Japanese War Brides and the Normalization of Family Unification after World War II
ARISSA H. OH
For years, conventional American immigration history traced a rise and fall in anti-Asian laws that went something like this: Congress first restricted Asian immigration by passing the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, then established an Asiatic Barred Zone in 1917 from which it refused migrants. Finally, at the high-water mark of immigration restriction, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act implemented a notoriously discriminatory national-origins quota system and prohibited the migration of Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”1 After World War II, two overhauls of immigration law slowly lowered the walls against Asians: in 1952, Congress lifted the racial requirements for immigration and naturalization, which allowed Asians to migrate (albeit in very small numbers); and by removing the national-origins quota system altogether in 1965, it ushered in an unprecedented wave of immigration from Asia.
This narrative has implied a kind of fallow period between 1924 and 1965, but in fact two important and intertwined trends, usually thought of as post-1965 phenomena, actually emerged during these years: the slow dismantling of Asian exclusion, and the rise of family unification as a central principle of immigration policy. Although America’s gates were indeed shut against Asians in 1924, Asian exclusion, while strict, was never absolute.2 Cracks in the barriers against Asian immigration appeared after 1924 in the form of exceptions that recognized family ties, particularly marital relationships. The steady accretion of these small-scale exemptions admitted increasingly larger numbers of Asian immigrants and contributed to the reforms of 1952 and 1965.3 The not-so-absolute ban on Asian immigration after 1924 suggests that we might reperiodize and recharacterize anti-Asian immigration restriction. Rather than describing 1924 as a moment when Asians were summarily excluded, it may be more illuminating to focus on how state selection allowed for “conditional inclusion.”4 In this light we can see that laws against Asian immigration were “not about erecting impenetrable borders” but calibrating them “so that they were porous to some things while remaining barriers to others.” This was a case, then, of a gatekeeping nation carving out “privileged exemptions” for certain Asian immigrants based on class, education, gender—and family ties.5
At the same time anti-Asian immigration laws eroded between 1924 and 1965, the principle of family unification emerged as a central pillar of immigration policy. This is an aspect of immigration reform that is much remarked on but not well studied. Although many scholars cite the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA, also known as the Hart-Celler Act) as the law that made family unification a cornerstone of the US immigration regime, Congress first codified a commitment to family unification almost fifty years earlier, in the Immigration Act of 1917. The acknowledgment of family unification as a goal of US immigration policy was not new. Family unification had been available to racially eligible immigrants, by custom and by law, for decades before 1917; and after 1917 Congress reinforced the US commitment to family unification in the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924. What was new about the 1952 INA (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) is that it enshrined the principle of family unification regardless of race.6 This is especially notable given that the same law also preserved quotas based on nationality and race despite significant opposition, including a presidential veto.
This chapter explores the question of how family unification regardless of race became normalized in American immigration policy by examining the case of Japanese war brides after World War II.7 By tracing the legislative reforms that made Japanese war bride migration possible, as well as how journalists, filmmakers, and novelists sought acceptance for these women by positioning them as ideal mothers, wives, immigrants, and citizens, we can see how the notion of family unification expanded to include formerly racially inadmissible spouses, and how war brides, their husbands, and their supporters redrew the racial boundary around what constituted a legitimate, acceptable American family. A convergence of factors and considerations persuaded Congress to pass race-blind family unification laws: moral arguments about keeping families together and rewarding citizen-soldiers for their service; lobbying by Asian American groups; and the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War, which required the United States to prove itself as a global leader of democracy and win friends in Asia. Against the political and social backdrop produced by these forces, Japanese war bride migration helped to drive the legal and cultural normalization of family unification—including interracial family unification—in American law and culture.
Family Ties versus Racial Exclusion
Congress changed immigration laws after World War II to admit racially undesirable Japanese war brides for two main reasons. First, supporters of war bride laws positioned them as rewards for deserving citizen soldiers.8 It seemed obvious that men who had selflessly and heroically served their country should have the right to bring their wives and children to the United States.9 Servicemen saw themselves as “deserving war heroes” whose rewards should include the right to have their wives with them, like the corporal in Japan who wrote, “The way I look at it my citizen’s rights are to let me marry who I want to.”10 Second, servicemen’s demands to bring their Japanese wives home forced Congress to resolve a fundamental tension in American immigration law and policy, between family unification and racial exclusion. The US immigration service and federal courts had historically demonstrated a tendency to facilitate family unification even before the principle was codified as law in 1921.11 But family unification was not consistently available to Asians.12 Laws allowing Japanese war bride migration represent the first time in US history that immigration laws explicitly and systematically prioritized family unification over racial exclusion.
Japanese war bride laws have to be understood in the larger political context of immigration reform during and after World War II. A coalition of Asian and US state officials, Asian American community leaders, and their white American allies campaigned to end Asian exclusion.13 They had some powerful forces on their side: Congress members’ attitudes toward immigration were swayed by Cold War considerations—especially the need to win friends overseas by demonstrating the racial liberalism of the United States, the leader of the free world.14 Yet those imperatives were not enough to convince Congress to eliminate the national-origins quota system or completely end Asian exclusion. At a time when a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws seemed out of reach, reformers had to be satisfied with more piecemeal achievements such as the 1943 Magnuson Act, which ended Chinese exclusion, and the 1946 law that gave Indians and Filipinos the right to immigrate and naturalize. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) wanted Congress to give the Japanese the right to immigrate and naturalize. They had to settle for Japanese war bride laws instead.
