Picture Bride Response (pt 1)

Keeping true to what Takaki wrote in Strangers from a Different Shore, Picture Bride is deft at portraying the racial tensions between the Filipinos and the Japanese, especially with the payday scene where discrepancies in payment are used to pit the two ethnic groups against one another. Also, Takaki wrote that the sugar cane owners viewed themselves as having a “moral purpose” to “emancipate the natives” from their slave-like conditions of labor. In Picture Bride, white Americans—whether it is the woman for whom Kana and Riyo do laundry or the plantation manager—are similarly portrayed as being benevolent. The woman is genuinely concerned for Kana and Riyo’s welfare, offering to them cold drinks and inquiring as to their relationships with their husbands. Likewise, the manager prevents the Portuguese boss from using physical force against the women laborers. In reality and in Picture Bride, however, the immigrants still work under harsh conditions with meager income. As it is directed by a Japanese woman and it focuses on the struggles of Japanese immigrant laborers, I would have expected there to be more bias in the portrayal of the plantation owners who seem to exploit their labor, but I will have to finish the film before I can assert this for certain.