the man. I don't know how much. But anyway, that's the way it usually worked. And in Japan this is perfectly legal because in Japan, in those days, you can get legally married by proxy. So even though the man is in the United States working on a railroad in Tim, not Timbuktu, in Spokane let's say, and his bride was out there in Nanukaichi, by proxy, they could get married. And in Japan in those days, once that they got married by proxy and her name was entered on her husband's family register, that's called a koseki tohon, and that's a legal binding document. It still exists today, and it's still legal and binding. Once it was registered in that book on paper, she was his legal bride in Japan. Now, the Japanese authorities, well, that's sure a strange, weird way of getting married. They didn't much approve of that; but on the other hand, this was Japan law. United States can't tell Japan what to do legally, so they accepted it with some reservations, and the reservation in the beginning was this. Once the so-called, American says this so-called bride -- more like a prostitute -- comes to the United States, they got to get married, so that's what happened. When the bride came and arrived on the dock, her husband in his duted up suit and all that come to meet her, and they get a white preacher, and they get married on the dock. The only problem, neither one could understand the, the proceeding, but they got a legal document, and I have one for my parents, a legal document, November 12, 1912, in Tacoma, and it's signed by some guy I never heard of. But my father knew a little bit of English by then, but my mother, I'm sure, she was totally in the dark what the hell was going on. But that's what happened. In the United States, in order to satisfy everybody, they had to get remarried. So this was the "picture bride" system. You can get married by proxy in Japan legally, and once there, the bride's name was entered in the family register, that was a legal binding document. So they, all intents and purposes were married. See the Chinese, I don't know how they did that because I have no experience with that, but the Chinese did not usually use that method as far as I know. But the Japanese did. They did it by the thousands, tens of thousands. That ended in 1920, voluntarily by the Japanese government. They stopped that because there was so much ruckus raised by the population saying, "That's immoral; that's indecent. They're promoting vice." So the Japanese government, bowing to pressures from the Anglo community, they stopped issuing passports in 1920, so that's when the picture bride era ended. But from about 1900 to 1920, it was in full bloom, and that's one of the reasons why I'm here.

MR: Were there systems in place to help these new brides adjust?

HY: Well, I think there were, but it was very difficult because of the tremendous language barrier. See we're talking about 1910 up to the 1920s. When the brides came home, in Japan, most Japanese in those days didn't know any English. They didn't have good English schools. I know most of these immigrants who came didn't come from the big cities. They came from farm areas; and of course being rural, they would have less education and so on. So when they came to the United States, most of them didn't understand English. And so if they had white teachers, they had to have a white teacher who understood Japanese as well, and those were exceedingly rare things. So what happened is as years went by in 1914, '15, '16, '17 and so on, as more of the earlier picture brides came who would learn a little bit of Japanese, American customs and language, then they did form classes to teach the new brides to come, but it was a really haphazard slipshod affair because there was no organization to it. I would suggest that probably in the cities like in Portland, bigger places like that where they had well organized churches and hierarchical structures of organization, that was probably better because they had more practice and not only that, had [inaudible]. In Hood River, they did have a kind of a half-baked organization to help the picture brides, but it was strictly half baked. Because my mother would have to ask her own children what the significance of something like say Arbor Day is. She had no idea what Arbor Day or in the beginning what Memorial Day or Halloween was because they don't have such festivals or holidays in Japan, so she'd have to ask her own children that, so they had to wait until she had kids. So eventually, she got so she knew, but it took a long time for the Issei women. For Issei women, it was very hard because the, the farm women anyway, maybe not the town people, but the farm women because they didn't have the social interaction with the white community, so it was very difficult for them. So you have to give them a great deal of credit for hanging in there when they were so lonely and nobody to talk to, and they're living with a Meiji man who was a very domineering, strict, male-centered man, very difficult.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.