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OHIO NEWS
Faculty members filming documentary about Japanese war brides
From left to right, Brad Bear, Dr. Miki Crawford, and Don Moore, all faculty members at Ohio University Southern, will go to Japan this fall to film a documentary about Japanese war brides. Crawford, herself the daughter of a Japanese war bride, is also co-writing a book on the subject.
Purchase this photoIRONTON -- Three members of the Ohio University-Southern faculty are heading to Japan this fall to do a documentary on Japanese war brides.
Miki Ward Crawford, an associate professor of communication studies and the daughter of a Japanese war bride, will be going to Japan with Don Moore, director of the electronics media department, and Brad Bear, an advance video production teacher. They'll be going with about a dozen Japanese war brides, Crawford said.
"It's not a typical documentary," Moore said earlier this week. "We'll have to deal with a language barrier. I look at it as a tremendous opportunity. We hope to get stories about some of these ladies going back to their hometowns."
They'll also do some filming at an exhibit of Japanese war brides at the Overseas Migration Museum in Yokohama, Japan, on Oct. 16. Members of the Japanese royal family are expected to be there, too, Crawford said.
There were an estimated 50,000 Japanese war brides who married American soldiers stationed in Japan after World War II and came to America between 1947 and 1965. There were some 500,000 American soldiers in Japan after the war. Like many World War II veterans who are passing away, the purpose of the documentary is to tell the stories of some of these strangers in a strange land before they too are gone.
"There is no place for them to be remembered," Crawford said.
She and two other women are writing a book called "Japanese War Brides in America: An Oral History." She has done some 200 interviews, and with the other two authors, Katie Kaori Hayashi and Shizuko Suenaga, will feature about 20 of them in the book.
The book is being published in English in late November in both book form and electronically, Crawford said.
"Hopefully, it will be published in Japanese, too," she said. "It was neat working with two other people. They both live on the West Coast. We helped each other."
Hayashi is a Japanese journalist and author, while Suenaga is a program coordinator and senior lecturer of Japanese studies at Seattle University.
Crawford's mother, Fumiko Tomita Ward, 82, of South Point, married Louis Ward in 1947. They had to get a special bill through Congress for her to move to the Huntington area. About 900 of the resolutions by the U.S. House of Representatives were approved before the law was changed to allow the Japanese war brides to immigrate to the United States.
"They just couldn't get on a plane and come to America," Moore said. "There were a lot of hoops they had to go through. I think it's a unique story."
The 1924 Immigration Act prevented them from immigrating to this country. Some states also made it illegal to have interracial marriages. Those laws later were repealed or found to be unconstitutional.
It took three years after they were married before Fumiko and her son, Eddie, could get into the country.
It will be Crawford's second trip to Japan. She went there in 1996 with her mother and brother. "It was wonderful to see some of my family for the first time, but it was difficult since I couldn't speak the language," she said. "I'm looking forward to going back."
