Picture Bride

Picture Bride was an informative film that displayed the kind of life that many Japanese women had when they came to the United States.  Riyo becomes a picture bride for Matsuri, and travels to Hawaii after both of her parents shamefully die from tuberculosis.  Riyo is another victim of the deception that was possible when it came to the picture bride system, and when she arrives she learns that her husband-to-be gave her a misleading picture.  While it was a picture of him, it was one from many years ago, and he is much older than he led her to believe.  This happened often with all picture brides, not only Japanese picture brides.  Takaki mentions how this also happened to many Chinese picture brides.  As Riyo is brought around the new country she is about to be living in, she clearly isn’t thrilled.  She is overwhelmed and frightened at her new house, and that combined with all of her stress causes her to pass out.  This is quite opposite to the experience that Me Loi has in Eat a Bowl of Tea.  In Eat a Bowl of Tea, Mei Loi is mesmerized by the running water and stovetop in her apartment.  She has a positive first impression of the United States, while Riyo’s experience is horrible enough that she instantly wants to return to Japan.  

As mentioned in the Japanese-American presentation, Hawaii encouraged a lot of Japanese people to migrate over because both Japanese men and women were able to do labor in the fields and on farms.  Japanese women were a source of even cheaper labor, since they got paid 65 cents instead of a dollar for a day’s work.  Takaki also mentions this on page 50 when he says “wives were particularly useful on farms, where production was labor intensive.  The wives do much work in the field.”  Riyo is another woman who gets pulled into this life, and when she arrives in Hawaii she works alongside other Japanese women in the fields.  She is very upset when she receives her first payment envelope, and it is much less money than she expected.  She didn’t know that she was being paid less for the same amount of work until then.

When Riyo realizes how much the picture bride system had fooled her, she planned to return to Japan as soon as possible.  She wanted to do her work in the field and do extra work doing laundry so that she would be able to save enough up to return to Japan.  This mind frame roughly qualifies her as a “dekaseginin- laborer working temporarily in a foreign country" (Takaki 44).  She doesn’t fully fit the definition, however, because she does not plan to return home in glory.  She just simply wants to be able to return home to Yokohama, Japan.  Throughout most of the movie, this is her attitude.  However, at the end as her opinions about Matsuri begin to change, and she begins to become fonder of him, her desire to return home lessens.  At the very end of the film, as her voice serves as a conclusion, she talks about the ocean.  The “ocean that carried [her] home to Hawaii.”  This is something that also happened often to immigrants as they came to the United States.  Even though they came but planned to return home someday, often they would never fulfill that plan.  Often they adjusted to their new country, had their children there, and stayed there for the rest of their lives.