Yeiko Mizobe So and the Japanese Women's Home for Abused Picture Brides

The Japanese women who migrated to both Hawai‘i and the United States as “picture brides” were not passive individuals but active agents who, by their very willingness to move to a foreign land and create new lives, embodied a rare quality that scholars have only recently recognized.

Yeiko Mizobe So founded the Japanese Woman’s Home in Honolulu, which served over 700 abused picture brides in its ten years of existence. Her life story illustrates a long and largely unacknowledged tradition of female radicalism in Japan. This activism converged with American missionary efforts to meet the various needs of newly arrived migrants to Hawai‘i. An examination of her life and her remarkable activities reveals tantalizing new details about female activism in Hawai‘i, both within the Japanese and white communities, that bridged both class and ethnic divides. Yeiko Mizobe So’s groundbreaking work also acknowledges the often “silent” crime of domestic violence as early as late nineteenth-century Hawai‘i.

Kelli Y. Nakamura is a History Instructor at Kapi‘olani Community College. Her research interests include Japanese and Japanese American history.

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
956-3774, aikoy@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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