Chinese wives were the first Asian women to benefit from the erosion of anti-Asian immigration laws in the face of family ties. The Act of 1930 allowed Chinese women who had married Chinese men with US citizenship before 1924 to enter the United States; under this law, 607 Chinese wives were admitted between 1931 and 1940.15 Chinese women were also the first Asian wives to enter the United States after World War II, under the War Brides Act of 1945. This law, passed in response to the demands of thousands of servicemen, allowed US citizens to bring foreign spouses and children to the United States on a nonquota basis, meaning they would not be charged against the annual quota set for their country of birth. Chinese were the only Asian spouses who could migrate under the War Brides Act thanks to the 1943 repeal of Chinese exclusion; other Asians were still inadmissible.16 Finally, the Act of August 9, 1946, allowed all Chinese wives to immigrate on a nonquota basis.17 Backers of the law pitched it as something that would benefit Chinese American men, and they emphasized that Chinese were “good citizens” and “good soldiers” who deserved to have the same right to bring their wives as other Americans did.18 They also reassured Congress that only a small number of Chinese women would take advantage of the new law.19
Although they are part of the same movement toward the end of Asian exclusion, Chinese wife migration differed significantly from the later migration of Asian military brides. Only 7,449 Chinese wives came to the United States between 1945 and 1950, a relatively small number. Given how many more wives came from other Asian countries in the decades to come, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Filipino women came to represent the war bride in a way that Chinese women did not. Chinese wives were also mostly in intraracial marriages with Chinese American men. This set them apart from later war bride migrations, which involved mainly interracial couples. Additionally, laws permitting Chinese wife migration reunified already-married couples—some had been married for several years—whereas laws facilitating the migration of other Asian war brides prevented separation of relatively newer couples.20
Japan hosted hundreds of thousands of American military and government personnel during the 1945–1952 US occupation, and despite official nonfraternization policies (later lifted), American men and Japanese women embarked on romantic relationships.21 However, Americans who hoped to bring their Japanese girlfriends or wives home to the United States faced formidable obstacles. Servicemen who wanted to marry Japanese women had to receive approval from their commanding officers and the US occupation government, known as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Commanding officers and chaplains alike strongly counseled against such marriages and denied permission outright, justifying their denials in two ways: US immigration law deemed Japanese racially ineligible for US citizenship, meaning Japanese wives would not be able to accompany their husbands to the United States; and many states in the United States—thirty at the time—prohibited miscegenation.22
Despite these discouragements, servicemen pressed Congress for the right to bring their Japanese wives to the United States. Through their legislators, they filed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private immigration bills, each of which significantly increased the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s workload and slowed down the legislative process. This strategy, historically used by Americans unable to find help under existing laws, often compels Congress to make changes to public law.23 In this case, Congress responded with the Act of July 22, 1947 (PL 213), which provided the first, albeit extremely temporary, opportunity for Japanese war brides to enter the United States. It amended the 1945 War Brides Act by adding a section that stated, “The alien spouse of an American citizen by a marriage occurring before thirty days after the enactment of this Act, shall not be considered as inadmissible because of race, if otherwise admissible under this act.”24 The JACL, with support from the ACLU and the American Jewish Congress, actively lobbied for the law. As it had with the 1945 War Brides Act, Congress passed the 1947 law quickly and with no debate—significant, given Congress’s general hostility to immigration reform during this time. The law indicated Congress’s recognition of the rights of citizen soldiers—especially white men—to choose their wives, as well as an admission that the 1945 War Brides Act was racially discriminatory.25
The 1947 law was not a sign of Congress’s acceptance of or support for these marriages but a grudging provision. The opening it provided was unprecedented, but not generous: if a couple was not already married, they had only thirty days from the law’s enactment to get married (that is, they had to marry by August 22, 1947). Given that it took a good ninety days for a serviceman to get a request to marry a white American woman through proper channels, the possibility of marrying a Japanese woman within thirty days was slim. And permission to marry did not mean permission to migrate, since wives could be denied visas on a range of grounds. Nevertheless, by the thirty-day deadline 823 couples were married, and 750 Japanese wives and five children entered the United States by December 28, 1948. In comparison, 85,896 European wives and children of American servicemen had entered the United States by that time. The JACL’s Masaoka had opposed the “ridiculous” thirty-day clause, arguing it was too short, and condemned as “preposterously racist” the notion that “for one month Japanese women would be acceptable as immigrants, but after that they would revert to unwanted and unacceptable status.” But even that small window was itself a compromise.26
In response to servicemen’s continuing demands, Congress provided a second opening for Japanese war brides in 1950 (PL 717, Act of August 19, 1950).27 Couples who had not married within the thirty days provided by the 1947 law had been separated because husbands were rotated back to the United States while their racially inadmissible Japanese wives were unable to follow them; as of 1950, a reported 760 wives and children of US servicemen had been left behind in Japan.28 Like the 1947 law, the 1950 law provided only a temporary window, but it was a more generous one that gave couples six months, rather than thirty days, from the enactment of the law to marry. And like the 1947 law, and the 1945 War Brides Act that preceded it, the 1950 law was passed with no debate.29
Servicemen’s requests for marriage applications “overwhelmed” SCAP officials. By the time the 1950 law expired in February 1951, “officials at American consulates throughout Japan performed 2,230 marriage ceremonies.” Congress extended the 1950 law for another year, giving couples until March 1952 to marry. It did this at SCAP’s request and in recognition of the servicemen who had left their girlfriends in Japan to fight in Korea and had not had the time to complete the requirements for marriage under the 1950 law. The extension also helped a new group of military wives—from Korea.30 By early 1951 members of Congress had seemingly accepted that men stationed abroad would want to bring back foreign wives, including those deemed racially inadmissible, and were willing—if not eager—to facilitate this migration.
Congress assumed that laws permitting Chinese and Japanese bride migration would allow Americans of Chinese and Japanese descent to bring to the United States “girls of their own race.”31 The drafters of the 1947 law had explicitly expressed a desire “not to encourage marriages between United States citizen service people and racially admissible aliens,” a goal shared by SCAP’s legal section, which asserted that any extension of the 1947 law should be for Nisei (US-born Japanese) servicemen only because they and the Japanese shared a common “bloodline.”32 Supporters of the 1950 bill acknowledged those fearful of race mixing, assuring them that “a considerable number of the citizen servicemen involved are themselves of Japanese descent.” They also made clear that the larger issue of removing the racial bar to immigration and naturalization was separate, and that the law they proposed would only apply “in this type of limited case.”33
In the case of Japanese war bride laws, the numbers confirmed Congress’s assumption that war bride laws would facilitate intraracial marriage—at least initially. Of the 823 couples married under the 1947 law, 597 (72.5 percent) included a Nisei groom, 211 (25.6 percent) a white groom, and 15 (1.8 percent) a black groom.34 While the JACL emphasized helping Nisei men to marry Japanese women, it soon found itself defending interracial marriages, since up to three-quarters of the married couples in Japan comprised a Japanese woman and a white or black American man.35 Under the 1950 law the racial makeup of the couples changed significantly: now 73 percent of the couples included a white groom, 12 percent a black groom, and 15 percent a Nisei.36 Thus, laws intended to facilitate intraracial marriages between Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals paved the way for decades of interracial marriages between women from Asia and American servicemen.
