Becoming an American wife

During the post-World War II occupation of Japan, at least 30,000 young Japanese women married U.S. soldiers and experienced culture shock upon moving to the U.S., said Kathryn Tolbert, co-director of a new film about these so-called war brides that will be shown Friday at Hawaii Pacific University.

Tolbert and her collaborators, Karen Kasmauski and Lucy Craft, are daughters of war brides; their film, “Fall Seven Times Get Up Eight,” has won awards for best short documentary from the 2016 California Women’s Film Festival and the Boston and Philadelphia Asian American film festivals.

The heart of the film lies in scenes of Tolbert, Kasmauski and Craft with their mothers, who reminisce, sometimes bluntly, about their lives. These segments alternate with old family photographs and present-day vignettes of the mothers in their homes and the American landscapes they navigate.

Historical footage includes a film about schools run by the Red Cross to teach Japanese women how to be American wives.

In the film, Craft recalls what her mother said to her middle school friends at a sleepover: “You said you didn’t know why anyone would want to be friends with your daughter, I was so stupid and ugly.”

“I never said that,” replies her mother.

Tolbert, 63, is an editor at the Washington Post. While in Hawaii she hopes to interview three or four families of war brides here.

“Michiko Kurokawa, who lives in Honolulu, has been very helpful. I met her last fall in San Antonio, Texas, at the annual meeting of the International Marriage Friendship Club — elderly Japanese ladies, most of them war brides. I showed the film and during it she cried, ‘Stop the film, that’s me!’ She had gone to a bride school in Tokyo and a group of them were picked to be filmed by the U. S. Department of Defense for a propaganda film. Sixty-two years later, she finally sees it,” said Tolbert by phone from her mother’s home in Elmira, N.Y.

“Fall Seven Times Get Up Eight” is a film to which any daughter and mother can relate. Here’s more from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s interview with Tolbert.

Question: Fall seven times get up eight: What does it mean?

Answer: It’s an old Japanese proverb. It means that basically no matter how many times you encounter setbacks, you can bounce back stronger. Seven’s a popular number in Japan.

Q: How did the film come about?

A: Karen, Lucy and I have known each other for many years; we’re all journalists who worked in Japan. They got in touch about four years ago and said let’s do a documentary film … but we didn’t know how to do it. We tried to create our own trailer and it was pretty much a disaster. Then Karen brought in Blue Chalk, a media production company who helped us run a Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2014. It was amazingly successful. We realized that people really responded to the idea of three daughters telling the tale of their mothers.

Q: What roles did you play in the production?

A: We were the directors. We wrote the treatment and then Blue Chalk filmed and edited it, and the three of us would Skype and decide what our edits were going to be. Lucy and Karen did most of the archival research. The producer is Megumi Nishikura, who made “Hafu,” a documentary film about the half-Japanese generation living in Japan and their struggle to fit in.

Q: How did the war bride phenomenon happen?

A: The Americans arrived in 1945 but Japan was pretty much flattened and there was an anti-fraternization rule for a while: The U.S. worked hard to keep GIs from having relationships with Japanese women.

By end of the ’40s they were getting married but having trouble bringing their wives to the States because of the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act. Starting in 1952, they were able to bring their wives.

Q: How did the couples meet?

A: The women worked for the occupation as typists, waitresses, maids, in dance halls and as interpreters. The young GIs looked great in their uniforms and had a kind of Western gallantry they weren’t used to. “Ladies first” is not a Japanese tradition.

Q: How did their families react?

A: Their families were not pleased … but what were they going to do? They had nothing in Japan after the war. My mother was desperate to get out. She worked at the PX in the Ginza as a shop girl. She feels that she didn’t know my father that well.

Q: Was there a stigma?

A: In Japan they made war brides sound like prostitutes, so when they came here they were kind of shunned by established Japanese-American communities, particularly on the West Coast, who had just gone through their own trauma of internment.

Q: What were other challenges they faced?

A: It was a shock to end up in isolated communities in 1950s America; the women felt such a pressure to become American as quickly as they could.

Many had American nicknames; my mom’s was Susie. I have yet to find anybody who raised her kids bilingually. We all wish our mothers had taught us Japanese. Some of them never learned to read or write English but the kids understood their mother’s broken English.

Q: What have you learned as you interview war brides’ families for your oral history project?

A: These are women who kept a lot inside, who didn’t complain, were determined to not let the kids know of their own problems. But the kids want to know.