Japanese War Brides: An Oral History Archive
Stories from across the United States as told to a daughter of a war bride
She loved working for the Silvers as a nanny for their infant daughter in Japan after the World War II. They treated her as one of the family and she was heartsick when they returned to the United States. Decades later, their paths crossed again.
Peggy was fairly certain she did not want to be involved with the American GIs at the Kure Ammunition Depot in Hiroshima depot, where she had gotten a job as a typist. But one young man asked several times and Peggy agreed to go out on a date with him because she knew he was leaving Japan in just a few weeks. She figured it would be a few dates with no obligations on either side. But Cy told her he would write and that he wanted her to write back. And he did. For three years. When he was finally posted back to Japan, he wanted to marry her but first she had to convert to Catholicism. Getting baptized, it turned out, was not going to be easy.
Sidney and Kazuko were great partners at the Zanzibar in Yokohama, a club where black GIs bought tickets to dance. Sidney bought a whole roll of tickets every night, so that no one else could dance with her.
When Hiroe got the well-paying job in a military intelligence office, she knew she was not supposed to date anyone in the building. He was persistent, though, and finally she relented. She got fired and he was demoted. Still, she was taken aback when at a dinner show one night he presented her with a box containing two rings, which she thought were earrings.
Fumiko Ishikawa was pretty much on her own from the age of 14, after her parents divorced. She lived with her father and was not permitted to see her mother. She went to work at the Misawa Air Force Base at the age of 17. David Langley met her there and before his 21st birthday, decided he wanted to marry her. They both describe their life in the United States as having been defined by their religion. Christianity provided Fumiko an identity and a community – her “cocoon” of Christian friends, as she calls it. The combination of her lack of a stable Japanese family and becoming a born again Christian with her husband helped her find an identity between the United States and Japan.
Her name was originally Takako Funo but her American mother-in-law had a hard time with Takako, so called her Kay. Kay gave up her Japanese identity in other ways, not speaking the language much anymore or cooking the food she grew up with. But she was hampered in feeling completely American because she doesn’t read or write English. Still, she is a loved figure on the streets of her Philadelphia neighborhood, and an essential part of the lives of her children and grandchildren.
In Japan after World War II, Keiko’s mother thought she was acting in her daughter’s best interests when she pushed Keiko to get training as a barber and to marry the young U.S. Air Force man who kept coming around. The first was good advice; the second more complicated. Keiko followed Norman to Maine, where the marriage failed but her work as a barber flourished. She raises three children and becomes a local institution. Then Norman reappears.
Yoko arrived in Minnesota in 1963 with her husband, Roger, and wanted to work. But her English was very poor and her options limited. She had been trained as a barber in Japan, so she decided to try her hand in the United States. But first she had to pass the licensing exam, in English.
Hiroko was the pampered daughter of a Kyoto sushi chef. Don Roberts was one of nine children of a logging family in northern Wisconsin. Hiroko — Don called her Nancy — knew she had made a mistake shortly after arriving in the tiny town of Hiles, and wrote to the Red Cross for help returning to Japan. The obstacles to that seemed insurmountable, so she resigned herself to her life. When they are adults, her children discover her deep unhappiness, and a bit of her true nature, and they commit themselves to making her happy in her remaining years.
Sally Sachiko Blackwell had had enough. Nearly 20 years of following her Army husband from base to base with their two children and now she and the kids were headed from a posting in Okinawa to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. But at a plane layover in Hawaii, she was drawing the line.