Picture Bride

In the film “Picture Bride,” when Riyo travels to Hawaii to marry a man she has never met, she is desperate to make a new life for herself after the “shameful” death of her parents in Japan. Like the marriage of Ben Hoy and Mei Oi in “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” Riyo’s marriage was arranged by the matchmakers of her and her future husband’s families. In addition, prior to her marriage with Matsuji, she had only seen a picture of him. After marrying Matsuji, Riyo struggles to adapt to her new life of hard labor in the sugar plantations.

When Riyo first meets Matsuji in Hawaii, she is astonished at how different he looks from his picture. When the two go to Matsuji’s run-down house, Riyo horrified by the bugs in the house and she faints. As Takaki mentions, many picture brides like Riyo “found their new homes were often crude ‘huts’ with oil lamps for light, boards nailed together with legs for tables, and straw-filled canvases for beds” (190). For Riyo—who had suffered through the death of both parents, the stressful journey to Hawaii, and the shock of marrying a man much older than herself—the state of the house amplified her anxiety about her new life.

Before she is able to recover from the disappointment of her situation, Riyo must work in the sugar fields and endure the harsh oversight of Antone. Later, Kana befriends Riyo and lets her help do the laundry for the other Japanese workers for extra money. Riyo’s multiple responsibilities of farm work, laundry, and cooking for her husband reflect the burden faced by Tome Hayashi in Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables.” In the story, Tome wants to pursue writing poetry, but she must fulfill her traditional female duty of housework in addition to farm work before she can finally write haikus, staying “busy at the parlor table as late as midnight scribbling with pencil on scratch paper” (155). Women—as seen with both Riyo and Tome—in traditional Japanese American society were expected to shoulder many burdens in this way. Within the film, this dedication to hard work in order to achieve—in Riyo’s case—a passage back to Japan illustrates the foundation of the model minority myth. Riyo and her fellow Japanese Americans demonstrated a fervent desire to work hard to eventually find success.