Women - Japanese Picture Bride - Essay Example

This part of the paper addresses the various analyses of my findings during the course of the research work. Considering the case of ‘picture brides’ and their increasing infiltration in U.S during the early 1900s, need of marriage in the own community, commitments previously made by the matchmaking relatives, like the fathers of the brides to the bridegrooms, possibility of an escape- route from the complexities of Japanese culture of arranged marriage and opportunity of visiting U.S in order to provide a helping hand to the working prospective husbands can be regarded as the independent variable for migration of the Japanese women.

The dependant variable can be the set of skills and expertise required to adjust to the U.S culture. There was also a hint of uncertainty to how the husband will turn out to be in real life. In several cases, there are evidences where picture brides were sent false pictures or pictures of the groom taken during his young age. These women, after arriving in U.S and seeing their husbands to be a very old person have gone back to their homelands (Nishimuta, 2006, pp.15-17). In most cases, the age difference of a bride and the man was almost fifteen to twenty years.

These women were also lured with photos of big lavish houses in richer areas of America, but when they finally used to reach there they were shocked with the living conditions of the man, in most cases which turned out to be isolated, sub standard and rationally segregated plantation quarters. These men also used to pose with hired suits and rented cars in the pictures to impress these women. Some Japanese and Korean women of that time came to U.S from their homelands as picture brides since there was an increasing trend and influx of more Japanese women invading the U.S lands. So these women merely went with the ongoing flow.

In some other cases, there are traces where a married woman has eloped with a younger person; the practice of elopement was known as kakeochi (Tamura, 1993, pp. 45-46). In order to catch their fleeing wives, the husbands would issue newspaper ads in the Issei community declaring rewards for those who could provide information about their missing wives. Kakeochi was a very risky thing to do since it was considered hazardous to the reputations of these married women and if and when these women were caught they were deported to Japan following the Japanese civil code which gave rights to the husbands in deciding where their wives would stay; Women's Home Missionary Society in U.

S was used as a temporary establishment for these women for the time being before they were deported back to Japan. Thus, a trend of increasing cases of cheatings and forgeries on the part of the young, innocent Japanese women by their husbands can be seen which was never justified by the federal law of the U.S, while in cases where women were found cheating on their husbands were met with strict jurisdiction from the U.S government. So, there is hint of differential treatment on part of the women that can be analyzed.

In analyzing the motives of husbands and the wives behind picture marriage, the Japanese and Korean men traveled to the U.S to mainly work on plantation fields of Hawaii as cheap labor. Some also worked on primary fields. These men basically had an idea of working in U.S for some years, accumulating some money and then returning back to their motherlands after enough money was earned. However, in reality most of them could not make enough money to make their way back home. In such situations, single men considered the possibility of another helping hand in supporting their cause.

Their wives would help them in plantations work and also take care of their households and breed their children. Sometimes, in order to earn more money, the husbands wou