A summary and review of "Picture Brides" by Tomoko Makabe, which chronicles the lives of five Canadian-Japanese women.
Written in 2008; 1,408 words; 1 sources; MLA; $ 46.95
Paper Summary:
This paper critically reviews "Picture Brides" by Tomoko Makabe, a Japanese woman living in Canada, who became fascinated by the fact that women would go overseas to marry men they did not know. The author of this paper feels that, while the book is interesting to read, a person aware of Japan's 19th and 20th century history, and the longer story of the Japanese in North America will find little that is so 'amazing' in the experience of the five women informing Makabe's work.
From the Paper:
"Also, the phenomenon to which Makabe gave her attention involved a range of factors to which she seems not to have given ample thought led by the extreme gaps in Japanese social classes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Young women choosing to marry abroad, as ever, were often people with few or no alternative prospects. Makabe seems not to have considered a number of factors of the kind. For instance, a somewhat irritating aspect of Picture Brides is the author's repeated reference to how courageous the picture brides were, in a manner showing that the author has failed to imagine the turn of the 20th century and the courage that all men and women without prospects in Japan, or anywhere else, needed in order to simply survive. Makabe's informants had come to Canada as picture brides in the 1920s, by which time many Japanese women had undertaken the same sorts of journeys, going to join a settled and working man of whom their families were apt to know little or nothing. In addition to traditional family methods of locating spouses, brokers were often involved, a woman taking some risk as ever in terms of how her husband across the world turned out to be but she went abroad with the approval of her family having settled a daughter and sometimes expecting remittance funds.
As an Oral History volume, Picture Brides would be better if the author had managed a shorter introduction on herself and tried for a briefer introduction to 100 years of Japanese in Canada. More weight should have been placed on events in Japan in the later 19th and early 20th centuries that made becoming a picture bride of appeal. For instance, Makabe notes that the women were from village backgrounds and notes how a newly industrializing Japan had few waged opportunities for women that most could not work beyond the home. She seems not to see either that as elsewhere in Asia, marriage was a necessity for poorer families, and that embarking across the world as a picture bride could solve various family problems. Becoming a picture bride was probably more strategic or simply straightforward than courageous or heroic. One gains the impression that the author was fairly sheltered or had not reflected on social reality of the time in either Japan or Canada when beginning research with the assistance of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario."
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