57 pages • 1 hour read
Picture Bride
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Background
Authorial Context: Yoshiko Uchida
Yoshiko Uchida (1921-1992) was a Japanese American author. She was born in California to Japanese immigrant parents. Her parents were both educated Christians that were prominent in their community. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Uchida and her family were relocated to concentration camps like Tanforan in California and Topaz in Utah. Uchida worked as a teacher during her time in the camps.
Uchida’s personal life influenced much of her writing. Journey to Topaz: A Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation (1971) and Journey Home (1978) are young adult novels set in concentration camps. She also wrote children’s books about the camps such as The Invisible Thread (1991) and The Bracelet (1993). In 1982, Uchida wrote a memoir about her family’s imprisonment titled Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. Picture Bride (1987) was her first and only adult novel about the camps.
While Picture Bride is a fictional novel, Uchida’s narration of Hana’s story is influenced by her own experience as a Nisei (meaning “second generation,” or a child of Japanese immigrants). Picture Bride’s description of concentration camps, in particular, draws from Uchida’s personal life and larger body of work. Many of the novel’s most descriptive passages are featured in the Tanforan and Topaz camp sections. This demonstrates Uchida’s ability to translate personal experience into detailed retelling.
Several character details parallel Uchida’s own life. Dr. Kaneda’s FBI arrest on the day of Pearl Harbor is one such example. Uchida’s father, like Dr. Kaneda, was a prominent leader in the local Japanese American community. In the post-Pearl Harbor paranoia, community leaders were seen as a threat to American interests. Uchida’s father was arrested immediately after Pearl Harbor, and Uchida and her family followed shortly thereafter.
Like Mary, Uchida was born in the early 1920s. Uchida’s experience as a child of Japanese immigrants likely informed her depiction of Mary, who struggles to identify completely with the Japanese or white American community. Unlike Mary, Uchida was imprisoned in the camps along with the rest of her family.
Historical Context: Picture Brides
“Picture brides” were a practice in which early 20th-century Japanese immigrants in the mainland United States and Hawaii would match with women in Japan by using pictures and letters as correspondents. These matches were facilitated by family members or matchmakers. Having traveled to America alone, Japanese laborers could pay for their potential fiancée’s emigration to marry a Japanese woman and start a family.
In 1907, the US and Japan enacted the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which restricted the immigration of Japanese laborers to America. Picture brides arose as a loophole to the Gentlemen’s Agreement. If a Japanese American man was already living in the US, his wife and children could immigrate to join him. The practice had numerous issues, such as abuse within the eventual marriages and connections to sex work. Picture brides were outlawed in 1920.
Historical Context: Immigration to California in the Early 20th Century
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Asian immigrants arrived in California. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrants would travel by boat to Angel Island (known as the West Coast equivalent to Ellis Island) in San Francisco Bay. From there, they could stay in San Francisco, travel to adjacent cities such as Oakland, or relocate to other locations in the country. As a result of this immigration boom, the first Chinatown was established in San Francisco in 1848, and Asian immigrants established enclaves throughout California.
Anti-Asian prejudice rose in this period, with some Euro-Americans growing paranoid about the racial makeup of the West Coast, calling the changing demographics the “Yellow Peril.” In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law to restrict immigration in the United States. This law prevented Chinese laborers from emigrating to the US. In 1924, the Immigration Act effectively banned Asian immigration and greatly reduced the number of new Japanese immigrants in the US.
California, as depicted in Picture Bride, features a strong immigrant community. However, Uchida also addresses the macrocosms and microcosms of anti-Asian racism that permeated American society during the early 20th century.
Historical Context: Japanese Concentration Camps
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese military launched an attack on a US military base in Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii. After the attack, the US declared war on Japan and officially joined the Allied Powers in World War II.
The event also initiated widespread anti-Japanese paranoia in America. Japanese Americans—regardless of their citizenship—were seen as threats to domestic security. As a result, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans. Japanese immigrants and children of Japanese immigrants, particularly those living in California, were required to move first to “assembly centers” and then to “relocation centers” in isolated regions of the country’s interior. The euphemistic terms “assembly” and “relocation” downplay the reality of the situation: Japanese Americans were forcibly imprisoned by the military on the government’s orders. Prior to the evacuation, they were required to sell their property and belongings, often at disproportionately low rates. The camps were advertised to the public as comfortable, but in reality, the living conditions were not well maintained. People were forced to sleep in barracks, sheds, and stables. Food resources were limited. Those located in harsh environments like Utah were vulnerable to extreme temperatures, dust storms, and complete separation from the larger public.
With time, these centers became known as “internment camps,” but many scholars, historians, and activists argue that this is yet another euphemistic term that fails to convey the harsh and unjust circumstances. Various organizations—including the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Densho—advocate for use of the term “concentration camp” on the basis that it represents history more accurately. Per Densho:
As prison camps outside the normal criminal justice system, designed to confine civilians for military and political purposes on the basis of race and ethnicity, these sites also fit the definition of ‘concentration camps.’ […] America’s concentration camps were very different from Nazi Germany’s, but they, and dozens more historical and contemporary examples, do have one thing in common: ‘people in power removed a minority group from the general population and the rest of society let it happen’” (“Terminology.” Densho).
While the US government announced the closing of these concentration camps at the end of 1944, the final facility did not close until the spring of 1946, months after World War II ended in August 1945. By the end of the war, about 125,000 Japanese Americans had been imprisoned in the camps (“Japanese American internment.” Britannica). In 1988, the US government paid compensation to living survivors to publicly acknowledge the misguided conception and execution of the Japanese concentration camps.
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