Picture Bride Response

The main character of Picture Bride, Riyo, is one of those Japanese migrants Takaki describes in his book, Strangers From A Different Shore. Riyo leaves Japan voluntarily to start a new life because of the stigma of her parents death. She is looking for a fresh start in Hawaii but soon discovers it will take a lot of hard work and her husband is not the young man she thought she was marrying. The fear Riyo feels about sexual intimacy is visually portrayed by two scenes: one in which a caterpiller is wiggling in the petals of an orchid and another time when a caterpiller is wiggling its way underneath Riyo's clothes. Using Barthes explanation of these two film images the denotation is just a flower or a caterpiller, but the connotation is conveyed by close-ups of the caterpiller and flower thus leading the viewer to grasp the human emotion of Riyo's fear of sex with her husband.

When Riyo arrives in Hawaii, we can already see she is different from the other Japanese women in the waiting room because Riyo is the only one dressed in Western garb: skirt and blouse. The other new arrivals are dressed in kimonos. The filmmaker appears to be showing that even educated "city girls" from Japan made the migration to Hawaii, it wasn't just farmers. Takaki writes that Emperor Meiji wanted Japanese women to go abroad because "Japan would 'benefit by the knowledge thus acquired'" (48). Riyo's migration and adaptation to life on a sugar plantation in Hawaii shows one way Japanese-Americans became a permanent part of this new land.