Japanese War Brides: An Oral History Archive
Stories from across the United States as told to a daughter of a war bride
“You gotta speak up,” says Yoko Jones. And she did, even arguing in public about the stupidity of racial segregation in 1950s America. Speaking her mind is so much more an American trait than a Japanese one. But the word her husband used to describe her was samurai — when they argued, when he spoke of her admiringly and when he was frustrated with her stubbornness. It seemed to fit every circumstance for him.
Many Japanese war brides gave up their special identities and all but disappeared into American society. Especially in small towns and rural communities, the goal was to blend in as best they could. In a sense, Akiko Hewitt was no exception. Nearly from the day she arrived, she was intent on becoming a true American. But the Hewitts also stood out. For one thing, they had eight children. But this is more than a story about a big family. It’s about the varied identities within one family, and the culture of service to country instilled by the daughter of a Japanese military man. It’s also a story about flowers.
Kazue Jordan – born Kazue Shibata – was a jitterbugging bobby-soxer who danced nights away with black GIs at a cabaret in Yokohama. She married one of those soldiers, Sidney Jordan, and accompanied him to the United States. Her California life, cleaning houses for the rich and famous, was a kind of immigrant success story. But she also lived in a smaller universe of Japanese women who married black GIs in the aftermath of World War II and had to negotiate an especially difficult racial and cultural divide.
It took the 1960s women’s movement to make a Japanese war bride see that her view of what it meant to be an American wife did not need to be so limiting. Because, in fact, she had already enjoyed a more liberated life in Japan than she did in the US.