The Thymology of Picture Brides: Imagined Images of Marriage as a Site for Legality

Preface

"Young picture brides, like those seen here, were often disillusioned to see the true appearance and lifestyle of their husbands once landing on American soil. Japanese women were often younger than their new husbands by several years, sometimes decades. Some young brides returned to Japan upon seeing their husbands, but the majority accepted their fate by settling into life in America and starting families | Copyright 2008 California State Parks"

(The image above is taken from an article entitled Japanese Picture Brides: Building a Family Through Photographs by Kelly Simpson at  Los Angeles' KCET @ 

 http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/little-tokyo/japanese-picture-brides-building-a-family-through-photographs.html )

Critical Response

                    What does it mean to be an in between "picture bride" or a "paper son"  and by what means and towards what ends do these liminally charged archetypes call into question (or re-member) legality in terms of shifting cultural and economic threseholds? What does it mean for a subject to make or fake a thymological assumption on behalf of an object within an arranged marriage as the means towards migration? To begin with, this traditional form of traditional Japanese matchmaking (miai) represents a set of complex socio-sexual and socio-cultural exchange values that are to be mediated foremostly by family recommendations and economic necessity as opposed to the ideal experience of marriage as a dyadic relationship rooted in true love and mutual understanding. Whose wants and needs are obfuscated in this picture?

               Although most Japanese and Korean men in the late 19th century who had traveled to Hawaii as cheap labor had originally planned to return home between the years of 1886 and 1924, 199,564 Japnese entered Hawaii and 113,362 returned to Japan. Many women, out of obligation to support both close and distant relatives appeased to the ornamented and oftentimes unrealistically forged photographs sent from the vast male labor reservoir of immobile "bachelors" and the practice of arranging picture bride ceremonies continued until the Japanese government stopped issuing passports to paper brides on March 1, 1920 due to the exclusionist and over-arching Anti-Japanese prejudices widespread in the United States. I am interested in further understanding and discussing the cyclic creation and destruction of cultural imaginings and forgettings as symptomatic of the pathologizing residuals of  arranged marriage in general as a type of  involutionary violence often left unsaid and understated. Below I beg some questions around the personal palimpsest that is experienced in terms of cultural and educational opportunities and how these only provide extremely partial ways of knowing the true experience and thymological antecedence that inform structures of desire. 

1 Key Term &  2 Relevant Passages for Further Discussion

Thymology= Thymology is what a man or woman knows about the way in which people value different conditions, about their wishes and desires & their plans to realize these wishes and desires. It is the knowledge of the social environment in which a man lives and acts or about which he has learned by study... As Collingwood formulated, it belongs to the sphere of history: It deals with the mental activities of men that determine their actions; It deals with the mental processes that result in a definite kind of behavior.

Short excerpt from Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts: Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique (1996)

"Culture is the medium of the present- the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationships with the national collective- but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference... It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently" (Lowe 3). 

                                                                       and

Short excerpt from Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980):

"He did much worrying, and hit upon a plan. He would not end his American life but show her how to live one. "Here's what you have to do if I'm to bring you to America," he wrote, though there was a law against her. "I'll bring you to America on one condition, and that is, you get a Western education. I'll send you money, which you must spend only on school, not on food or clothes or jewelry or relatives. Leave the village. Go to Hong Kong or Canton and enroll in a Western scientific school. A science school. Get a degree. Send it to me as evidence you are educated, and I'll send you a ship ticket. And don't go to school for classical literature. Go to a scienctific school run by white people. And when you get your degree, I'll send for you to come here to the United States" (Kingston 67)