Japanese War Brides: An Oral History Archive
Stories from across the United States as told to a daughter of a war bride
Machan Taylor is a singer, songwriter and musical composer who has toured with Sting and Pink Floyd. She has shared the stage with Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, Natalie Merchant and many other artists. Music is in her DNA, and Machan’s dream of becoming a singer first belonged to her Japanese mother, Ayako Sasaki, a jazz singer in post-war Japan.
Admiral Harry Harris spent his boyhood in rural Tennessee, son of a Japanese mother and American father. He says he was a typical American boy. He did not think much, or at all, about being half-Japanese. But that began to change when his family moved to Pensacola, Florida and he enrolled in a recently integrated high school. And his mother’s heritage played a bigger role as he rose through the ranks in the U.S. Navy.
His birth mother gave him a slip of paper with his father’s name on it. Bruce Hollywood did not intend to search for him.
Air Force Col. Bruce Hollywood never felt a need to find his Japanese birth mother. That changed when he had a heart attack and realized he had never thanked her.
Kyoko’s birth father was an American GI, one of the first to land in Japan for the Occupation after the end of World War II. He met a young woman named Taka at a train station, and soon got her pregnant. Then he left. Taka raised Kyoko, her bi-racial child, for 17 years in Japan, a difficult situation for both of them. When a retired American military officer asked Taka to marry him, she viewed it as a chance to get her daughter out of Japan. Kyoko was taken from high school and landed in Minnesota. Unhappy in many respects, she clung to her secret mission, finding her birth father.
Her mother was shunned by her family when she married a black GI. Many years later, the Japanese relatives tried to find their sister, but they were too late. She had died six years earlier. Morgan had no interest in forming ties to the family in Japan, hurt by what they did to her mother. Then she thought she should at least tell them what they missed.
They attributed many things to her being Japanese – the lack of visible affection between their parents, her criticism of her children in front of others. Even the yelling… although it’s questionable whether that’s a Japanese trait or a mom trait. They didn’t understand why she married their father, and they didn’t understand why she stayed.
Over the years, the children of Toyoko Yonamine and Wardell Townsend Sr. have sought to find balance in the multiple sides of their heritage. Modern multi-racial American; descendants of the segregated south; son or daughter of ancient Asia. They have come to value their origins from both sides of the Pacific.