Three strands of logic lay behind the post–World War II laws that admitted Japanese war brides: recognition of men’s rights to have their wives and children with them, reward for military service, and the principle of family unification. In fact, the belief that soldiers deserved to be rewarded for their service was so unquestioned that there was significant support among government officials—including the secretary of state, attorney general, and some INS officials—for an early version of the 1945 War Brides Law, never enacted, which would have made war brides citizens immediately upon their marriage to American GIs. Although arguments that emphasized the rights and rewards due to citizen-soldiers in return for their service were originally more prominent, at some point between the 1947 law and the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, family unification came to the fore. During this time, lawmakers shifted from referring to war bride laws as “temporary” to seeing them as “interim”; in other words, situating them “within an arc of policymaking” that pointed, inexorably, toward a permanent, elevated place for family unification in immigration policy.37
Whether they were originally rewards for citizen-soldiers or representative of an American commitment to family unification (or both), laws that admitted racially inadmissible spouses set an important precedent for immigration law. War bride laws, and the assumption that keeping families together should be a goal of immigration policy, became folded into permanent immigration law in 1952 with little discussion or opposition.38 They legitimized, however grudgingly or inadvertently, the notion that spouses should be together regardless of racial difference, years before the Supreme Court decided in 1967 that antimiscegenation laws were unconstitutional. And they also legitimized the view of family embodied by the majority of the war bride couples: one that was not monoracial. In essence, the 1952 INA signaled that Congress had resolved the longstanding tension between family unification and racial exclusion in favor of family ties.
Although the 1952 INA eliminated race as a barrier to naturalization, thereby making both entry and citizenship possible for Japanese war brides and all Asian immigrants, it was not a complete reform. Most notably, and controversially, it maintained the national-origins quota system. With regard to Asians, the law contained features that critics considered racist: it created an Asia-Pacific triangle within which individual countries received only token quotas, and it applied a global race quota that admitted only two thousand Asian immigrants per year regardless of nationality.39 Japan received the “embarrassingly small” annual quota of 185, but thanks to the provision for family members, spouses and children of US citizens could migrate on a nonquota basis.40 In 1952 alone, the United States admitted 4,220 Japanese war brides. Between 1952 and 1965 thousands of Japanese war brides entered the country each year (see table 1).
Table 1. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 1947–65: Japanese Nationals Classified as “Wives of Citizens” Who Immigrated to the United States
| Year | Number |
| 1952 | 4,220 |
| 1953 | 2,042 |
| 1954 | 2,802 |
| 1955 | 2,843 |
| 1956 | 3,661 |
| 1957 | 5,003 |
| 1958 | 5,027 |
| 1959 | 4,568 |
| 1960 | 3,990 |
| 1961 | 3,285 |
| 1962 | 2,749 |
| 1963 | 2,771 |
| 1964 | 2,665 |
| 1965 | 2,372 |
“Numbers from US Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Reports, 1947–75, Table 6” (Washington, DC). Cited widely in sources, for example, Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). Simpson notes that these figures are considered conservative (at 213n22).
Postwar Madame Butterfly Tales
Although laws to allow the migration of Japanese war brides were intended to facilitate intraracial unions between Japanese Americans and “girls of their own race,” and although a quarter of the grooms were nonwhite, it was the white groom and Japanese bride who quickly became the public face of these marriages. American filmmakers, novelists, and journalists sought to culturally and socially normalize the Japanese war bride and her interracial marriage by presenting her as a “symbol of domesticity,” depicting her as a perfect wife and mother, and thus an ideal female immigrant and future citizen. Her firm adherence to American middle-class values and her cultural disappearance into the white mainstream made palatable the expansion of the “racial boundary” of the American nuclear family that was necessary to allow her inclusion in the American national family.41
This reframing of the Japanese war bride reflected the geopolitical repositioning of Japan after World War II. After a viciously racist war, the United States sought to rapidly transform Japan from enemy to friend in American culture. This was because the United States needed Japan as its bulwark of democracy in Asia, especially as the Cold War intensified.42 This reversal was a highly gendered one. Americans’ dominant understandings of Japan had long been impressionistic and Orientalist; by World War II, Madame Butterfly was entrenched as the emblematic representation of Japan. In this extremely influential story, an affair between a white American naval officer, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and a Japanese geisha, Cio-Cio-San, produces a child but ends tragically, with Cio-Cio-San’s suicide. Pinkerton and his white wife adopt the child and return to the United States. In line with this narrative, American cultural producers typically represented the postwar US-Japan relationship as one between a white male conqueror and subjugated Asian woman. Interracial Japanese war bride marriages made this geopolitical relationship concrete at an intimate level: at the same time the American military government figuratively husbanded Japan’s entrance into the democratic, modern world, American servicemen became the actual husbands of Japanese women.
Films, novels, and media coverage depicted Japanese women in ambivalent, Orientalist ways: submissive and obedient, but also exotic, hypersexual, and sometimes diabolical.43 The Japanese war bride posed a sexual threat to American men and women alike: she stole American men from American women, who could not compete with her special brand of Japanese hyperfemininity, and she ensnared American men to gain access to the United States. The predominant American stereotype of Japanese womanhood before World War II had been the geisha, but the surge in sex work that accompanied the arrival of thousands of occupation personnel produced a new kind of Japanese woman: the common prostitute. Most Americans had never truly comprehended the difference between a geisha and a prostitute; now they simply conflated and merged them with the Japanese war bride. The press contributed to the widely held view that many of the war brides were “barmaids, entertainers, dance-hall girls and some outright prostitutes”44 who had preyed on lonely American men and had been devious enough to slip through US military and consular screening.45 The assumption that foreign war brides were actually prostitutes was not specific to Japan, having emerged in connection with French war brides after World War I, but Orientalist ideas about Asian female sexuality reinforced these stereotypes.46 They would also attach to other Asian war brides as they began to arrive. These stereotypes circulated on both sides of the Pacific. Some servicemen who had been stationed in Japan used their limited knowledge of Japan and Japanese to harass war brides they encountered in the United States.47 Japanese and Japanese Americans also tended to see the war brides as “just street girls.” For them, one war bride said, “the war bride is a synonym for prostitute.”48
