In a webinar that was offered on January 24, 2024 as a joint collaboration between the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, USC U.S.-China Institute, and SPICE, Kathryn Tolbert, a former long-time journalist with The Washington Post, noted that following the end of World War II, more than 45,000 young Japanese women married American GIs and came to the United States to embark upon new lives among strangers. Tolbert’s mother was one of them. 

Tolbert spent a year traveling the United States to record interviews with these women and their families. The Japanese War Brides Oral History Archive (https://www.warbrideproject.com) is the result of her comprehensive interviews. The Oral History Archive documents an important chapter of U.S. immigration history that is largely unknown and usually left out of the broader Japanese American experience. During the webinar, Tolbert shared moving clips from several of these oral histories during which Japanese immigrant women reflect on their lives in postwar Japan, their journeys across the Pacific, and their experiences living in the United States. In addition, she shared emotional clips from some of the children of these women and their American fathers. Tolbert described bringing the legacy of these stories to life through not only the oral history archive project but also, with colleagues Lucy Craft and Karen Kasmauski, a documentary film (Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight) and an upcoming Smithsonian traveling exhibit. 

Waka Takahashi Brown, SPICE Curriculum Specialist, shared an overview of the teacher’s guide that she developed to accompany Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight, which is available to download for free at https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/multimedia/japanese-war-brides-oral-history-archive. As part of her talk, Brown encouraged teachers to introduce Asian American history and offered specific examples of how Asian American-related topics can be introduced with topics that are commonly taught in U.S. history. For example, she suggested the introduction of the history of Angel Island—the site of an immigration station where officials detained, inspected, and examined approximately one million immigrants who primarily came from Asia—along with the introduction to Ellis Island. 

During the question-and-answer period, Tolbert was asked about the challenges of conducting oral histories of the Japanese war brides. She noted that “The[ir] children were my allies because their children and sometimes the grandchildren wanted to know the stories. The women didn’t think that they had a story. They didn’t understand that there would be interest in their lives… In every family there is a storyteller, and if you could find the person who can tell the family’s story or the mother’s story, then that’s what makes it work.” She was also asked for her suggestions on how a grandchild might start exploring their grandparents’ history because it is such an important part of identify formation. Tolbert replied, “I would start by looking at photographs… ask the grandparent to talk about the photos. And ask the grandparent to explain what they are, where they were taken, what was happening that day. And then you start to get a picture of life at another time.” Brown also noted how her involvement in the development of the teacher’s guide for Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight was very personal to her because though her mother wasn’t a war bride, she was a Japanese immigrant to the United States, and issues like cultural understanding/misunderstanding, identity, and assimilation—key issues for Japanese war brides—were important issues in her family as well. 

Reflecting on the webinar, moderator Naomi Funahashi commented, “As I mentioned in my opening comments, my grandmother was a Japanese woman who married an American GI after World War II. Thus, it is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. The webinar heightened my knowledge of what these women—including my grandmother—endured during the post-war period. The webinar really underscored the power of learning history through personal narrative.” 

A recording of the webinar is now available at https://youtu.be/sp4EWuLct7E.

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