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Shadow Traces
THE ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Series Editors
Eiichiro Azuma
Jigna Desai
Martin F. Manalansan IV
Lisa Sun-Hee Park
David K. Yoo

Roger Daniels, Founding Series Editor

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
Shadow Traces
Seeing Japanese/American
and Ainu Women in
Photographic Archives

ELENA TAJIMA CREEF

© 2022 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Creef, Elena Tajima, author.
Title: Shadow traces : seeing Japanese/American and Ainu
women in photographic archives / Elena Tajima Creef.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2022]
| Series: The Asian American experience | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046166 (print) | LCCN 2021046167
(ebook) | ISBN 9780252044403 (cloth) | ISBN 9780252086472
(paperback) | ISBN 9780252053399 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Japanese American women—Portraits.
| Japanese American women—Archives. | Women,
Ainu—United States—Portraits. | Women, Ainu—
United States—Archives. | War brides—United States—
Portraits. | War brides—United States—Archives. |
Photograph collections—Social aspects—United States.
| Portrait photography—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC E184.J3 C74 2022 (print) | LCC E184.J3
(ebook) | DDC 305.48/89956073—dc23/eng/20211014
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046166
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046167
For Sky
 Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1 Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2 Looking at Japanese Picture Brides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3 Beauty behind Barbed Wire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4 Filling in the Blank Spot in an Incomplete
War Bride Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
 Acknowledgments

My deep love of Asian American visual culture has been foundational to

this book. While I have watched with pleasure as the field of Asian Ameri-
can film studies has blossomed—even exploded—in the past decade, Asian
American photographic studies are only getting started. Judy Yung’s Chinese
Women of America: A Pictorial History (1986) was one of the very first vol-
umes that caught my eye back in my UC–Santa Cruz graduate school days,
when my friends and I would pore over its precious images cover to cover
with fascination and excitement. The recent work on the interplay between
the camera, history, Asian/American communities, war, and empire by senior
scholars like Thy Phu, Bakirathi Mani, Jasmine Alinder, and Robert G. Lee
are groundbreaking and inspiring for how they are moving Asian American
studies along in this under-explored direction.
Every scholar who has spent countless hours, months, or years alone in a
library, cubicle, or at an isolated desk knows very well that there is no such
thing as researching and writing a book by yourself. It takes a constellation
of friends, colleagues, family, and others to keep you going from beginning
to end of the marathon journey. I am deeply indebted to so many who have
supported me over the years as I conducted archival research across a dozen
different special collections, presented my findings at many professional
meetings, and wrote at my signature snail’s pace.
In my search for photographic materials, the staff at the following special
collections and libraries helped me tremendously with their time, expertise,
and guidance: the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago,
the Field Museum, the Bishop Museum, the East-West Center, the Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i, Manoa, the Japanese American Cultural Center in Ho-
 nolulu, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the Japanese American
National Museum, the Japanese American History Center and Archive in
San Francisco, the Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
at the National Archives and Record Administration-Pacific Region in San
Bruno, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the
Radcliffe Institute, and the Shiraoi Ainu Museum and Village in Noboribetsu,
Hokkaido, Japan.
I am also deeply grateful to the Northeast Council for Asian Studies for
their grant support that launched me headlong into the National Archives
in San Bruno, where I found the mother lode of archival materials related
to Japanese picture brides. Likewise, I am very grateful to Wellesley College
and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department for their years of generous
support for my work.
I consider myself extraordinarily privileged to have worked with some of
the best editors imaginable—past and present—at the University of Illinois
Press. My deepest respect and gratitude go to Vijay Shah, Larin McLaughlin,
Dawn Durante, Alison Syring, and Ellie Hinton, who have long cheered me
on to the finish line with this book. I am also deeply indebted to the rich
feedback and brilliant insights of Wendy Kozol, Thy Phu, and especially Jigna
Desai. All three—in their different capacities—generously read my work and
helped me when I was most stuck.
To my dearest friends and family, Ursula Heise and Karen Schmidt, thank
you for hosting me during my visits from Boston to San Bruno. To my sisters-
in-law Valorie Creef and Cheryl Fischer and my beautiful niece, Kat Hoag,
thank you for the meals, laughter, and support—you are the best. To my
beloved cousin Satomi Okubo, her husband Yuji, and my Ojisan, Kunichika
Tajima, thank you for hosting me and helping me figure out how to book that
long scenic two-day “romantic” train ride from Tokyo to Sapporo. (Satomi,
you were right: I don’t know what I was thinking. I should have listened to
you and booked that two-hour flight instead.)
To Teresia Teaiwa, your comments and insights about the Ainu in St. Louis—
and what Frederick Starr’s personal photographer, Manual Gonzalez, contrib-
uted to this archive—resonate deeply in my opening chapter. I miss you.
To Yoon Sun Lee, Yue Hu, Stanley Chang, D.J. Hatfield, Paul Fisher, Laura
Hyun Yi Kang, Nora Keller, Glen Masato Mimura, Vince Diaz, Tina ­DeLisle,
Greg Robinson, Heng Wee Tan, Josephine Lee, Jennifer Ho, and Floyd Cheung,
I consider all of you my sassy, brilliant, and beloved circle of friends who have
long inspired the kind of work and play I want to do, both inside and outside
the classroom.

x Acknowledgments
 Leslie Bow, I have always said that one of your many superpowers is the
ability to listen to others’ half-baked ideas and then re-articulate them within
your framework of genius. A thousand thank-yous, my dear friend, for the
countless times you have brainstormed with me and elevated my critical and
creative work.
At Wellesley, I am especially grateful to my colleagues and friends who
sustain me with their enthusiasm and support: Rosanna Hertz, Susan Re-
verby, Betty Tiro, Irene Mata, Jenny Musto, Natali Valdez, Pat Berman, Nikki
Green, Becky Bedell, Martha McNamara, Eve Zimmerman, Michael Jeffries,
Petra Rivera-Rideau, Genevieve Clutario, and Karen Shih.
Alice Friedman, thank you for your years of support, insight, and for
suggesting the title of this book.
To my feminist teachers Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Bettina Aptheker, Angela
Davis, Donna Haraway, Helene Moglen, and Akasha Hull, thank you for
training me since 1986. I’ve always been a late bloomer, and much of what
you have taught me is, at last, beginning to take root and blossom.
I count myself extraordinarily lucky that I get to teach at a historic women’s
college with the best students you will ever meet. A special shout-out to
my amazing women’s and gender studies students who over the years have
helped me test out Asian American feminist research methods and findings
across many classes, collections, and conversations. Big thanks especially to
Holly Uyemoto, Elaine Chin, Sejal Shah, Mai Nguyen, Wei-Lin Wang, Wei-
Ying Wang, Shana Nishihira, Rachelle Dang, Margot Seeto, Minnie Yuen,
Janet King, Annie Wang, Jin Yoo-Kim, Claire Shin, Rachel Shuen, Shelby
Baptista, Irina Chen, Esa Tijilla, Lia Camargo, Kat Hyslop, Michelle Baker,
Roya Rastegar, Anna Mueller, Vicki Nam, and Xan Chacko.
Junot Diaz, Marjorie Liu, and Yuko Matsukawa, I cannot thank you enough
for your great friendship and unwavering support for my work stretching
from Cambridge to Tokyo. I don’t know what I’d do without you.
Mitsuye Yamada and Jeni Yamada, thank you for your friendship and the
inspiration you both have long given me. You remain two of my all-time
favorite writers in poetry and prose.
Alison McKee, my dear friend and longtime writing buddy, thank you for
our Sunday Skype sessions that continue to be one of the brightest moments
of my week. I credit you with helping me fly and land the unwieldy Jumbo
Jet that turned out to be this book.
To my big brothers, Ed and Art, thank you for letting me write about
the stories and images that live in our mother’s album and collective family
memories.