Defenders of Japanese war brides used various strategies to counter these stereotypes. Novelists and filmmakers foregrounded the purity and aristocratic origins of their war bride characters, and journalists, academics, and war brides themselves emphasized their respectable family backgrounds.49 At a minimum, supporters of these women consistently depicted them as dainty and exceptionally well groomed. Cultural producers also tried to neutralize the Japanese war bride’s sexual threat was by refiguring her as inherently domestic. In doing so, they paradoxically erased the war bride’s perceived hypersexual, racial otherness by emphasizing that very racial otherness. The American press helped to racialize femininity and domesticity as innately Japanese traits with accounts of war brides who polished their husbands’ shoes, greeted their husbands on bended knees, and bathed, massaged, and otherwise “worshipped” them.50 Race and culture seemed to be one and the same when it came to Japanese war brides, and their subservience and servility became another thing Americans “knew” about them.51
Some war brides and their husbands took to print to publicly insist that they had married for love. One war bride told Reader’s Digest: “‘Because I love the man’ does not seem to satisfy people. They think there must be more to it than that.” A husband declared, “As to why ‘our boys’ marry Japanese girls, my answer is: For the very same reasons that people anywhere get married!”52 In private, war brides spoke candidly about various other reasons for marrying: material and practical considerations, pregnancy, dreams of a better life in America, and a desire for escape or rebellion. One woman admitted that she married for the sake of her family’s well-being: “Marrying an American was the only way I knew to get the support they needed.” Many brides mentioned impressions of the United States as a land of abundance and comfort and of American men as being much more gallant and gentlemanly than their Japanese counterparts.53 For others, marriage to an American was the best available option. After being raped by an American soldier, one woman resorted to prostitution, which shamed her family and ruined her chances for a proper Japanese marriage.54 She confessed that although she did not love her husband, she accepted his proposal when she became pregnant. “I figured the sooner I could get away from my family, the better for everyone including myself.” Another woman was even blunter: “My marriage … didn’t have anything to do with loving or liking; it was more a matter of survival and escape … I was a social outcast and thus I no longer desired to live in Japan.”55
Almost as soon as Japanese war brides began to arrive in the United States, scholars sought to assess their marriages; in fact, the marriages were a major driver behind academic studies of the general phenomenon of interracial marriage after World War II.56 Researchers came to a wide range of conclusions: some found that the women were adapting well and the marriages were healthy, while others determined that Japanese war brides and their husbands had married because they were psychologically damaged.57 But by the mid-1950s the media broadcast a largely optimistic narrative in which suburban America absorbed the Japanese war bride, defusing her racial threat and transforming her into a symbol of the attainability of American racial democracy. American novelist James Michener created the emblematic version of this story in a 1955 Life article featuring Frank and Sachiko Pfeiffer, a Chicago-area couple. Arriving in the United States in 1948, they had overcome racism and economic struggle to enjoy a peaceful house in the suburbs, close friendships with their white neighbors, and a restored relationship with Frank’s formerly intolerant mother. The title of the article—“Pursuit of Happiness by a GI and a Japanese”—broadcast its essential purpose: to celebrate the Pfeiffers’ attainment of the American dream.58
While the Pfeiffers had achieved success by postwar American standards of highly gendered domesticity and consumption—modern appliances, a mink coat for Sachiko—more important than economic success was their triumph over racial discrimination. At their first apartment, Sachiko had been threatened and called a “dirty Jap,” so the couple was apprehensive about whether they would be accepted by their new neighbors: veterans of the Pacific war who told Michener that they had hated people of various racialized groups, especially blacks and Mexicans. Sachiko instantly won over the neighbors with her doll-like appearance and timidity. As a neighbor recalled, “She seemed so clean, so needing a friend that I started to cry.” Sachiko’s strict conformity to gender norms helped to compensate for her racial difference and won her the admiration of everyone around her. Indeed, like most Japanese war brides in the public eye, she was a superlative wife and mother. She encouraged her husband to return to school and supported their family in the meantime by working as a seamstress; thanks to her frugality, the Pfeiffers quickly paid down their debt and built a house of their own. She and the neighbor women bonded through feminine rituals of childcare and housecleaning while the men shared their tools and labor as they built their homes side by side.59
While opponents of Asian immigration had long argued that Asians’ inability or unwillingness to assimilate justified and even necessitated their exclusion, Japanese war brides like Sachiko demonstrated that some Asians, at least, were actually highly assimilable. One sign of this was the marriages themselves: by marrying white American men, these women were seen as willing to become totally American. It also helped that war brides migrated in a pattern different from earlier Japanese immigrants: rather than settling in ethnic enclaves, which many non-Japanese saw as a sign of unwillingness to assimilate, war brides entered as members of American families and lived scattered across the country.
Feature articles in mainstream news outlets presented brides schools in Japan as proof of war brides’ commitment to becoming ideal American wives and mothers. These schools, which were run by the Red Cross and staffed by volunteers— mainly the wives of American military or businessmen—were designed to equip Japanese war brides to smoothly and rapidly assimilate into American society. The schools offered a varied program that included lessons in American history and government; child care and feeding; clothing, good grooming, and etiquette; shopping; and cooking. In short, Japanese war brides received an intensive course in American domesticity and respectability, and were modernized and civilized in the process. Media coverage emphasized how their skills as wives and mothers radically transformed Japanese war brides from unassimilable due to their race to supremely assimilable, ideal future citizens.60
It is important not to overstate the importance of the brides’ schools. Although they were an important ideological site and valuable source of propaganda, most Japanese war brides did not attend them.61 Japanese war brides were lauded for displaying many of the characteristics prized by midcentury American domestic ideology: thrift, skillful household management, and industriousness. However, most Japanese brides probably did not gain these skills via American tutelage. Instead, many who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s had grown up in the straitened circumstances created by Japan’s wars in Asia. Their ability to save money or to make do with available resources was more likely born of necessity, not brides’ schools.
