Picture Brides
In 1986 local historian Barbara Kawakami and Women’s Studies Professor, Alice Chai introduced us to their project on picture brides. They had collected stories and photos from a sampling of women who came to Hawaiʻi as picture brides, with marriages arranged by families in which the bride and groom only knew each other from exchanged pictures. The stories told by women from Japan, Okinawa, and Korea, contained a range of human emotions from sadness to joy and often humor!