Acknowledgments xi
 To the circle of Japanese war bride families who shaped my early life and
have left their traces in the pages of my mother’s albums, thank you for always
helping me find my way back home in the universe I grew up in. I honor
you, Mrs. Yoshiko Rafuse, Mrs. Emiko Arrowood, Mrs. Taeko Regan, and
Mrs. Satoko French. Special love also goes out to all the hapa daughters who
I still consider my best childhood friends, fake cousins, and adult comrades:
Shirley Eilek, Marian Holmes, Jean Hubbard, Sandra Arrowood, Velina Hasu
Houston, Kathryn Tolbert, Karen Kasmauski, Lucy Craft, and Marie Dunell.
To the Boston Rebel Alliance Taiko (aka, BRATs), thank you for continu-
ing to light the Asian American feminist fire in my Boston life.
To Colin Channer, thank you for daring me to take some risks and trans-
form the last chapter into its nontraditional autoethnographic form.
Finally, I extend my deepest love and gratitude to my mother, Chiyohi
Creef, and my son, Skylar Schmidt. Thank you both for serving as the two
greatest anchors of my life.

xii Acknowledgments
Shadow Traces
 Introduction
Photography does not belong to history, it offers history.
—Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light

The quality we call beauty . . . must always grow from the

realities of life, and our ancestors forced to live in dark
rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows,
ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s end.
—Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

My family’s claim to fifteen minutes of fame is that both my parents once

appeared in the pages of popular American magazines. I have written else-
where about my mother’s inclusion in a vintage 1952 issue of the Saturday Eve-
ning Post in a feature story titled “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives.”1
My war bride mother can be seen in a series of photographs taken at the
American Red Cross Brides’ School in Tokyo, where she is depicted as an
obedient student learning the domestic arts of cooking and good groom-
ing. Captains Janet Wentworth Smith and William L. Worden document
the efforts of the American Red Cross to educate naive and newlywed Japa-
nese women like my mother in the cultural mysteries of America as they
eagerly prepare for their new life overseas. Even when they have misspelled
her name in the caption, I have always been able to pick out my mother in
photographs. She is the short one with bright red lipstick and wearing the
tight white sweater, sporting the permed hairdo, holding a measuring cup
alongside two of her smiling classmates in Mrs. Mary Alexander’s cooking
class, where they are learning how to make homemade apple pies for hungry
husbands (fig. 1).2 She also appears in a second photograph embedded along-
side the same cluster of war brides who watch with rapt attention as volunteer
instructor Mrs. David Lyon gaily demonstrates the fine art of applying an
eyebrow pencil in a grooming class (fig. 2). I have always said that there is
something both exciting and disturbing about discovering my “mother as
the Other” in magazine photographs meant for a postwar and presumably
 FIGURE 1. Chiyohi Creef (second from left) learns how to make apple pie in the
Japanese Brides’ School cooking class run by the American Red Cross in Tokyo in
1951. (Saturday Evening Post, photographer Frank Ross)

white US audience not quite sure where these Japanese immigrant women
will fit once folded into the nation as wives, mothers, and later as natural-
ized citizens. I have long noted the strange disconnect that I have felt when
looking at the Saturday Evening Post representation of my mother as one of
the “Little Madam Butterflies studying hamburgers, Hollywood, and home
on the range”—while also trying to anchor the actual person I know who
embodies intelligence, resilience, and dignity. My mother came of age dur-
ing World War II, fell in love with my father during the postwar occupation,
and then made a life for herself as one of the thousands of mid-century war
brides who immigrated to the United States.
Not to be outdone, my father always said that he too once appeared in the
pages of a popular American magazine. He insisted that as Private Gilbert

2 Introduction
FIGURE 2. Chiyohi Creef (standing second from left) and classmates learn how to
apply makeup in the Japanese Brides’ School grooming class run by the American
Red Cross in Tokyo in 1951. (Saturday Evening Post, photographer Frank Ross)

Creef, he could be seen guiding his big bay thoroughbred Fair Easter over a
sizable jump back when the US Army still had a mounted cavalry. Because
there are no family photographs of my father as a youth growing up in North
Carolina, I have always had to imagine him as a young and handsome trooper
who possessed the kind of athletic grace and confidence of a country boy
who grew up around horses. After all, he was a farmer’s son from the Outer
Banks who learned how to handle and hitch the family team long before
other boys his age had learned how to ride a bike. To escape the poverty and
hardship in his hometown during the Great Depression, he lied about his
age, joined the army at sixteen, and ended up riding in the cavalry until it
was disbanded in 1946.3

Introduction 3
 Although I have spent countless hours poring over the pages of late 1930s
and early 1940s issues of Life magazine, I cannot find my father’s photo-
graph. Instead, I have found countless other images of US Army soldiers
on horseback that I have adopted as substitutes. There is one photograph in
particular that I am obsessed with for its depiction of a wartime soldier on
horseback who looks remarkably like my father. This photograph appears
in online searches for “WW2 military horses.” I marvel how it functions
perfectly if not as family memory, then as imagined counter-memory. I
love the way it visually captures the romantic drama of an army soldier gal-
loping with a sense of purpose on a dark bay cavalry horse, pistol held up
high at the ready in his right hand. This is how I like to imagine my father
must appear in that elusive Life photograph: Young, handsome, and fetch-
ingly heroic. Not quite a white knight on horseback, but a former farm boy
turned soldier urging Fair Easter forward as they race toward some unseen
obstacle or enemy. As a spectacle of World War II GI masculinity and hero-
ism, the man in this photograph may have less to do with awakening what
Roland Barthes has called the “intractable reality” of history, and more to
do with my own quest for perfect images and romantic family mythology.4
For my purposes, I confess it is infinitely more satisfying. In the absence of
an artifactual photograph of my father on horseback, I happily choose this
substitute pulled from a random online military archive dedicated to army
horses and willfully ignore the gap between historical fantasy and historical
fact. When photographs that anchor us to history and to family memory go
missing in action, we do what we must to fill in the void—reminding us, in
the process, that images were never stable in their meanings to begin with.
Their flat surfaces invite us to imagine a range of other stories we can read
into their absent frames.
In many ways, I have always considered my parents’ magazine photographs
as the underlying inspiration for all my work in Asian American visual cul-
tural studies. On one level, these images narrate how my American father met
and married my war bride mother in postwar Japan. Essentially, she is over
here, because he was once stationed over there, and my two brothers and I
are the direct results of the life they once shared across an endless series of
US Army bases around the world. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photog-
raphy, Roland Barthes’s canonical and meditative book on the relationship
between photography and emotional memory, he concludes with this poetic
observation: “perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the
past, in History, except in the form of myth.”5 If Barthes is correct that there
is no simple believing in the past, or in history with a capital H, then perhaps
the only thing we can believe in, in the end, is myth—not photographs.