Two kinds of postwar Madame Butterfly tales emerged about Japanese war brides in the 1950s. The first, gloomy version was simply an update of Madame Butterfly except that the Japanese wife did not die like the original Madame Butterfly, but returned to Japan.62 This was the story illustrated by real-life tragedies like the war bride in Chicago who killed her child, attempted suicide, and ultimately went back home.63 These early narratives aligned with negative scholarly assessments of these marriages. Portrayals of unwholesome war bride marriages mitigated war brides’ racial and sexual threat, assuring skeptics that unhealthy marriages were bound to fall apart and that the women would not remain in the United States. On the other hand, Sachiko Pfeiffer and others like her represented a second, progressive version of the Madame Butterfly tale, in which a desexualized, hyperdomestic war bride overcame racism to find acceptance in her new extended family, community, and nation. Likewise, the community overcame its justifiable but misinformed hostility toward her and made her one of their own. Her story assured her adopted country that it was correct to envision itself as a democracy that allowed all people equal access to the American dream, and that it could make the changes necessary to live up to its creed. The Pfeiffers’ typical American suburb—with its Irish, Italians, Lutherans, Catholics, war veterans, and housewives—had proved its racial tolerance by embracing the “little Japanese girl,” and America could do the same. Indeed, the neighborhood itself perfectly illustrated the colorblindness that was such a crucial component of postwar American liberalism, for it accepted Sachiko’s racial and cultural difference by denying its existence. Everyone on the block showered Sachiko when her son was born, but a neighbor was quick to emphasize, “not a person … gave anything because Sachiko was a Japanese. We all gave because she was such a good human being.”64
The uplifting Madame Butterfly stories that became dominant beginning in the middle of the 1950s confronted America’s reputation for racism either by denying racism’s existence outright or by showing that it could be defeated. While Sachiko Pfeiffer had endured epithets and threats, many war bride couples reported that they had never encountered racism or anti-Japanese sentiment. A war bride declared in Reader’s Digest that American prejudice was “really a phantom.” One man wrote in The American Mercury that he had had a chip on his shoulder when he had brought his wife home to the United States, but that “the only sideways looks that have been cast at her have been looks of admiration.” He confessed to feeling ashamed for having doubted his country.65 A former Japan missionary interpreted the good treatment of the war brides as proof of America’s growing racial egalitarianism. “Apparently, we Americans are losing our race prejudice,” he exulted. America’s embrace of these women also served the country’s Cold War agenda by strengthening relations with Japan, the United States’ most important Asian ally.66 In fact, white men and their Japanese wives “came to be seen as brave challengers of lamentable, and increasingly outdated, structures of American racism.”67
In two important ways, the positive postwar Madame Butterfly tale reassured Americans that the racial situation was really not so bad. It provided a way for Americans to think about racial and cultural pluralism, but without having to confront the implications of impending black-white racial integration. Melrose Park, the suburb that so embraced Sachiko Pfeiffer, was near Oak Park, which had been the site of violence in 1950 when a black man moved in. One of Sachiko’s neighbors had been raised to hate blacks but had learned to accept a Chinese family she had met a few years prior to meeting Sachiko, whom she instantly embraced. These comparisons suggest that the Japanese woman represented a racial mid-point between white and black; by accepting her, white Americans could claim some progress on racial problems. They also reflect how Japanese war brides both benefited from and contributed to the transformation of Asian Americans from not-white to not-black that was such an important part of the refiguring of Asianness that occurred after World War II.68
At the same time, the Japanese war bride offered an alternative symbol of Japan to Americans who did not want to think of Japanese Americans they had incarcerated.69 This reluctance to confront Japanese internment might also explain why cultural producers focused so much on Japanese-white intermarriage rather than Japanese-Nisei marriages, which were, after all, the original impetus for the Japanese war bride laws. It was also true that in the intraracial Japanese war bride marriages, nationality differences were invisible, so there was nothing to celebrate. More important, they could not embody and underscore the new US-Japan friendship in same way a racially different husband and wife could. An African American man and his Japanese wife could not symbolize this alliance either because the black soldier was not as unmistakably American, as perfect a symbol of America, as the white soldier. In fact, in searching for the perfect test case to challenge miscegenation laws before the Supreme Court, civil rights groups had in mind as their ideal couple a white combat veteran and his Japanese or Korean wife. This pairing (as opposed to a black-white couple) would allow them to sidestep more controversial issues such as school desegregation.70 Positioned in this way among whites, blacks, and Japanese Americans, the Japanese war bride was a sort of neutral thought zone, where white Americans could celebrate their racial liberalism without the discomfort of considering the more difficult challenges of integrating blacks or re-integrating Japanese Americans.71
Japanese women married to African American men hardly appeared in the postwar studies conducted by academics and social service agencies, and only the black press paid them much attention. The available evidence suggests that they experienced rejection from other war brides, Japanese Americans, and African Americans. Their absence from war bride networks no doubt resulted from racism: some women with Nisei or white husbands would not socialize with women married to black men, and some nonblack husbands forbade their wives from interacting with the wives of black men. The mainstream media likely did not focus on them because their struggles were uncomfortable reminders of the racism that remained prevalent in American society. Their numbers were small and their presence little remarked upon, these women seem to have vanished from the historical record most of all.72
In both the negative and positive versions of the postwar Madame Butterfly tale the Japanese war bride disappeared, either through repatriation or assimilation. But she did not disappear without a trace, since she, like the original Madame Butterfly, left her mixed-race child behind. Although sociological understandings of race mixture had emerged in the 1920s and 1930s to challenge the biological views of the nineteenth century, and eugenics had been largely discredited by the end of World War II, scientific views of race and race mixing lingered.73 In the self-consciously racially liberal climate of postwar America some scholars, cultural producers, and ordinary citizens endorsed racial mixing with scientific theories of “hybrid vigor,” the idea that “a crossing of strains—in dogs, cattle, horses or people” would produce superior offspring.74 Some predicted that interbreeding would eventually erase racial difference and end race problems altogether.75 Cold War politics also encouraged antiracist Americans to recast the mixed-race child, from maladjusted and “marginal” to a symbol of diversity, globalization, multiculturalism, and the promise of interracial harmony.76 For them, these children were figures of hope.
Mainstream magazine and newspaper articles about war brides featured photographs of mixed-race children but included little commentary about them, suggesting the relative public acceptance of these children. There are several reasons Americans might have found mixed-race Japanese children bearable. First, postwar Americans were developing a certain familiarity with mixed-race Asian babies. As US troops poured into Asia and had sexual encounters with local women, Americans at home became accustomed to images of mixed-race “GI babies” or “occupation babies.”77 Mainstream US media treated these children sympathetically, and many Americans identified with them and expressed a sense of responsibility for them because of their American paternity.78 Second, a paradoxical understanding of race and racial mixture helped to whiten Japanese-white children. On the one hand, the principle of hypodescent dictated that the race of a mixed-race child followed that of the parent of the “lesser” race, meaning that children with white American fathers and Japanese mothers were Japanese. But this biological understanding of race coexisted with a contradictory cultural understanding of race, which asserted that the right environment could make Japanese-white children more American—that is to say, whiter.79 A hint that Japanese-white children were perceived through this second, cultural lens, could be seen in the US Army’s approach to mixed-race children during World War II. Under the mixed-marriage policy, so-called “mixed-blood” Japanese children who were at least 50 percent white and had white fathers could be released from internment camps if their home environments were found to be sufficiently “American” or “Caucasian” (with these terms used as synonyms).80 Third, the couples who produced most of these children—Japanese women and white men—aligned with the gendered geopolitics of the time, and with racial and gender hierarchies that reserved sexual access to women (of all races) for white men only. Given that American opposition to Asian-white miscegenation stemmed partly from historic fears of Oriental males seducing or raping white women, children with Japanese fathers and white mothers would no doubt have been more problematic.81 Fourth, in the quickly shifting postwar racial landscape of the United States, Asians were moving from not-white to not-black;82 this, plus their white paternity, put Japanese-white children affirmatively on the not-black side of the color line. Finally, the one-drop rule removed ambiguity about Japanese-black children, making it simple to classify them as black. Thus, neither Asian-white nor Asian-black children undermined the racial order and were therefore tolerable.
