War Brides of Japan Marches Forward And, A Sister Search

Aloha, Hip Hapa Homeez!

Arrigatou gozaimasu for your continued support in both reading this blog and in ‘liking’ our various Facebook fan pages. A list of the links appears at the end of this post.

The good news is that we’re in the midst of pre-production for our documentary, War Brides of Japan.

The bad news is that Your Hip Hapa will have little time to devote to the intense interviews posted here in the past.

However, our featured Hip Hapa Homee this bi-month is E. Dawn Samuel who has a special request for you. Please read her plea below, and respond to her directly if you have any information you feel might be helpful.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep you updated about our War Brides of Japan documentary at our Facebook fan page as well as at our new website—once it’s built, that is.

Greetings, friends.

PLEASE HELP! I’m writing in pursuit of lost love. I'm searching for a woman and her child on behalf of my father, an 86 year-old African American veteran living in upstate New York. He recently came to me to ask a favor and proceeded to tell me the most amazing story. Here are the Cliff Notes:

Toward the end of WWII, at the young age of 18 or so, my dad and his twin brother went off to war and were stationed in Japan. There my dad met and fell in love with a mixed-race Japanese/German girl named Natasha. One day in 1948 or '49, she came to him, sat in his lap and said, “You are a handsome man and I am a pretty woman. So, I’m sure this is going to be a beautiful baby.” And with that romantic remark, he was thrilled at the prospect of parenthood and the three of them becoming a family. But as fate would have it, shortly thereafter, his unit was shipped off to Korea and the young lovers where separated.  

The military, which was segregated at the time, heartlessly sent the black troops to fight with only their summer gear and, cruelly, their cold weather gear never arrived. With a lengthy winter that reached temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero, horrifically, the majority of his unit froze to death. Thankfully, my dad and a lucky few survived.  

But when he returned to the apartment in Nagasaki where Natasha lived, her roommate--shocked and completely taken aback to see him alive--told him that thinking he was dead, Natasha had married a tech sergeant from another unit and they had immigrated to the U.S.  The roommate also told my dad he was the father of a baby girl. So, with very little information to help him pursue finding Natasha, he was shipped off again and again. 

Once, he was finally discharged from the service years later, my dad had no idea of how to find them and no idea of Natasha’s circumstances. And, he didn’t want to blow up her life. So, he harbored two major secrets: first; he kept the secret that he was alive from Natasha and; second, he kept the secret of fathering a child during the war from his family. For more than 65 years, my Uncle Richard was the only other person who knew, until my father asked me to find them for him over the Christmas holiday. 

“Babe, will ya help me out and find your sister for me?” he asked me. “I wanna meet her and see Natasha again before I die. She and your momma are the only women I’ve ever loved, and I need to see my firstborn. So please babe, find them for me.”

My dad is 86, has early Alzheimer’s/COPD and is on full oxygen. So, that’s why I’m trying to find this particular war bride. I’m searching for my sister! With a heart full of joyous emotions (I’m crying as I’m writing this now), I’m searching for my sister! Somewhere out there, my dad has a daughter that he’s never seen, but desperately wants to. So, I’m searching for my big sister! Honored and humbled that my dad chose me to share his deepest secrets, I’m searching for my sister!  Hopeful that she will be accepting of our dad and as thrilled as I am to learn of a new sibling, I’m desperately searching for my sister!  And compelled by a sense of privileged duty and with nothing but love in my heart and hope in my soul, I am searching for my sister!

E. Dawn Samuel

Production@edawnsamuel.com

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Don’t forget you can become a member of our Hip Hapa Homeez group on Facebook and post articles about being ethnically mixed, or an interracial couple, or a blended family, or a transracial adoptee, and more.

And, please join our cyber voyage as we travel to film the War Brides of Japan!

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely, Uh, Something!

Earlier, I wrote about the tensions between Japanese in Nippon v. the J/A's (Japanese Americans) in the U.S. Even though I slammed Mr. Sulu for his snide remarks about how I pronounced my name, I didn't mean to make light of the issue of Nipponese v. J/A's. Certainly, there is much to be said about the suffering on both sides.

J/A's languished behind the barbed wire of interment camps and were separated from family and friends, lost careers, property, and--most important of all in Asian culture--face. The Japanese in Nippon, also lost face along with millions of innocent lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were destroyed by American atomic bombs. My own mother, living in Tokyo at the time, often found herself racing towards a bomb shelter to avoid the constant rain of B52 bombs dropped by Americans. One day, she arrived at work only to find her office in shambles; completely demolished by bombing.

No one ever really wins a war. The devastation comes not only in the loss of lives, but also in the deeply psychological pain that often lingers following the trauma of war.

But if there's any kind of light at the end of the tunnel to be celebrated, it's the births of thousands of mixed-race babies who would've never been born had it not been for a war somewhere. So, war can be a kind of cultural bridge, too.

Who would've ever thought that an African American man from the South, whose ancestors were brought in chains from a place he has no recollection of, would end up marrying a Japanese woman whose own sad personal history made her eligible to move to America? And, who would've ever thought that a spirited and artistic Japanese woman would marry a man who should've been considered a representative of the enemy of her people?

But it happened. And, it happened to many others like my parents. It happened to Germans and Italians, too. One of my best friends in high school had a French mother and Swedish American soldier father who had met his bride while he was stationed in Europe. Another had an Austrian mother and Caucasian American father. War brides are what they called these women, but they were so much more. They were brave souls who struggled to recover from the devastation of war and, if that meant marrying a stranger from a strange land, whether or not love fit into the equation, so be it. I'm sure most of those women loved the men they ended up with, but who among us can say how we would behave romantically after losing our families, friends, countries, and even our hope.

About 3/4's of the kids I knew while our family lived at Ft. Lewis were either Japanese and black or Japanese and Caucasian, and German and black or German and Caucasian. Quite frankly, if it hadn't been for a war, I wouldn't be me.

Still, it's too bad that it takes a war to bring some folks together. Perhaps in the future, people will make an effort to not segregate into tribes and, in the words of Bob Marley, "Spread out! Spread out!"

Cool runnin's, ya'll.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

P.S. That's me and Moms, above, with her bike in Tokyo many moons ago.