4 Introduction
 Photographs, as these opening images suggest, are hardly stable objects.
Whatever unelectable “truth” the camera may have recorded, I suggest that
it is only through our reading that their meanings are decipherable. Photo-
graphs by themselves are malleable and shape-shifting in their instability.
However, as unstable objects, photographs readily lend themselves to a wide
range of interpretive reading methods and interventions that include learning
how, as Allan Sekula famously argues, to “read against the grain,” as well as to
imagine ourselves as specific kinds of embodied spectators looking for those
“pricking” elements that Barthes has called the “punctum” that “shoot out”
and pierce us like arrows from within the frame.6 Looking becomes akin to
excavating the visual traces of history, resistance, and resilience from those
who have been photographed and filed away in the dark shadows of archives.
This book is invested in pulling from forgotten archival collections and
into the light of its critical scrutiny surviving images of Japanese, Japanese
American, and indigenous Ainu women that continue to have much to tell
us, even teach us, about what it meant to be visible—during particular mo-
ments of US history when their presence in photographs briefly circulated
in the public eye of local and national popular cultural imagination. Shadow
Traces is not, however, a history of these women told through unknown pho-
tographs wrestled from various archives. Instead, this book offers an exercise
for how we might look—from an Asian American feminist vantage point—at
the representational legacy and imprint of four distinct groups of Japanese/
American and Ainu women who have left their traces in photographs culled
from a variety of collections.7 I combine Japanese and Japanese American
women together in this study using the “intervening slash” that Laura Hyun
Yi Kang has created in her rigorous theoretical work on the representation
of Asian/American women as “compositional subjects” of history.8
This book contributes to the growing field of Asian American visual cultural
studies through its examination of how these Japanese/American and Ainu
women have been caught in the visual grip of history. The archival materials
that form the basis of this study include little-known photographs of the in-
digenous Japanese Ainu women who were participants at the 1904 Louisiana
Purchase Exposition, Japanese immigrant “picture brides” in the early twenti-
eth century, interned Japanese American Nisei women in the wartime camps,
and World War II Japanese war brides who immigrated to the United States
in the 1950s. With each of these distinct historical groups, I argue that their
photographic images not only function as key components of their unique
archives but invite us to consider their visual history in new ways.
In his famous critical commentary on the notion of the archive itself,
Jacques Derrida begins his interrogation with this classic etymological de-

Introduction 5
 tour: “Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather
at the word ‘archive’—and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe
we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This
name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according
to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or
ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there where
men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised,
in this place from which order is given.”9 If archives are indeed organized by
those originary powers of authority embodied by individuals, appointees,
and officials who collected and ordered materials deemed worthy of public,
private, or institutional memory, then we must be mindful of how the hands
of power and authority have shaped the various archives examined in this
book. Building on Derrida’s notion of the archive, Susan Scott Parrish adds
that archives also function “as a memory prosthesis, [as] an outgrowth of
the earlier technology of writing itself and as a premonition of the later
technology of photography,” or, to be more precise, “writing, the archive, and
photography, all are meant to make memory durable, external, locatable—a
thing to be pointed to.”10 Shadow Traces literally points to a range of public and
private archival repositories in order to document—and challenge—those
who have been authorized with the power to represent the history of Japa-
nese/American and Ainu women remembered here through photographs.
The photographic archives I examine are not supplemental to my reading
of Japanese/American and Ainu women’s history, but are in fact central to
it. Inspired by the work of Tim Dant and Graeme Gilloch in “Pictures of the
Past: Benjamin and Barthes on Photography and History,” this book repeat-
edly asks, how do historic photographs speak to us in the present?11 What new
light do they shed on our understanding of the past? While photographs may
operate as historical portals or frames that can teem with meaning, without
the cultural historian’s intervening gaze or critical reading skills, they re-
main by themselves entirely silent. With a central focus on reading archival
photographs of Japanese/American and Ainu women in America, this book
offers a way of looking closely and critically at the gaze that is bound up in
historical photographs in order to open up nothing less than history itself.
John Berger and Jean Mohr’s classic 1982 study of photography, Another
Way of Telling, remains a foundational work for how we utilize historical im-
ages as narratives. “What is a photograph? What do [they] mean? How can
they be used?” This lyrical collaboration between art critic and photographer
asks a series of questions—centered on the meaning of photographs—that
are vastly underutilized by those of us who work in Asian American visual
cultural studies. Berger famously observed, “between the moment recorded

6 Introduction
and the present moment of looking at the photograph, there is an abyss.”12 If
there is an abyss in Shadow Traces, it exists in the gap between when these
photographs were taken and where we, as spectators, now find ourselves
situated across time and place as we turn our gaze to them.
My first book, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of
Citizen­ship, Nation, and the Body, helped ground Asian American visual
cultural studies with its interdisciplinary focus and scope on internment
camp history in art, film, literature, museum, and memorial representations.
Shadow Traces builds on and expands my earlier work by focusing on the
representation of Japanese/American and Ainu women as explicit subjects
of photography. My methodological approach has always been intersectional
in its foundation with its seamless integration of race, class, gender, visuality,
and history. This book allows me to probe deeper into the intersections of
gender and visual culture to analyze the ways in which photographic archives
house idealized, exoticized, and domesticated Japanese/American and Ainu
women who have been reductively framed as mothers, Others, wives, and
feminine beauties all the while taking note of the small moments and gestures
of resistance and negation that form a kind of counter-visuality of the archive
itself. This book advances the field of Asian American visual cultural studies,
where few interdisciplinary scholars have exclusively turned their attention
to photography.13
Throughout Shadow Traces, I ask, what new insights can we uncover about
these groups of Japanese/American and Ainu women if we turn our histori-
cal attention to the archives bearing their photographic imprint? Cultural
theorist Eduardo Cadava writes that “the light of photography never ar-
rives [alone, it] is always attended by darkness.”14 It is not accidental that
the visual histories I present in this book have been shaped by those dark
historical forces underlying turn-of-the-century cataloging of indigeneity,
anti-Japanese immigration legislation, political backlash, wartime racism
aimed at Japanese/Americans on the home front, and the shadowy backdrop
of the US occupation of Japan and the legacy of the Korean War. What ties
each historical group of women featured in Shadow Traces together are the
ways that they have all been subjected to what feminist scholar Laura Wex-
ler would call the “tender violence” of their photographic representation as
subjects who have been captured by nothing less than both photography and
the gaze of US power.15 All of the women in my study have been made to walk
the fine line between the representation of their dehumanizing Otherness as
indigenous “anthropological specimens,” as suspicious immigrants during a
period of Asian Exclusion, as interned wartime citizens, and as immigrating
brides of a conquered nation and their subsequent visual recuperation as

Introduction 7
 mothers, morally upright beauties and homemakers—domestic roles that
they perform for the camera.
In my research for Shadow Traces, I have specifically searched for new pho-
tographic materials depicting these four groups of women. Again, this book
does not attempt to rewrite a comprehensive history of Japanese/American
and Ainu women in America. Rather, each chapter engages the critical and
pedagogical process of how one can read their archival traces at the begin-
ning and midpoint of twentieth-century US history. The archival collections
central to each grouping of women in my study form a kind of lens through
which we can see the intersection between race, class, gender, indigeneity,
history, and photography. This book offers a visual pedagogy for how one
might look at and listen to the bodies and voices of marginalized women of
color who have left their historical imprint in the shadows of archives. My
interdisciplinary approach is deeply indebted to earlier generations of Asian
American feminists who have always been dedicated to moving gendered
subjects from the margins to the center of critical and creative inquiry at the
nexus of the personal and the political.
If photography is literally nothing more than a “story of dark and light,”
then what light might we shed on these particular women’s histories by fram-
ing them through photography?16 The vast majority of archival collections
that I examine showcase marginalized women whose living traces remain
behind in photographs. Like “angels of history whose wings register the
traces of this disappearance,” my exhumation and examination of their pres-
ence takes the form of a critical haunting where they are remembered and
reconstituted as worthy subjects for women’s and gender studies.17
In his moving reflection of the interrelationship between archives, re-
searchers, and historical traces “left by people in paper records,” anthropolo-
gist David Zeitlyn observes that “reading archival absences against the grain
is a way of making silence speak.”18 How exactly does one read an archive, or
a photograph, against the grain? What is the role of silence in photographic
archives? What is the disconnect between the representation of the body from
the representation of voice? Whose stories get told? Whose voices are never
heard? How are archives repositories of memories?19 Whose memories? How
do photographs not only help us to remember the dead, but permit them to
speak long after they are gone? Such questions have long formed the very
heart and soul of Asian American feminist inquiry that long ago shattered
the paradigms of invisibility and silence.20
In the introduction to her epic four-volume edited collection, Asian Ameri-
can Feminisms, Leslie Bow makes this keen observation: “In the second half of