When American journalists did discuss war brides’ children, it was to provide examples of acceptance. The American Consul at Tokyo had “read thousands of letters concerning mixed marriages” but none “objected to the entry of an Oriental daughter-in-law or Eurasian grandchildren.” A war bride in South Dakota received neighbors who had come for miles around for their first glimpse of a Japanese baby. Another reported that her twin daughters were a bridge between her and her neighbors: “They all loved the babies and it seemed to help us all get acquainted.”83 The majority of Japanese war brides and their non-Japanese husbands pursued strategies to help their children to blend in as much as possible: they gave their children English names, spoke to them exclusively in English, ate only American food, and maintained culturally Anglo-American homes. Perhaps because of these decisions, they anticipated that their sons and daughters would face little, if any, racial discrimination. Researchers echoed this confidence, even predicting in some cases that the children who were not overly Asian looking would face few problems.84 Notably, these households contradicted old and prevailing ideas of mothers as the primary transmitters of culture. They also happened to fit the definition of what the wartime mixed-marriage policy had idealized: American/Caucasian family environments that erased Japanese ethnicity by erasing Japanese culture.85
The message of all these stories about Japanese war brides and their children was that what made these women excellent immigrants was they had “no discernible impact on the US,” which is exactly what reformers had promised even as they worked to end Asian exclusion.86 Sachiko Pfeiffer embodied this ideal in her eagerness to melt into her new American home. On the topic of marriage prospects for her two young children, Sachiko reflected, “Maybe my children want marry pure Japanese. Same by me. Maybe they more happy they marry pure Caucasian. I like same-same. I content to lose my Japanese blood stream in America. I gonna die in America. This is my home forever.”87 Sachiko assured readers that Japanese-white racial mixing would result not in a disrupting, destabilizing hybridity but in the gradual merging and dissolving of her threatening racial difference into the larger American body. This Japanese war bride thus promised America that it had the capacity to assimilate women like her, not just culturally but by literally incorporating her blood. On a symbolic level, this image suggested how easily foreigners might assimilate into American society and naturalized it as an organic process. It also reaffirmed the strength and durability of whiteness, its ability to absorb Asian blood without degenerating. Both the racially different Japanese war bride and her mixed-race children were firmly enclosed within the traditional, patriarchal, middle-class Cold War nuclear family, in which the white father and surrounding (white) American society was powerful enough to ensure the management and ultimately the absorption and disappearance of their racial difference.88
Conclusion
At a time when mixed-status families, deportation, unaccompanied child migrants, and border walls are daily conversation topics, and lawmakers wrestle with the enormous problem of immigration reform, the notion that US immigration law should prioritize keeping families together nonetheless endures as a bedrock assumption of both American politicians and the American public. While Congress made family unification part of formal immigration policy just one hundred years ago, and family unification regardless of race even more recently, politicians and policymakers treat it as if it were a time-honored practice that has existed since the nation’s founding. Advocates argue that family members of US citizens bring important economic benefits to the country through their labor and entrepreneurship, and that allowing citizens to have their families with them creates a more stable, happy, and productive citizenry. They also argue, as they did with war brides, that immigrants who come to join US citizen family members assimilate and integrate better into American society. Finally, supporters of family-based immigration policies also argue that this kind of immigration is a reflection of true American values, that family preferences embody America’s unique respect for family values.
Family unification has, however, become increasingly controversial. The crafters of the 1965 INA had not anticipated that the law, and its family preferences, would admit unprecedented numbers of migrants from Asia and Latin America. Critics concerned about the changing racial makeup of the country began attacking family preferences in the 1980s while fears about undocumented immigration, national security, and the United States’ ability to compete internationally have prompted others to call for Congress to drastically narrow family unification provisions and increase skill-based immigration instead.89 Proposals include eliminating preferences for all but nuclear family members, meaning that parents, siblings, and adult children of US citizens and permanent residents would no longer receive preferential treatment.
In this sense, we see a move away from the expansions of the postwar period in which Japanese war brides, their husbands, their children, and their supporters played an important role. They challenged and won the arguments about who could be married, who could form families, and who could be part of the American family. In this way, they redefined the family in American immigration policy and in American society and culture, and pushed the principle of family unification to the center of immigration policy. These are enlargements and progressions in notions of family and nation that even the most ardent restrictionists in Congress will not be able to reverse.
Notes
1. The Immigration Act of 1924, PL 139.
2. Elliot Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
3. Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 103; Philip Wolgin, “Beyond National Origins: The Development of Modern Immigration Policymaking, 1948–1968,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011, 57.
4. Madeline Hsu and Ellen D. Wu, “‘Smoke and Mirrors’: Conditional Inclusion, Model Minorities, and the Pre-1965 Dismantling of Asian Exclusion” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 43–65; Hsu, Good Immigrants, 4.
5. Kornel S. Chang, “Reconsidering Asian Exclusion in the United States” in Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, ed. David Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 161.
6. The Immigration Act of 1917, PL 301. On family unification in the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, see Yuki Oda, “Family Unity in US Immigration Policy, 1921–1978,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014, ch. 1. For more on how family unification became “a driving force” of immigration law between 1952 and 1965, see Wolgin, “Beyond National Origins,” ch. 3.
7. Although some find the term “war bride” to be objectionable, I use it in this essay to reflect the terminology of the period I am discussing.
8. Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870– 1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Angela Lynn Tudico, “‘They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives’: Japanese War Brides in the Postwar Era,” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2009); Nancy K. Ota, “Private Matters: Family and Race and the Post–World War II Translation of ‘American’” IRSH 46 (2001): 209–34.
9. Interestingly, the 1945 War Brides Act was gender neutral, allowing both men and women in the armed forces to take advantage of it to bring alien spouses into the country.
10. Ota, “Private Matters,” 230.
11. Act of May 19, 1921 (PL 5).
12. Oda, “Family Unity,” 94.
13. Jane Hong, “Reorienting America in the World: Race, Geopolitics, and the Repeal of Asian Exclusion, 1940–1952,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013; Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For broader foreign policy context, see Meredith Oyen, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of US-Chinese Relations in the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015).
14. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994/2011); Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Cindy I-Fen Chen, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (New York: NYU Press, 2014); Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).
15. Todd Stevens, “Tender Ties: Husbands’ Rights and Racial Exclusion in Chinese Marriage Cases, 1882–1924,” Law and Social Inquiry (2002): 271–305; Unpublished Hearing re HR 3976, HR 4109, HR 4179, House of Rep. Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, November 14, 1945, 16; Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy.
16. The end of Chinese exclusion in 1943 meant that Chinese American veterans, unlike other Asian veterans, were also able to bring their fiancés or fiancées to the United States under the 1946 act that provided temporary admission for aliens intending to marry US citizens who had served in the armed forces.
