Three ‘Mail-Order’ Brides Reflect on Utah Lives And Still Dream of Japan

By Cathy Free

HONEYVILLE, Box Elder County – Giggling like school-girls caught talking in class, the “mail-order” brides of Honeyville have gathered in the center of Asano Tanako’s cozy living room with their rice cakes and tiny cups of steaming tea, to relive their past.

Has it really been nearly 70 years since they stepped off the noisy black Bamberger train with their trunks and bed-rolls to weed beets and haul hay in a far away, strange place called Honeyville?

“No, it does not seem so long ago,” the women agree sipping their tea and shaking their heads. It seems like only yesterday that we were beautiful and strong.”

They are still beautiful, so many years later, with their finely-lined faces, soft silver hair and delicate hands. And they are still strong – strong enough to face hard times and teach others what they have learned from a lifetime of struggling and working the land.

Asano Tanaka, Hatsumi Fujikawa and Tsuya Watanabe did not want to leave their friends and families behind and take the two-week journey across the ocean from Japan to America, but they had little choice in the early 1900s, a young Japanese woman was expected to marry early – to a man chosen by her aunts, uncles, and parents.

Perhaps it was fate that three poor Honeyville railroaders who had emigrated from Japan to earn money to send home to their families were looking for wives. Perhaps, as Asano now says, it was luck. For whatever reason, the letters arrived in Hiroshima and Isozaki, postmarked, “Utah, U.S.A.” and the future of three young women became certain and uncertain at the same time.

“Dear family,” said the letters from Honeyville, “I am in need of a bride. Will you play the matchmaker?”

Not many months later, Asano Hatsumi and Tsuya were packing their trunks and kissing their families over a final supper of fish soup and rice. They did not want to leave their homeland. They did not want to say goodbye. But they knew what was expected, so they did. “We did not ask questions,” remembers Tsuya, “Our families told us we had to go to America so we could send money home. We didn’t expect we would have to stay. We always thought ‘It will just be a few years.’ I will soon return home.”

Asano took the ship to America at age 21 in 1919, Tsuya came over at age 22 a few months afterward, and Hatsumi followed two years later at age 17. Asano and Tsuya are now 91 and live alone, while Hatsumi is 84, and still lives with the man who sent for her so many years ago. Kenzo Fujikawa is nearly 100, but to his wife of 66 years, he might as well be 30.

“We still love each other dearly,” Hatsumi says in Japanese, as her son, Kenji, interprets. “When I first came here, I was very unhappy. I was used to a big city, not cold fields and bare trees. And I was treated badly by others in the community because I was Japanese. But times have changed. I am now truly happy.”

None of Honeyville’s mail-order brides speaks more than a few words of English and none of them has ever learned to drive. They spend their days alone on their small farms, tending their gardens and discussing the past with a small circle of family and friends. Their tidy homes are decorated with memories of the past – Japanese fans, silk-screen paintings, and Buddha statues – and one can smell the aroma of shrimp tempura, fish chowder and chop suey. drifting from the other kitchen.

“When I first came here, I tried to eat American food,” says Asano as her daughter Sally interprets. “but I did not like it. Oh, how I yearned for the tastes of Japana.”

“We were lonely and frightened,” recalls Tsuya, brushing a wisp of grey hair from her snappy black eyes, “and I oftend cried myself to sleep at night. I would sit outside for hours, facing the west – the place where I had come from.”

In Japan, if the family of the groom decided they did not like the bride after the marriage, she was sent home with her suitcase in shame. In Honeyville, there were no parents, aunts or uncles to intervene, so as puts it, “There was no chance of leaving.”

“But it wasn’t long before I accepted my fate,” she says with a soft smile. “I was my husbands fourth wife. Two others had been sent home in Japan, and the one before me here had died. But I soon felt honored to be a Honeyville Bride.”

They raised sugar beets and children, and their fine, pale hands were soon blistered and sunburned and covered with scars. But the scars of the past, of being taken from their homeland, have become as faded as the delicate silk scarf Hatsumi wraps around her hair.