8 Introduction
the twentieth-century Asian women have become the object of undisguised,
unapologetic, and aggressive fantasy-making. Inspiring the American racial
imaginary like no other figure perhaps aside from that of the black man,
we represent a place of excess signification. . . . As playwright David Henry
Hwang recognizes, the Asian woman is the uber-template for Orientalist
imagining and gender projection; she is the ‘Perfect Woman,’ emptied of her
own desire, impregnated with self-referential meaning.”21 It is my hope that
Shadow Traces can contribute to Bow’s impressive compendium of Asian
American feminist writings by offering archival photographic evidence docu-
menting how Japanese/American and Ainu women have had an even longer
representational history serving as “objects of fantasy-making,” Orientalist,
and even primitivist “imagining” that was firmly in place just after the turn of
the nineteenth century. If Bow is correct that Asian women have historically
occupied a highly problematic position in the realm of racial imagination,
then this book asks how might we read these early to mid-twentieth-century
images of women in ways that anticipate and break the historical mode that
has subsequently shaped much of their representation in America? In the
archival images this books presents, what “excessive significations” might
we find of real and or imagined gendered projections, idealizations, impreg-
nations, and deformations of these women whose photographic histories
capture nothing less than a full range of what Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul
Chan long ago called out as the spectrum of “racist love” and “racist hate”
that has long been useful for studying the racial poles of representation in
America? “White racism enforces white supremacy. White supremacy is a
system of order and a way of perceiving reality. Its purpose is to keep whites
on top and set them free. Colored minorities in white reality are stereotypes.
Each racial stereotype comes in two models, the acceptable model and the
unacceptable model. . . . The unacceptable model is unacceptable because he
cannot be controlled by whites. The acceptable model is acceptable because
he is tractable. There is racist hate and racist love.”22
As a field, Asian American women’s and gender studies has long tried to
address this spectrum filled with racist hate and racist love. Yet, outside of
film studies, there has been a dearth of published work on the visual history
of Asian women in America. My search for largely unknown historic pho-
tographic images for this book led me to explore twelve different archives
stretching from Boston to Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu,
and Noboribetsu, Japan.23 Shadow Traces is thus organized around four major
movements in Japanese/American and Ainu women’s history in the United
States that are accompanied with their own unique—even iconic—assem-

Introduction 9
 blage of archival images; in addition, each chapter also articulates some of
the unspoken desires we have for archives, documentation, and photographs
themselves.
Shadow Traces offers a four-chapter lesson in reading against the grain, not
only of photographs pulled from multiple archival collections, but of other
historical objects bearing “textual traces” worthy of our critical decipher-
ing. The latter include anthropological field notebooks; national, local, and
internment camp newspapers; transcribed interviews; letters; handwritten
marginalia on official documents; Asian American women’s poetry, and
long-forgotten family photographs that have been excavated for this book.24
Shadow Traces showcases the ways that historical archives—both public
and private—have captured these different groups of women in the United
States. Each chapter considers how these women have left their mark and
representational imprint across a range of photographs, assorted narratives,
and other documents that collectively contribute to what we might wishfully
call a larger Asian/American Women’s Archive—one where the historical
silence and usual invisibility of these marginalized women of color are bro-
ken. If Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu are correct that women and racialized
minorities are the marginalized shadow subjects of history, then Shadow
Traces deliberately shines its light onto the visible Japanese/American and
Ainu women who form its subject.25 After all, in her eloquent and canoni-
cal essay, “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster,” Mitsuye Yamada reminded
us as early as 1981 that Asian American women have long been the “visible
minority that is invisible.”26
It is my hope that the historical photographs I have excavated from public
and private collections and offer up for discussion and analysis in the pages
of this book will allow us to learn new things about the history of Japanese/
American and Ainu women in America—as well as to see things we have
long taken for granted in new ways. Although the camera’s lens may itself be
impassive, there is nothing passive about the way this book invites us to look at
photographs pulled from the shadowy spaces of the archive as we reconsider
the many meanings contained within their frames—or better yet what spills
outside of them as a kind of excess. In his famous essay, “The Ontology of
the Photographic Image,” André Bazin writes, “every image is to be seen as
an object and every object as an image [hence] photography ranks high in
the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality
of nature, namely an hallucination that is also a fact.” To this I would add,
all of the images included in this book are carefully and formally examined,
contextualized, and decoded as precious representations. Bazin argues that
“photography is clearly the most important event in history of the plastic

10 Introduction
arts” that is simultaneously both a “liberation and an accomplishment.”27 He
concludes his essay with an observation that shifts from still to moving images
as a kind of “language.” Yet, if cinema is a language, then what is the language
of photography? More specifically, what is the language of photography where
Japanese/American and Ainu women are the subject of its impassive gaze?
What forms of liberation, accomplishment, or even hallucination might we
find by examining for the first time these historical images?
Chapter 1, “Those ‘Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives,’” looks at the
photographic representation of Ainu Women and girls at the 1904 St. Louis
World’s Fair—aka the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. University of Chicago
anthropologist Frederick Starr recruited a group of nine indigenous Japanese
Ainu to participate as a “living cultural exhibition” at the fair. Of the nine
Ainu, three were wives and two were girls. According to contemporary press
coverage, one of the most popular and sensationalized attractions at the fair
was that of one of the Ainu mothers and her young daughter—famously
photographed by Jessie Tarbox Beals for her set of pictures, Mother and Babe
at the Exposition.28 While there has been some limited scholarly attention
paid to the Ainu at the fair, there has been virtually no critical focus on the
specifically gendered nature of the representation of the Ainu women and
girls—even though, as my chapter argues, they literally dominated the fair’s
rich and disturbing ethnographic visual archive. Looking at the American
photographs of the Ainu at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair also gives us a rare
opportunity to consider questions of indigeneity and primitivism alongside
critical examinations of the intersection of race, class, and gender in visual
representations of Japanese in America.
Chapter 2, “Looking at Japanese Picture Brides,” moves forward by a de-
cade to offer a critical examination of how the archival traces of voice, body,
and image are embedded in the visual legacy of the group of Japanese im-
migrant women known collectively as the “picture brides” (1908–24). This
chapter begins by looking at the rich and vastly under-studied illustrations
in the anti-Japanese newspaper press coverage of the period. The chapter
ends by looking at the photographs that are part of official immigration case
files of Japanese “photo marriage” women in San Francisco who arrived in-
between the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907–08 and the Immigration Act
of 1924. Two crucial moments in the long history of anti-Asian immigration
laws that severely curtailed—and later cut off—the eligibility of Japanese (and
other Asian national groups) to enter the United States. By 1910, the arriving
Japanese picture brides at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco
were surveyed with great suspicion by a hostile press and white immigra-
tion officials whose job was to inspect incoming foreign bodies together