17. Act of August 9, 1946 (60 Stat. 975); Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 25.
18. Catherine Lee, Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Migration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), 84; Unpublished Hearing re HR 3976, HR 4109, HR 4179, 15, 16; Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy.
19. Senate, Committee on Immigration, “Placing Chinese Wives of American Citizens on a Nonquota Basis,” Report 1927, 79th Congress, 2nd session, Aug 1 (legislative day July 29), 1946. Besides the Chinese, the other Asian spouses admissible were from the Philippines and India because of the Act of July 2, 1946 (60 Stat. 416), which allowed the admission and naturalization of people from those countries. See Roland L. Guyotte and Barbara M. Posadas, “Interracial Marriages and Transnational Families: Chicago’s Filipinos in the Aftermath of World War II,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 2/3 (Winter-Spring, 2006): 134–55; Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1994); and Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
20. Zhao, Remaking Chinese America, 81–84; Philip Wolgin and Irene Bloemraad, “‘Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers’: Military Spouses, Family Re-Unification, and Postwar Immigration Reform,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 39.
21. US occupation personnel numbers fluctuated according to the year, from 125,000 to 465,000. Michiko Takeuchi “‘Pan-Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater,” in Over There: Living with the US Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Hohn and Seungsook Moon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 78, 105n2. For more on the US Occupation of Japan, see John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
22. Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 41; Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms, 156; Masako Nakamura, “Families Precede Nation and Race? Marriage, Migration, and Integration of Japanese War Brides after World War II,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2010, 38. Not all miscegenation laws were enforced, and not all of them prohibited marriage between whites and the category that we today refer to as “Asian.’ Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 199; Wolgin and Bloemraad, “Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers,” 42; Hrishi Karthikeyan and Gabriel J. Chin, “Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910–1950,” Asian Law Journal 9, no. 1 (2002): 1–40.
23. See Bernadette Maguire, Immigration: Public Legislation and Private Bills (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997), and Ota, “Private Matters.”
24. Act of July 22, 1947 (61 Stat. 401). Emphasis added.
25. Mike Masaoka and Bill Hosokawa, They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga (New York: Morrow, 1987), 204; Wolgin and Bloemraad, “Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers,” 36; Maddalena Marinari, “Divided and Conquered: Immigration Reform Advocates and the Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 19; Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 234; Eunhye Kwon, “Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the US West, 1880–1954,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2011, 239; Rose Cuison Villazor, “The Other Loving: Uncovering the Federal Government’s Racial Regulation of Marriage,” New York University Law Review 86, 1420.
26. Nakamura, “Families Precede,” 62n124, 63; Tomoko Tsuchiya, “Cold War Love: Producing American Liberalism in Interracial Marriages between American Soldiers and Japanese Women,” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2011, 111; Masaoka, They Call Me Moses Masaoka, 204.
27. Notably, the 1950 law also allowed US servicemen to petition for their Japanese fiancées as well as their wives. This put Japanese fiancées on equal footing with European and Chinese fiancées, who had been provided for by the 1947 Alien Fiancés and Fiancées Act (PL 471).
28. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, “Permitting of Alien Spouses and Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces,” House Report 2768, 81st Congress, 2nd session, 2.
29. The Senate’s Committee on Immigration had originally proposed a ninety-day window, which the House Committee expanded to the six months denoted in the law.
30. Regina Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between Japanese Women and American GIs, 1945 to the Present,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1999), 206–7; Villazor, “The Other Loving,” 1419; “Admission of Alien Spouses and Minor Children of Citizen Members of Armed Forces,” Congressional Record 82nd Cg, 1st session, vol. 97 (January 18, 1951), 441; “Admission of Alien Spouses and Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces,” Senate Report 56, 82nd Congress, 1st session, January 29, 1951.
31. “Amending the Act to Expedite the Admission to the United States of Alien Spouses and Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces,” House Report 478, 80th Congress, 1st session, May 28, 1947, 2. The corresponding Senate report includes the same phrase.
32. “Amending the Act to Expedite the Admission to the United States of Alien Spouses and Alien Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces,” H. Rept. 478, 80th Congress, 1st session, May 27, 1947, 1; Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations,” 205.
33. “Permitting the Admission of Alien Spouses and Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces,” House Report 2768, 81st Cg, 2d session, 1, 2; “Removal of Racial Restrictions Now Prohibiting Admissions to United States of Wives of World War II Veterans Asked to Meet Problem Arising in Japan and Other Pacific Countries,” Congressional Record Vol. 96, January 31, 1950, A691–A692.
34. Tsuchiya, “Cold War Love”; Nakamura, “Families Precede.” It is unclear how grooms of Mexican descent, for example, would have been categorized.
35. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 199. Of the total 10,517 US citizens who married Japanese women between June 22, 1947, and December 31, 1952, more than 75 percent were white. Villazor, “The Other Loving,” 1419n380. There were an estimated three thousand to five thousand Japanese-black marriages during the fifteen years after World War II. Michael Cullen Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 80.
36. Villazor, “The Other Loving,” 1418–19.
37. Tudico, “They’re Bringing Home,” 216, 33; Wolgin and Bloemraad, “Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers,” 43.
38. Wolgin, “Beyond National Origins,” 63.
39. While other immigrants arrived via the national quotas of the countries of their birth, Asians were counted according to their ancestry. This meant, for example, that a Chinese person born in France was counted against the Chinese quota, whereas a French immigrant of non-Asian descent was counted against the more generous French quota.
40. Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms, 148.
41. Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 162; Oda, “Family Unity,” 78.
42. Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, ch. 1.
43. Two representative novels include Pearl S. Buck’s The Hidden Flower (1952) and James Michener’s bestselling Sayonara (1953), both of which appeared as serials in Women’s Home Companion and McCall’s, respectively, before being published as books. Michener’s book was later made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Marlon Brando (1957). Another less popular film was King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride (1952).
44. William Worden, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1954, 134.
45. Before a man could marry, he had to have his marriage approved through military and consular channels, and show proof of citizenship, his single status, and his ability to support his wife. His wife and her entire family were screened and checked by the Japanese police and American military counterintelligence.
46. Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
47. Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 139–40; Worden, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” 133; Leon K. Walters, “A Study of Social and Marital Adjustment of Thirty-Five American-Japanese Couples,” master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1953, 83.
48. “The Winsome Geisha—Of an Old and Honored Calling,” Newsweek, January 25. 1954, 93; Spickard, Mixed Blood, 140; Worden, “Where are Those Japanese War Brides?” 133–34; Nakamura, “Families Precede,” 166–67, 263.
49. See, for example, Buck’s The Hidden Flower and Vidor’s Japanese War Bride.
50. “The Loneliest Brides in America,” Ebony, January 1953; “The Truth about Japanese War Brides,” Ebony, March 1952; Ray Falk, “GI Brides Go to School in Japan,” New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1954.
