Table of Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1 Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2 Looking at Japanese Picture Brides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

3 Beauty behind Barbed Wire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

4 Filling in the Blank Spot in an Incomplete War Bride Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

About the Author

Elena Tajima Creef is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body.

Reviews

"A tour de force. Creef provides nothing less than a visual pedagogy for Asian American feminism. She mines the dark gaze of imperial power and blank spots of gender history as well as its secrets. When she engages the family album (and story of a hapless Japanese pet dog, Butch) as a site of memory and memorialization, you cannot put the book down."--Leslie Bow, author of “Partly Colored”: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

"In this carefully researched book, Elena Tajima Creef offers compelling feminist readings of archival photographs from the first half of the 20th century. . . . The important questions this book raises will no doubt stimulate further discussion and analysis of not only the historic representation of Japanese/American and Ainu women, but more broadly, some visual traces of power and resistance yet to be uncovered and witnessed." --Visual Anthropology