Introduction 11
 with their photographs. While anyone familiar with Japanese immigration
history is familiar with the term “picture brides,” there has been very little
formal scholarly examination of the actual visual history of this group of
women. Anna Pegler-Gordon’s work on the intersection of photography and
US immigration history, In Sight of America: Photography and the Develop-
ment of U.S. Immigration Policy, is exceptional.29 Yet, her superbly researched
examination aims its critical lens mainly at historical groups of Chinese and
Mexican—not Japanese—immigrants at the turn of the nineteenth century
and early twentieth century. Looking at Japanese picture bride photographs
and press coverage from one hundred years ago, my chapter explores early
twentieth-century anti-Japanese politicians, Japanese picture grooms, US
immigration officials, and Japanese/American artists, and how each bring
different agendas to their “reading” of picture bride representations that have
generated a multitude of meanings.
Chapter 3, “Beauty behind Barbed Wire,” moves us still further forward
in time to the 1940s, where I offer a gendered lesson in looking at the vast
wartime photographic archive of Japanese American Nisei women who were
relocated to the World War II assembly centers and internment camps. This
chapter builds on my previously published scholarship on World War II in-
ternment representation but focuses exclusively on the intersection of race,
class, and gender in the camp photographs and newspaper coverage of young
Japanese American women interned at Manzanar War Relocation Center
in California. My examination reveals the myriad ways that young Japanese
American women were consumed with performing patriotism and citizen-
ship in ways that were inextricably linked to the wartime maintenance of
heteronormative standards of femininity, beauty, and domesticity in service
to the nation.
Chapter 4, “Filling in the Blank Spot in an Incomplete War Bride Archive,”
concludes this book by looking at the mid-century photographs of World
War II Japanese war brides that privilege the family album as a unique, logi-
cal, and highly overlooked visual repository for family history, memory, and
representation. While the first three chapters of Shadow Traces are consumed
with articulating the public meanings of the visual, this final chapter closes
the book by asking how collective and individual memories are embedded
in the private and personal archival spaces of the family album. Because the
visual representation of war brides in US history is not only fragmented but
incomplete, family photographs offer us both a unique intervention as well
as a corrective for reimagining their place in Japanese/American history.
This final chapter uses the supremely well-organized family album of Chi-
yohi Creef, my war bride mother, as a model for filling in the blank spot in

12 Introduction
American history where the lives of these immigrant Japanese women—as
wives, mothers, citizens, and witnesses of war—have been chronicled and
archived in personal photograph collections—well out of public sight.
Shadow Traces endeavors to show us subjects and their traces by asking
what is in the photographic frame and what is not, what is in the shadows and
what is in the light, and what exactly can we know or not know about these
historical groups of women snatched, as André Bazin might say, “from the
flow of time” in order to stow them neatly in the hold of an imagined Asian/
American visual after life?30 If it is true that photographs by themselves can-
not say what it is they let us see, and if you are curious to learn what I have
found in my investigation of these rich archival collections featuring these
Japanese/American and Ainu women, then I invite you to read this book.

Introduction 13
 1
Those “Mysterious Little
Japanese Primitives”
“Here is the Most Interesting Pair in the World’s
Fair Anthropological Exhibit: Shutratek, the Ainu
Mother, and Kiku, the Baby Daughter, are a Center
of Attraction—Kiku is Very Like a Japanese Doll.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 27, 1904

The Ainu at the Fair: The “Aborigines

of the Japanese Empire”
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was an event designed to showcase the
grandeur of empire, the supremacy of western technology, industry, and
culture while commemorating the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase—an
event that many scholars have argued consolidated the American nation and
empire. As Martha Clevenger notes, the 1904 fair occupies a unique place
in US history and was sandwiched between the Gilded Age and World War
I.1 In the seven months the fair was open, over twelve million paying visi-
tors attended the fair, which officially opened its doors on April 30 (closing
December 1) and featured exhibitions from fifty foreign nations, and from
forty-three of the forty-five US states. One of the most popular cultural at-
tractions at the fair included a group of nine indigenous Japanese Ainu who
were part of an ambitious anthropological exhibition of “living groups” under
the direction of W. J. McGee, chief of the Anthropology Department at the
exposition.2 They included two families, Sangyea, Santukno, Kin Hiramura
and Kutoroge, Shutratek, and Kiku Hiramura; one couple, Yazo and Shirake
Osawa; and a bachelor, Goro Bete.
According to anthropologist James W. Vanstone, McGee had envisioned
“extensive ethnographic exhibits located on an extensive ‘anthropological
reservation’ where ‘representatives of upwards of thirty living groups were to
be seen in native dress, living in houses of their own construction, cooking
 FIGURE 3. Nine indigenous Japanese Ainu participated as “The Ainu Group”
at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair: Goro Bete, Santukno Hiramura, Yazo Osawa,
Shirake Osawa, Shutratek Hiramura, Kiku Hiramura, Kutoroge Hiramura,
Kin Hiramura, Sangyea Hiramura (Image no. CSA13226, the Field Museum,
photographer Charles Carpenter)

and eating the food to which they are accustomed at home, and practicing
those simple arts and industries, which they have themselves developed.”3
In March of that year, the American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal
reported on the fair’s progress:
Plans have been completed for assembling, either in the Department of
Anthropology or elsewhere, representatives of all the world’s races, ranging
from the smallest pygmies to the most gigantic peoples, from the darkest
blacks to the dominant whites, and from the lowest known culture (the
dawn of the Stone Age) to its highest culmination in that Age of Metal,
which, as the Exposition shows, is now maturing in the Age of Power.
Arrangements are well advanced for placing family groups represent-
ing various other primitive peoples on the grounds of the department.
Among these are the Ainu tribe of the Island of Hokkaido (Northern

16 CHAPTER 1
 Japan), representing the aborigines of the Japanese Empire, and illustrating
in their occupations and handiwork some of the most significant stages
in industrial development known to students—germs of some of those
material arts which in their perfection have raised Japan to leading rank
among the world’s nation.4

The Ainu group was procured by University of Chicago anthropologist

Frederick Starr, who McGee commissioned to travel to northern Japan in
search of at least “eight good specimens” to bring back to St. Louis.5 Much
of our information about the Ainu who traveled to St. Louis comes from
Starr’s 1904 book chronicling this expedition, The Ainu Group at the Saint
Louis Exposition—with images by Starr’s longtime personal photographer,
Manuel Gonzales.6 In 1904, anthropologists considered the Ainu to occupy
an ambiguous racial position; Starr himself infamously asked, “Who are
the Ainu? Where did they come from? What is their past? They are surely a
white people, not a yellow. . . . We take it for granted that all white men are
better than any red ones, or black ones, or yellow ones. Yet here we find a
white race that has struggled and lost!”7
To launch this book’s examination of photographic representations of
Japanese/American women, the visual archive surrounding the Ainu group
at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition provides both a rich and unusual
place to begin. As a rule, indigeneity usually falls outside the purview of
Asian/American histories of representation. As the indigenous people of
Japan, the Ainu rightfully occupy a place outside the binary designation
“Japanese/American”; yet, as “indigenous Japanese,” I include them in this
book because of the prominent archival record that surrounds their brief time
in America. Furthermore, the Ainu at St. Louis have received scant critical
attention from US scholars over the past one hundred years.8 What remains
particularly striking about their story is the fact that out of the nine individu-
als who were recruited from northern Japan to participate in St. Louis, the
majority were female: three wives and two little girls.9 Yet, to date, virtually
no one has considered how “gender” has not only shaped, but in many ways
dominates, this visual archive. The five females of the Ainu group have indel-
ibly—and dramatically—left their mark across the visual and anthropologi-
cal archives of the Frederick Starr Papers, the local and national newspaper
coverage of the fair, and the striking work of fair photographers like Jessie
Tarbox Beals.10 This chapter explores how a critical feminist revisiting of
these American archival collections pedagogically invites us to read against
the representational grain, as it were, for a closer critical examination. While
Japanese Ainu do not traditionally fit into the larger history of “Asians” in

Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” 17

 America, as unique turn-of-the-century travelers caught by the camera at
one of the key historical and cultural events in turn-of-the-century America,
they deserve to be included in a reframing of early Japanese/American visual
history courtesy of the kind of critical inquiry afforded by a women’s and
gender studies lens.
In her superb study of early women photographers, Laura Wexler cites
James Scott’s notion of “hidden transcripts” that haunt historical photo-
graphic records and prompt us to look more deeply if we wish to learn how
to decode “encrypted resistance” in “official records of compliance.”11 With
Scott’s notion of the “hidden transcript” in mind, what might we uncover by
looking more closely at the 1904 Ainu group that others have missed? What
kinds of counter memories or readings might we retrieve or reconstruct
based on incomplete or partial records that chronicle the haunting presence
of the Ainu women and young girls at the fair? How might we scrutinize their
photographic traces? What might we find in the anthropologist’s handwritten
field notebooks or even personal scrapbooks that others have overlooked?

The Ainu Group and the Performance

of Racial and Gendered Spectacle
While the Ainu were part of the larger living anthropological exhibit at
the fair, and were in fact recruited to perform their indigeneity as a form
of entertainment for a curious American public, one could say that their
performance began as soon as they left Japan. According to Starr’s travel nar-
rative, the Ainu were framed as “spectacle” as soon as they left Yokohama on
March 18 onboard the SS Empress of Japan. An outraged Starr recalls how the
Ainu were invited to contribute to the ship’s entertainment program under
an insulting and dehumanizing misnomer:
We were invited to contribute . . . to the program by bringing in the Ainu
and making an address about them. The address was well received but gave
occasion to a little sparring. We did not see the program until it was printed
and then found that we were announced to present a “short description of
the Aino, followed by an Aino bear-dance by three of the tribe on board.”
Our people were in ceremonial dress and made a fine appearance. . . .
Had we seen the program, we should not have permitted the word Aino
to appear upon it; nor should we have allowed announcement of a “bear-
dance” of which we never heard. . . . As to the name of our people it is not
Aino, but Ainu, which is a word in their own language meaning man. . . .
The word Aino is neither an Ainu nor a Japanese word; it approaches the
Japanese word ino, “dog,” and there is no doubt that this similarity shades

18 CHAPTER 1
 the word when used by the Japanese, to whom the Ainu often are as “dogs”
and who have a legend that the Ainu are really the offspring of a woman
and a dog.12

The anthropological lectures that Starr would deliver onboard the Empress
of Japan on Ainu life and customs—with members of his Ainu delegation
giving live demonstrations—would be reprised along their journey once
they arrived in Vancouver, Canada, and then traveled by train from Seattle,
Washington, through Sheridan, Wyoming, to their final destination in St.
Louis, Missouri.13 Starr notes that the Ainu were objects of visual fascination
for all those who beheld them: “at almost every station passed during the
daytime, people crowded to see the Ainu and asked their questions and made
their comments but all good-naturedly. Several adventures with drunken men
upon the car took place, but these poor fellows were usually bubbling over
with goodwill and were only troublesome in their well-meant advances of
kindness.” Starr also records two occasions during their journey where the
Ainu encountered Native Americans and African Americans with whom they
exchanged what he calls “mutual inspection”: “At Fort Sheridan, Wyoming,
negro soldiers were at the station. Kutoroge was greatly excited and exam-
ined them closely. He finally asked us whether the color was temporary or
permanent, and then wanted to know whether it was generally distributed
over the body or confined to the face and hands.”14 Starr’s inclusion of these
brief cross-racial encounters reminds us that the Ainu group were not merely
passive objects who were scrutinized by others, but that they themselves held
their own counter-gaze with full curiosity and engagement.
According to Starr, the public performance of indigeneity en route to St.
Louis was also not just limited to the Ainu adults. In Vancouver, as guests of
the local Japanese mission, the entourage appeared in a lecture room where
the two little girls, Kin and Kiku, were also put on display, becoming instant
crowd favorites. Starr describes how in exchange for toys and bonbons the
little girls were coaxed into giving a show of “salutation, thanks, and petition”
for the amusement and delight of those watching the Ainu show:
This trick of Kin and Kiku is one which Manuel [Gonzales] discovered
and has a bit developed. On shipboard, when we carried lumps of sugar
or fruits or cakes down to the children, as we did every afternoon, we in-
sisted on their standing to receive them. On seeing the gift, the little hand
was raised and the finger drawn across the upper lip, then the two hands
were crossed one on the other, palms up, just in front of the body, when
the gift was laid upon them. It was very pretty, particularly when done by
little Kiku. Rarely have we seen such general interest and close attention

Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” 19

 as this crowd of young Japanese gave throughout our little entertainment.
At its close they showered gifts upon the Ainu. The men each received a
dollar; each woman received cloth for a dress; the children were given
toys and bonbons.15

One of the rare published photographs depicting Starr’s accompanying

photographer, Manuel Gonzales, appears in the anthropologist’s 1904 book,
The Ainu Group at the Saint Louis Exposition. In one particularly moving im-
age, the smiling Gonzales squats at eye level next to “little Kiku.” The camera
captures Gonzales’s obvious pleasure in interacting with the child, who is
shown performing the very same salutation of thanks described above. While
the appearance and performance of the little girls Kin and Kiku were deemed
not only charming but even a “very pretty” spectacle, the US press coverage of
the traveling Ainu group repeatedly reveals an ambivalent cultural fascination
mixing admiration together with repulsion aimed at the three indigenous
women. It is worth looking more closely at some of the newspaper represen-
tations of the Ainu group that vividly documented their journey to St. Louis.
The coverage began immediately upon their arrival in North America.
Across the country, the Washington Post noted that “The Canadian Pacific
steamer Empress of Japan arrived [in Vancouver] from Yokohama today.
Among her passengers were a party of Hairy Ainus from the island of Hok-
kaido, in charge of Professor Fred Starr, lecturer in the department of an-
thropology at the University of Chicago. . . . The men are small, but well
proportioned, and have long beards and intelligent faces. The women are
handsome and dress in gaudy costumes.”16 In turn-of-the-century popular
and anthropological literature, the Japanese Ainu are deemed the “Hairy
Ainu” based on the observation that the men were able to grow full beards
and possessed a thick body of hair that more closely resembled Europeans
rather than the Japanese.17 While the Washington Post fails to mention that
only the two older men had “long beards,” descriptions of Ainu hair neverthe-
less become a recurrent theme in popular press coverage and morph into a
kind of sensational misrepresentation that follows the group all the way to St.
Louis. Starr himself addresses the term “hairy Ainu” and speaking on behalf
of scholars in his field argues, “we consider the term just.” He then expounds
on the subject of the “hairy Ainu” with this anthropological perspective: “It
is true that their proximity to the smooth-bodied yellow Asiatics has made
their hairiness conspicuous by contrast. It is true that many writers, who have
spoken of ‘fur’ and ‘missing links,’ have overstated facts; but it is also true
that notably hairy bodies are the rule among the males. Individual Russians
are no doubt common, who are as hairy as the average Ainu, but we believe

20 CHAPTER 1
firmly that taken en masse the Ainu are more hairy than the Russians, and
probably the hairiest people on the globe.”18
Ethnic studies scholar Danika Medak-Saltzman has noted that if one com-
pares archival photographs of the Ainu group both before and after they
left Japan, it is apparent that the two younger Ainu men, the husband, Yazo
Osawa, and the unmarried Bete Goro, were originally clean shaven and then
grew out their beards while in St. Louis. Medak-Saltzman speculates that it
is possible that Starr gave instructions that the younger men “regrow their
beards while at the fair to look more Ainu.”19 Indeed, in Starr’s published
account of the Ainu group, he laments that “Goro is young, shaves, wears
Europanized, not to say Japanized, clothing.” Starr seems pleased that Goro
“still wears Ainu leggings with fine embroidery,” but otherwise finds him
“dreadfully conventional” and complains that instead of “whittling inao, he
knits stockings”—practices that the anthropologist finds “highly commend-
able, but . . . no qualification for figuring in an Ainu group at the Exposition.”20
The March 30 edition of the Vancouver Province announced the arrival of
Starr’s Ainu Group with the following headline: “Rare Specimens of Human-
ity of Low Grade.” The newspaper describes the nine travelers as “queer little
stunted bits of humanity” and erroneously notes that “the Ainu men, and the
women too, are covered all over their bodies with fairly long, silky-soft hair.
The eye-brows, whiskers and moustaches of the men are especially heavy in
growth, and they present a grotesque appearance to western eyes.” The next
day, the Vancouver Ledger also announced the arrival of the Ainu on the
steamship as part of a “Large Cargo from the Orient Including Some Curi-
ous People.” In addition to the “usual full cargo of Oriental merchandise, she
had a large list of saloon passengers and 100 Orientals, among whom were
a party of . . . these peculiar hairy little people [who] will be on exhibit at
the St. Louis exposition.” The March 31 edition of the Chicago Record-Herald
was less gracious in its description of Professor Starr’s Ainu group: “Two of
the men of the party are fairly intelligent, but the others look more like apes
than human beings.”
In an uncredited newspaper clipping in Starr’s personal scrapbook, a full-
page photograph of the anthropologist is juxtaposed alongside a photograph
of two unidentified Ainu women, with the ironic caption mixing fascination
with repulsion vis à vis their gendered bodies: “Ainu Belles with Tattooed
Lips in Imitation of Mustaches.”21 In illustrated stories such as this one, it
is the specter of the female—not the male—Ainu body that dominates the
representational record with multiple and ambivalent references to “belles,”
“beauties,” “queer ladies,” and “tattooed women.” In turn-of-the-century an-
thropological exhibitions of indigenous cultures, the border between the

Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” 21

 exotic, the primitive, and the freakish overlap in the public spaces of the fairs
and expositions. On May 5, the Chicago Tribune painted a picture of the fair
where the carnival-like voices of the barker will “[implore] visitors to see
the ‘hairy Ainus’ or the ‘protoplasmic man,’” courtesy of the Anthropology
Department at the University of Chicago.
Even across the Atlantic, the British American-Journal-Examiner pub-
lished a full-page story highlighting the anthropological exhibitions of the
fair featuring a photograph of Ainu mother Shutratek Hiramura and her
baby daughter Kiku beneath the caption, “Queer Ladies You’ll Meet at the
St. Louis World’s Fair,” with the accompanying subtitle, “Native ‘Beauties’
Gathered from All the Odd Corners of the Earth, and the Strange Things They
Wear and Eat.”22 Juxtaposed with a bare-breasted Igorot woman, Shutratek
holds Kiku in her lap in a photo captioned, in very tiny print, “Hairy Ainu
Mother (with Moustache and Child).” If Ainu mothers are marked by “mus-
tache” tattoos designating them as “queer,” grotesque, and freakishly Other,
then the unmarked bodies of the doll-like Ainu little girls provide the visual
counterpoint of innocence, beauty, and the possibilities of twentieth-century
salvation through assimilation.23 By reexamining the contemporary local and
national press coverage of the fair, one can see how the Ainu stirred Ameri-
can fairgoers’ imaginations in specifically gendered terms as either exotic
wives and mothers (who were rumored in the popular press to be tattooed
mustached primitives who suckled bear cubs) or else as dainty girls.24
The April 27, 1904 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch perhaps says it best
with an illustrated feature story about Shutratek and Kiku. The photograph,
taken by Jessie Tarbox Beals—who was one of a handful of official women
photographers at the fair—certainly captures the universal appeal of what she
was later able to frame in her commercial set of fair images of “Mothers and
Babes at the Exposition.”25 The newspaper caption that accompanies Beals’s
photograph declares that “Here is the Most Interesting Pair in the World’s
Fair Anthropological Exhibit: Shutratek, the Ainu Mother, and Kiku, the
Baby Daughter, Are a Center of Attraction—Kiku is Very Like a Japanese
Doll” (fig. 4). The iconic power of Beals’s portrait of this Ainu mother and
child helps to explain why it was one of the most reprinted and circulated
newspaper images of the Ainu in St. Louis.26 In his Official History of the Fair,
John Wesley Hanson reprints Beals’s close-up of the pair with a caption that
reveals more about his own imagined projection than it does of Shutratek’s
interiority: “Surprise is depicted on the countenance of this dusky visitor from
the wilds of Japan’s northern islands, viewing for the first time the wonders
of the Occident after getting settled in the Ainu home camp in the exposition

22 CHAPTER 1
FIGURE 4. Ainu mother and child (Shutratek and Kiku Hiramura) were
dubbed “the Most Interesting Pair in the World’s Fair Anthropology
Exhibit.” (John Wesley Hanson, Official History of the Fair [Chicago:
Monarch Books, 1904]; photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals)
 enclosure.”27 The appearance of the Ainu mother and girl child in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch also confirms the visual popularity of the pair at the fair:
Shutratek, the mother of Kiku, the Ainu baby at the World’s Fair, sings, “By,
O Baby Bunting your daddy’s gone a hunting” or the Ainu substitute. For
the Ainu are very much a home people and have lullabies just the same as
Missouri mothers do. . . . Kiku is a veritable Japanese doll in appearance.
She is 2 years old and a very good baby. She plays about the Ainu corner of
the Indian School building at the World’s Fair, which is serving her family
as a temporary home as contentedly as though she was in her native home.
She opens her eyes wide when the many strangers come by and . . . want
to give her trinkets, and looks at them with baby wonder. . . . Her father
and mother [are] middle-aged sturdy people, who are well thought of by
their fellow tribesmen. . . .
They are a devoted family and Kiku is easily the center of attraction
for the mother and father. Shutratek, the mother[,] guards her with jeal-
ous care and lavishes upon her all of the affection that could be asked of
any mother. There was a time a few years ago when Kiku and her parents
would have been brought to the United States in fur clothing had the com-
missioner been able to persuade them to leave their native island at that
time, but of recent years the tribe has made rapid advances in civilization
and now wear clothing similar to the Japanese, which race they resemble
in many respects. This fact adds to Kiku’s appearance as a Japanese doll.
The time will come as she grows older . . . when the tattoo marks similar
to those that surround her mother’s mouth will be made about her own,
unless the tribe makes another marked advance and forsakes that old rite
of their ancestors.28

