The A-Files - A Life Imagined: The A-File of Umeyo Kawano
Spring 2013, Vol. 45, No. 1
“On the boat the first thing we did—before deciding who we liked and didn’t like, before telling each other which one of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, before even bothering to learn each other’s names—was compare photographs of our husbands. . . . On the boat, we often wondered: Would we like them? Would we love them? Would we recognize them from their pictures when we first saw them on the dock?”
—“Come, Japanese!” The Buddha in the Attic
Umeyo Kawano (left) was the picture bride of Suikichi Kawano (right), a widowed farmer from Tulare, California. (Records of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, RG 566, National Archives at San Francisco)
Julie Otsuka’s 2011 novel The Buddha in the Attic gives voice to Japanese immigrant women of the early 20th century. As young “picture brides” destined to marry Japanese farmers, merchants, and others who had settled the western United States, these women raised families and built homes and businesses. Years later, they would be up- rooted and interned during World War II, forced to start anew after the war.
Umeyo Kawano (A2579173) is one of thousands of immigrants whose A-Files have come to the National Archives at San Francisco. Born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1889, Umeyo Nakahara immigrated to San Francisco in 1913 as the picture bride of Saikichi Kawano, a widowed farmer from Tulare, California. Her A-File includes photographs of her and her husband-to-be; she wears a patterned kimono and obi and stands next to a vase of blooming roses. There is the requisite letter from the consulate general of Japan in San Francisco, testifying to Saikichi’s “good character . . . and means” and a transcript of her interview before the Board of Special Inquiry at Angel Island Immigration Station.
From examining census and vital records, we know that the Kawanos lived in Kingsburg and Selma, agricultural towns in central California, with their three sons and five daughters. Umeyo’s A-File picks up in 1940, as she registered under the requirements of the Alien Registration Act by completing the Form AR-2. Two years later, just days before President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, she registered as an “Alien of Enemy Nationality.” (This form deals frankly with the matter of Umeyo’s nationality—she writes that naturalized American citizenship had always been a right “denied [to her] by law.”) A handful of Address Record Cards track her family’s movement from their homes to an assembly center in Fresno, California, and then across the United States to Jerome War Relocation Center in southeastern Arkansas, where they remained throughout World War II.
One is struck by what might be read between the lines of these forms and documents. Was Umeyo nervous as she answered the three immigration inspectors in 1913? How did she feel about her son’s military service in the U.S. Army while she was interned in Arkansas? What of her former life awaited her when she returned to Selma in 1945?
While these federal records and books like The Buddha in the Attic can help us imagine the thoughts and feelings of these immigrant women, we in the National Archives eagerly wait for the day when Umeyo’s descendants seek these records here and share their part of her story.
Related stories:
Return to The A-Files: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors