F7GU8's Euro-debut!
F7GU8 screened on the continent for the first time at the Women Over 50 Film Festival, in the seaside city of Brighton, outside London. We received a wonderful review from judges Jill Nicholls - a veteran documentary filmmaker - and Felicity Beckett, General Manager at the Picturehouse Duke of York's cinema in Brighton:
"In 2nd place is an unsentimental and well-researched documentary, which, without judgement but with compassion and insight, presented the extraordinary lives of these women who left war-torn Japan and their families for good, to start tough, new lives with people who often didn’t understand, welcome or like them. They raised mixed race but American children, and both mothers and daughters were frank about their relationships, which were sometimes confusing and frustrating. The most polished and well-paced of all the entries. Both this film and Abandoned Adopted Here brought the past alive in the present, and showed us things we didn’t know. In second place, it's Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides by Lucy Craft, Kathryn Tolbert and Karen Kasmauski."
Organizer Nuala O'Sullivan told us our film was "interesting for a British audience -- it educated and entertained and surprised…did what a good doc should do."
The "New directors film festival," Toyosu, Nov. 6, 2016
Not the fish market, but the screening went, ahem, swimmingly...
Nowadays, the Tokyo neighborhood Toyosu is a synedoche for tainted land and bureaucratic fiasco. It’s where the world’s biggest fish market, Tsukiji, was supposed to move, last November.
But Toyosu is also a gleaming new neighborhood of high-rise condos and family-friendly entertainment, and as part of a "new directors" festival, F7GU8 screened at a mini-cine in Toyosu's sprawling shopping mall. Our film followed some amazing animated shorts. One was an adaptation of a story by Osamu Dazai, (1909-48) one of the leading Japanese writers of the 20th century. While Dazai’s life itself was the stuff of tragic novels, this anime drew me in. It was based on the Schoolgirl (which has been translated into English); the original was written in 1939, when my mother was ten, and describes a lost world of teenaged angst in the period preceding the American Occupation… the creator of this animation, Shigyoshi Tsukahara, painstakingly recreates the details of urban life in the early Showa period, like the cornice of a sliding door… Some of his amazing works viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/user/TSUKAHARAnime
Another fine rendering of a Japanese folk tale was created by art student Miyo Sato; samples of her work, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOGdWCl0rNQ
Surprisingly, many of these animators continue to render every frame by hand. A ten-minute film - really a piece of moving art - thus takes a full year to complete.
I strolled through a few of the other films, and realized that no matter what the era, genre or style, the subject of war continues to cast a long shadow...
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F7GU8 has gotten some nice publicity on both sides of the Pacific recently. First off, we were interviewed for a feature in the wonderful Atlas Obscura online magazine:
Please read the article here: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-curious-curriculum-of-the-1950s-red-cross-bride-schools
We also got a great ride in the popular, print-only English Journal magazine... the Feb. 2017 edition of EJ ran a long interview with F7GU8's Lucy Craft and veteran journalist Drini Kakuchi; which was translated into Japanese and included an audio copy of our talk.
The article was entitled 「戦争花嫁」が娘たちに語った戦後 or "The Postwar as told by 'War brides' to their daughters." http://ec.alc.co.jp/book/0017021/
Since F7GU8 really began with the US military, it has always been our dream to bring our film to members of the armed forces community and to hear their thoughts. That wish became reality earlier this year, thanks to Annette and John Bradford, of YCAPS http://www.ycaps.org/ which arranged our event at the Benny Decker Theater on Yokosuka Naval Base -- the base where Karen was born (!)
Of all the dozens of events we have held since late 2015, this surely was one of the most enthusiastic and memorable in terms of audience engagement. A man asked about how war brides dealt with religious differences and isolation from the faith of their birth - in fact, Kathryn's ongoing research has demonstrated that church participation was particularly high among many women... audience members were curious about whether brides had the will, desire and wherewithal to ever return to Japan for visits (there is a gamut here, from women who have visited frequently, to others who have never returned); and acceptance of vs. rejection by their families in Japan.
Other members of the audience honed in on how much Japanese heritage we were exposed to, advice about accessing family records, and "pictures brides." (Sometimes confused with war brides, picture brides emigrated decades earlier to marry men of their own ethnic group.)
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F7GU8 has been a six-year learning project, a college course that never ends, for us...
It has also been a bit of a detective story, trying to track down some of the folks who surfaced briefly in the early telling of the war bride story. Trying to find people who made the news a half-century ago is, needless to say, an ambitious undertaking - but we are happy to say we have finally located someone whose existence was so crucial to our short film. She appeared - unacknowledged - in our movie!
You may recall that we used several old b&w clips to illustrate a bride’s first encounter with her new in-laws and getting odd looks on the street... that piece of film, from the National Archives, helped us visually show a bit of the isolation and trepidation experienced by brides in unfamiliar towns across America.
We knew the family who actually appeared in that old government film was Walter and Mona (Miwako) Lutz - but were never able to find them. The closest we ever got was the Denver Art Museum, which holds some of their bamboo collection.
Photogenic, and with a surprising natural talent for acting, the Lutz family starred in the obscure 1952 film Japanese Bride in America which we found in the archives over 50 years later. It was produced by the U.S. government for Japanese consumption -- to reassure Japanese families that their daughters were doing ok.
The Lutz daughters - Adelle (looking straight at the camera) and Tina - went on to extraordinary lives, and after years of searching, we were thrilled to finally meet up with Adelle, now an artist living on the west coast. She kindly filled us in on how her parents met in Japan, and would join a handful of pioneering war bride couples who married in the late 1940s.
Adelle, right, with F7GU8's Kathryn Tolbert
Kathryn was on a panel last month at the Hapa Japan Festival, held at the Japanese American National Museum and the University of Southern California.
From left: Megumi Nishikura from Blue Chalk Media, who produced our film, USC Distinguished Professor Velina Hasu Houston, producer Monique Yamaguchi, Kathryn and anthropologist Mitzi Uehara Carter of Florida International University.
Our film was screened with war bride daughter and playwright Velina Hasu Houston’s new film, “Rising Sun, Rising Soul” about the families of African American fathers and Japanese mothers. Kathryn took part in a panel discussion with Velina, her producer Monique Yamaguchi, and the producer of our film, Megumi Nishikura.
For those of us who grew up in parts of the country not knowing other families like ours, it was fascinating to hear Velina and others talk about how African American-Japanese families found each other and formed a community, bringing their families together and celebrating New Year’s with Japanese food, finding ways to integrate their two cultures.
There was also a question from the audience about the use of the word “war bride” which some people don’t think is literally accurate, and some Japanese don’t like because the Japanese media portrayed women who married GIs as bar girls or prostitutes. But Prof. Fumi Nitta, who has worked on the subject matter for more than 20 years, spoke up and said that in his research the women felt that their experiences were very particular immigrant ones, and that war bride was an acceptable way of identifying them.
Finally, there is talk of a Japanese War Bride Symposium next year, with hope that many of the children of these families will be interested in exploring the story of their mothers and their own experiences growing up in in a mixed Japanese and American household. An organizing lunch was hosted by Duncan Ryuken Williams, Associate Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California and the Director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. The proposal comes from Fredrick Cloyd, who was born in Japan shortly after the U.S. Occupation ended, to a Japanese mother and African-American soldier father. We’ll send updates on the symposium in future newsletters.
Two perspectives on the conference, in:
NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/in-los-angeles-a-festival-of-love-and-hapa-ness.html
Rafu Shimpo http://www.rafu.com/2017/03/into-the-next-stage-hapa-documentaries-twin-takes-on-similar-subject/
We received a poignant remembrance from Michelle Burnett about her mom, nee Shizuko Mabuchi...
Rumi, as she preferred to be known, was the eldest of seven in Nagoya. Her beloved father died when she was a child, a loss that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Although exceptionally bright, she was forced to leave school after just a few years to help support the family.
At age 30, she met her future husband, a Korean War vet. Michelle was born on the air force base in Tokyo.
Denied of education herself, Rumi pushed her husband and children to excel in school - Michelle would go on to become a doctor; her sister, an engineer. Their father would attend graduate school.
Rumi was the portrait of calm and dignity. While living in Pennsylvania, someone called her the n-word. "I was horrified (but) she let it roll right off of her," Michelle recalls.
Rumi learned to paint, weave, knit, crochet, and make pottery. She took English and a writing class at a community college when she was in her 70s, despite recurrent bouts of cancer, caused perhaps by exposure to blue dye in the factory where she worked as a child.
She requested red, white and blue flowers at her funeral, saying, with palpable emotion, 'I love this country.'
"She, who grew up with so little love, loved me with such grace and such generosity," Michelle says.
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The road ahead...
We are working on the next step in telling the story of this generation of Japanese women -- a multimedia project that includes an expansion of the short documentary and a traveling, participatory exhibit with photographs and oral histories. Kathryn is still reaching out to families and conducting interviews; Karen is taking photographs of the women and their families. We'll be sending out a special newsletter in the coming months focused on this next phase.
Here's Karen in Wellsboro, Pa., recently with Akiko Hewitt, who started a business called Akiko's Floral Arts.
Please look forward to a bulletin in your inbox, soon!
Wanna catch up on our old newsletters? Some archived here: http://www.fallsevengetupeight.com/news