51. Walters, “Study of the Social and Marital Adjustments …” 127, 147–49; “Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, May 1952, 6–7; O’Reilly, “Our East-West Marriage Is Working,” American Mercury, December 1955; James Michener, “Pursuit of Happiness by a GI and a Japanese,” Life, February 21, 1955. Husbands protested that, contrary to popular opinion, their wives were not subservient, and they joked about the consequences of crossing them. But wives’ supposed lack of subservience was only in areas that advanced their image as good wives and mothers. For example, a husband might jokingly complain about how strict his wife was about his spending habits but would also admit that he had a healthy savings account as a result.
52. J. P. McEvoy, “America through the Eyes of a Japanese War-Bride,” Reader’s Digest, April 1955, 97; O’Reilly, “Our East-West Marriage,” 18; Janet Wentworth Smith and William L. Worden, “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives,” Saturday Evening Post, January 19, 1952, 81.
53. Patricia Anderson Kataoka, “Why Japanese War Brides Married: Four Case Studies,” master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 1988, 46, 48; Kyoko Kondo, “Experiences of Japanese War Brides and Assimilation into Appalachia: Understanding the Intersection of Ethnicity and Gender,” master’s thesis, Marshall University, 2000, 26; Yoshiko Gloria Yamaji, “The Impact of Communication Difficulties in Family Relations Observed in Eight Japanese War-Bride Marriages,” master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 1961, 93.
54. Robert Fish, “The Heiress and the Love Children: Sawada Miki and the Elizabeth Saunders Home for Mixed-Blood Orphans in Postwar Japan,” PhD diss., University of Hawaii, 2002, ch. 2.
55. Kataoka, “Why Japanese War Brides Married,” 25, 52
56. Nakamura, “Families Precede,” 175; Allison Varzally, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, 215.
57. Two of the most-cited of these studies are Anselm L. Strauss, “Strain and Harmony in American-Japanese War-Bride Marriages,” Marriage and Family Living 16, no. 2 (May 1954): 99–106, and George A. DeVos, Personality Patterns and Problems of Adjustment in American-Japanese Intercultural Marriages (Taipei: Orient Cultural Service, 1973). See Nakamura, “Families Precede,” appendix B, for a list of studies of Japanese war brides and their marriages from the 1950s to the early 1960s.
58. Michener, “Pursuit of Happiness,” 124.
59. Ibid., 135, 138, 141.
60. For more on war brides’ schools, see Tudico, “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives,” ch. 3; Nakamura, “Families Precede,” ch. 2; Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations,” ch. 4.
61. Nakamura, “Families Precede,” 123.
62. Pearl Buck told this kind of story in her novel The Hidden Flower (1952), only her heroine returned quietly to Japan, leaving her mixed-race child in the United States with an adoptive mother, a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor.
63. Ruth Moss, “Mother Slays Baby; Relates Tale of Abuse,” Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1953; “Jap War Bride Who Killed Son Tries Suicide,” Chicago Tribune, February 20, 1954; “Jap Wife Who Slew Baby Set to Fly Home,” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1954.
64. Michener, “Pursuit of Happiness,” 136.
65. Walters, “Study of the Social and Marital Adjustment …”; John W. Connor, A Study of the Marital Stability of Japanese War Brides (San Francisco: R&E Research, 1976); Strauss, “Strain and Harmony”; McEvoy, “American through the Eyes,” 98; Worden, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” 39; O’Reilly, “Our East-West Marriage,” 19.
66. Worden, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” 133, 134.
67. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 233.
68. Wu, The Color of Success; Arissa Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015).
69. The 1952 film Japanese War Bride portrayed a Japanese American family, resettling in California after having been interned. The inclusion of this uncomfortable fact surely contributed to the movie’s unpopularity and criticism that the film overstated the “distasteful theme of race prejudice.” Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 196.
70. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 232; Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 49–50.
71. Simpson, An Absent Presence, 151–52, 183; Michener, “Pursuit of Happiness,” 132.
72. Green, Black Yanks; “Loneliest Brides”; “Truth about Japanese War Brides.” For more, see Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005); Yasuhiro Okada, “‘Cold War Black Orientalism’: Race, Gender, and African American Representations of Japanese Women during the Early 1950s,” Journal of American and Canadian Studies 29 (2009): 45–79.
73. Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842– 1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), ch. 5.
74. “Hawaiian Medley,” Collier’s, December 11, 1943, 16; Cynthia Nakashima, “An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-Race People in America,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P.P. Root (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992).
75. Ralph Linton, “The Vanishing American Negro,” American Mercury, February 1947, 133–9; Henry Yu, “Mixing Bodies and Cultures” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North America, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 455–56.
76. Robert E. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6 (May 1928): 881–93; Teng, Eurasian, 143–44.
77. Pearl S. Buck used the term “Amerasian” to refer to the mixed-race Chinese children produced in World War II, but the term only became widely popular with the Vietnam War and continues to be identified with mixed-race people from Southeast Asia. Although she is credited with the term, it was actually suggested by someone in the State Department. Emily Cheng, “Pearl S. Buck’s ‘American Children’: US Democracy, Adoption of the Amerasian Child, and the Occupation of Japan in The Hidden Flower,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 35, no. 1 (2014): 188.
78. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea. For more on how the Japanese saw these children see Koshiro, Transpacific Racisms.
79. Jennifer Ann Ho, Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 39. This idea that the right cultural influences could overcome racial inferiority was not unique to the United States. European imperial powers had also applied these beliefs in their colonies. See, for example, Christina Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016), and Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
80. Ho, Racial Ambiguity, 22, 30. The mixed-marriage policy allowed “568 people of Japanese ancestry (predominantly women and children) … to escape incarceration.” Ho, Racial Ambiguity, 22.
81. See for example, Mary Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of- the- Century New York City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
82. Wu, Color of Success.
83. Smith and Worden, “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives,” 81; McEvoy, “America through the Eyes,” 95; Worden “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” 133.
84. Walters, “A Study of the Social and Marital Adjustments …” ch. 7.
85. Ho, Racial Ambiguity, 30–31.
86. Hsu and Wu, “Smoke and Mirrors,” 49.
87. Michener, “Pursuit of Happiness,” 139.
88. Arissa H. Oh, “From War Waif to Ideal Immigrant: The Cold War Transformation of the Korean Orphan,” Journal of American Ethnic History 31, no. 4 (Summer 2012): 34–55; Simpson, Absent Presence, 183.
89. US Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, Role of Family-Based Immigration in the US Immigration System, 110th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, DC, 2007), 25–26.