Picture Bride

 

We attended the 30th Anniversary screening of the 1995 film "Picture Bride". It was a tribute to the late director Kayo Hatta.

Revisiting this film after 30 years was extremely heart felt for all the key figures in attendance and for audience members as well. For me it brought back many memories of my cousin Bob's daughter Lisa Onodera who is the producer of the film. I can remember my mother and my aunts (my aunt Mary is Lisa's Grandmother who lived in Honolulu Hawaii) talking about the work Lisa was doing. We knew of the constant struggles in the film production, raising money to complete the film. Lisa a graduate of UCLA's film school was dedicated to Kayo Hatta's dream of making this movie. Together they worked unbelievably hard to make this dream come true. Yesterday to sit in the audience with Lisa's two adult children and to watch this film together made us tremendously proud of the work Lisa has done. It's a film that has stood the test of time.

Let me give you a very brief summary of this delicate yet profound movie.

Between 1907 and 1924, more than 20,000 young women made the journey from Japan to Hawaii, promised to husbands they knew only through photographs. "Picture Bride" tells the story of one of them, Riyo (Youki Kudoh), who is forced to leave Yokohama under a cloud of family shame. She is only 16. Her future husband has promised her a new life in "paradise". He has sent pictures of a much younger version of himself, well dressed and seemingly prosperous. He has saved for years to pay for his bride’s passage to Hawaii. When she arrives she learns the truth. Her husband to be is almost three times her age and weathered and worn from hard labor in the sugar cane fields. Life in Hawaii is centered on extremely hard work she quickly learns. She vows to save enough money to reimburse Matsuji and buy her passage back home, but the pay is only 16 cents a day. He shows her the sea, visible over the tops of the young sugar cane plants, and tells her that they grow so quickly that soon they will be able to see only the sky. It is a parable: “By and by, we forget all about Japan.”

Picture Bride” was directed by Kayo Hatta and written by her with her sister, Mari. Both of their grandmothers came to Hawaii from Japan – although not as picture brides – and many of the episodes in the film are based on stories passed down through the generations by the descendants of that first generation in Hawaii. “Picture Bride” is one of several films about how we have gathered from all over the globe to call ourselves Americans. Of course, those early generations suffered much. We, the next generations, stand on the shoulders of our ancestors who braved new worlds to create better lives for the generations to follow. They produced the children and grandchildren who are telling these tales.

The film screening was followed by a very informative Q and A which talked about the late director Kayo Hatta and her early film career (student at UCLA) and the challenges she had making her 5 year dream of "Picture Bride" become a reality.

Some important facts:

* A graduate of Stanford University and UCLA’s film school,director Hatta labored for five years to bring “Picture Bride” to theaters. The low-budget movie was picked up by Miramax at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Audience Award for best dramatic film at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995.

*Hatta was strongly committed to making movies that offered authentic portrayals of Asian culture. Much of the dialogue in “Picture Bride” is in Hawaiian pidgin English and many of the actors are Hawaii natives. In “Picture Bride,” she resisted studios’ suggestions that she give a white male with box-office draw a romantic lead. Not only did she cast Asian actors in the leading roles, but Asian American women filled the top production posts, unprecedented for an American dramatic feature film. At Stanford, Hatta majored in literature, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1981. She worked with a documentary film group in San Francisco for several years before honing her skills at UCLA, where she earned a master’s degree in film production in 1991.

*“Picture Bride” began as Hatta’s thesis project at UCLA. During the early 1900s, nearly 20,000 Japanese, Korean and Okinawan women crossed the Pacific to Hawaii to marry Japanese plantation workers after an exchange of photographs. After their long journeys, many of the brides were crushed to learn that their husbands were not the rich and handsome men that their pictures suggested and that a life of backbreaking labor awaited them.

Hatta and her sister, Mari, interviewed 20 former picture brides who were in their 80s and 90s and wrote a script that aimed for a historically accurate depiction of the marriage system and its impact on Hawaiian culture.

*“One of the things we were looking at were the limited number of life alternatives young Japanese women had at that time,” “Picture Bride” producer Lisa Onodera said. “The lesson of the film was that [Riyo] learned to make a full life with what she had. Kayo managed to see that strength in all the characters in her films. She understood Japanese American women so well, with so much tenderness and subtlety.”

*“Too often Asian women are portrayed as geishas or some other exotic types,” Hatta told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1995. “I wanted to get away from that ... to show them as real human beings who had fears and dreams, sexual desires.”

Riyo was played by Youki Kudoh, a Japanese pop idol known to American audiences for her role as an Elvis devotee in the quirky Jim Jarmusch-directed movie “Mystery Train.”

“Picture Bride” also featured Tamlyn Tomita as Riyo’s ill-fated mentor.

A huge coup, however, may have been the casting of the legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, star of such classics as “The Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon,” in a cameo role. Mifune played a benshi, or traveling silent film narrator, who comes to the sugarcane fields to entertain the workers.