Takaki Chapter 10

In Chapter 10 of Takaki, “Pacific Crossings”, Japanese women were forced east to marry Japanese men who had already made their way across the Pacific Ocean. Through out the chapter, Takaki tells the hardships the Japanese women had to endure not only with being in a forceful marriage but living in a new world as well.
In the late 1800s, Japan’s economic system was not where it should have been. The Japanese were unable to pay taxes, especially the agricultural class. Many traveled east to Hawaii and to the rest of the United States. Some Japanese people traveled by their own choice, others were forced. The Japanese people that were forced were the women. They were forced across the Pacific to marry those Japanese men who were already settled. Back then, a Japanese marriage was arranged, and the bride did not have a say in who she wanted to marry. The Japanese women were more excited to experience America and get out of the hardships Japan was going through at the time. These Japanese women who were forced across the ocean to marry were called “picture brides”. Says one picture bride “My young heart, 19 years and 8 months old, burned, not so much with the prospects of reuniting with my new husband, but with the thought of the New World”. The Japanese women were used for not only marriage, but for labor as well. They were needed as workers for their new husbands. A researcher noted in 1915 that “The wives do much work in the fields”. The Japanese women were considered a type of slave, and more as an object that a human being.
Why the Japanese women? The Japanese women were very intelligent than any other race in that day. They were taught literature and a very young age and even knew English. This made the Japanese women easier to cooperate with and tolerate.
This reading was a difficult one to finish as it was one of our longer chapters this semester. It was disturbing reading what the Japanese women had to go through in their life. It is weird to think that back then men were supposed to be the care takers, and yet women were out in the fields contributing to all the hardwork.