Movie Night

Picture Bride

A Japanese-American film drama from 1994
17 Apr 2018 | Johann Jacobs Museum

The film depicts in a realistic manner the situation of Japanese laborers on sugar plantations in Hawai’i at the beginning of the 20th century. With an introduction by Dr. Yukari Takai, University of Windsor in Canada, Department of History.

Dr. Takai was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan and completed her PhD in history at the Université de Montréal in Canada. She is a historian of North America and Asia specialized in issues of migration, women and gender, border and borderlands. As former Fulbright Research Fellow at Columbia University in New York, Takai is the author of Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920 (2008). Currently, she is completing a book on Japanese transmigration across the Pacific and across the Canada-U.S. border during the Exclusion Era (1882-1941). She is also conducting a new project on the gender and social relations of Japanese in Hawai‘i in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Dr. Takai will be answering questions from the audience after the movie.

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Hans Bjarne Thomsen, University of Zurich, Chair for East Asian Art History. On occasion of the exhibition A Painting for the Emperor. Japanese Labourers on Sugar Plantations in Hawai’i.

Title image: Picture bride photograph of Tsuchido Takeko used to show prospective husband. Copyright Japanese American National Museum (Gift of Patsy Yasui, 97.64.4)