Two and a half months later, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a similar illus-
trated story under the caption “Indian Babies at the St. Louis Exposition.” Once
again, Shutratek and Kiku appear with the Beals-like caption, “Ainu Mother
and Babe,” alongside an image of a Moki Indian mother and her children.
The Moki Indians and the Ainus form an interesting part of the living
exhibit of the anthropological department. The babies of the Ainus live in
a roomy hut composed almost wholly of matting. This tiny girl is a valuable
subject for study to those who are fond of tracing man to his far begin-
ning. Her parents belong to the aboriginal tribe of Japan, the only stock in
the islands that has not been changed by the admixture of foreign blood.
The baby, when she is grown, will have a mustache tattooed on her upper
lip, as her mother has; but now she resembles the quaint Japanese dolls.29

That “tiny girl” Kiku is here constructed as a “valuable subject for study” offers
us an irresistible opportunity to revisit these turn-of-the-century photographs

24 CHAPTER 1
for a more critical look at what they continue to tell us over a century later.
Given the relative historical silence of the Ainu group, how does one extract
the experiences, perspectives, and voices of those who have been relegated
to the extreme margins of cultural history? In the absence of their voices,
how might we find a way to let them speak for themselves?
Certainly, by late spring 1904, the Ainu Group was a well-established and
publicized exhibit thanks to the abundant local and national press coverage
and fair publications. The May 8 edition of the Chicago Chronicle featured a
story about the Ainu that begins by describing the men, then quickly turns
its attention to the representation of the women. At stake is nothing less than
the assertion of western standards of beauty that deems indigenous Ainu
women “hideous” compared “to other races.”30
The skin of the Ainu is of a dirty brown hue, covered almost entirely by
coarse black hair which grows profusely. Hairiness is the most conspicuous
characteristic of the race. The whiskers and mustaches of the men grow
as long as the hair of their heads which is a heavy shock reaching down
to their shoulders. Nature did not give the women a mustache, but by a
method of painful tattooing they have supplied this deficiency in a mea-
sure. The statement that the Ainus are utterly without ambition does not
apply to the women, who, like all women, are ambitious to be beautiful.
Their idea of womanly beauty is to have a lip tattoo. This renders them
hideous to other races, but doubtless the lords and masters of their own.31

Reviewing Frederick Starr’s Ainu book for the Chicago Record-Herald,

Edwin L. Shuman also fixates on the visual representation of Ainu women,
arguing that “next to the long black hair of the men, perhaps the most curi-
ous characteristic of these people is the tattooing on the faces of the women,
which makes each look as if she wore heavy mustachios of a blue-green
color.”32 Public fascination with the traditional facial tattooing of Ainu women
dominates the press coverage of the Ainu at the fair, where images of female,
not male, bodies are rendered visible and subjected to scrutiny, public opin-
ion, and ridicule—with repeated references and speculation surrounding
what fate will await the two little girls. An early news article appearing in
the January 10 edition of the Chicago Tribune announces Starr’s journey to
Japan to “Investigate the World’s Most Mysterious Race of Men” and then
gives a long and vivid description of the rationale for and technique of lip
tattooing of Ainu women that sets the tone for subsequent news coverage:
In their youth many of these women are pretty, but their beauty is short
lived, even where they escape the ugliness of the tattooed upper and lower
lips. This disfiguration is supposed to have come from the desire of the

Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” 25

 women to affect the hairiness of lip characteristic of the men. In the process
the skin of the lips is cut in slashes parallel with the lines of the mouth, and
afterward there is a crosshatching of these lines. With these cuts opened
wide, soot from birchwood is rubbed into the slashings, after which wash-
ings with water of ash bark make the soot indelible. For days after the
process the lips of the young woman may be too sore to admit of taking
food or uttering speech, but her beauty has been assured by the process
and nothing else matters. It is as commonplace a concession as a French
heel or a pierced ear in civilization.33

In 1871, the tattooing of Ainu women was officially banned when the Family
Registry Law was passed in Japan, resulting in the incorporation of the Ainu
as “commoners,” thereby giving the government the authority to prohibit the
practice of certain cultural traditions—including the tattooing of women.
Many consider the years following the Meiji Restoration in 1868 the begin-
ning of the “forced assimilation” of the Ainu in Japan.34 Of the three Ainu
wives, only Santukno Hiramura (fifty-three years old) would presumably have
been tattooed before this cultural practice was disrupted. One must likewise
conjecture that the Ainu group’s other wives, Shutratek (aged thirty-seven)
and Shirake Osawa (aged eighteen), were both tattooed in the years after the
ban as some of the last women of their generation to bear this traditional
cultural marking. In 1904, Kin (aged seven) and Kiku (aged two) already
represented a new generation of Ainu girls who would be subjected to the
assimilationist policies well in place. What remains a consistent thread in
the representation of the Ainu at the fair is the ambivalence that is harshly
projected onto the bodies of the adult women—and then softened when it
comes to the more docile and acceptable bodies of the girls.

The Official Photographers

of the Ainu Group
Three official photographers chronicled the Ainu at the fair. Manuel Gon-
zalez worked as Frederick Starr’s personal photographer and traveled with the
anthropologist to Japan. Although Gonzalez photographed the Ainu both in
Japan and in the United States, the only extant images are those published in
Starr’s book. What happened to Gonzalez’s substantial body of photographs
remains a mystery and, according to anthropologist James Vanstone, appears
to have disappeared without a trace.35 Gonzalez nevertheless remains an
intriguing figure who haunts the margins of the Ainu archives, where he is
referred to in some newspaper accounts as Starr’s “trusty Mexican boy,” “his
adopted son,” “photographer,” and “secretary.”36

26 CHAPTER 1
 Charles Carpenter also photographed the Ainu at St. Louis. Carpenter
spent four months on assignment as the official fair photographer for the
Chicago Field Museum, where he had been employed since 1899.37 In his
book, A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904,
writer and visual artist Eric Breitbart notes that “Carpenter . . . brought the
Ainu into his portable studio and concentrated on full-length studies of a
single individual against a neutral cloth background.” Compared to the work
of the third fair photographer, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Carpenter’s images “have
an almost other-worldly quality; the background has removed them from
any real or simulated context, and the Ainu appear stiff and uncomfort-
able in front of the camera.”38 Carpenter’s studio portraits of the Ainu in St.
Louis—now housed in the Field Museum special collections—are the most
traditionally ethnographic in the archive, consisting not just of group shots
but many front and profile close-up studies of individual men and women.
Only Kin and Kiku are photographed facing the camera and not in profile
(figs. 5 and 6). Explaining the “stiff and uncomfortable” look of the Ainu in
Carpenter’s photographs, Breitbart notes John Hanson’s earlier observation
on the Ainu’s discomfort with the camera itself and the accompanying belief
“that ill-fortune will attend them if their pictures are taken, hence amateur
photographers at the Ainu village had a hard time of it.”39
Discussing the photographs taken of indigenous peoples at world’s fairs,
Breitbart noted that “these photographs are . . . consciously and uncon-
sciously, about the act of image-making. By representing specific events
and individuals in a particular way, the photographs show how these events
and individuals had been seen by others, thus providing insights into both
contemporary and historical ideas regarding the nature of photographic im-
ages.”40 If the nature of photographic imaging is problematic, then certainly
how photographs are “seen”—and by whom—is equally vexed. With this in
mind, I shift attention to two of the most compelling images of the Ainu at
the fair—taken by Jessie Tarbox Beals—where the process of “image-making”
is most clearly captured by the camera.
The first of these photographs gives us nothing less than a kind of visual
allegory for the politics of representation itself. In an unposed photograph,
Kin, Shutratek, and Kiku are shown standing outside and in front of their
traditional fairground house while being watched by a handful of white fair-
goers in the background (fig. 7). Three men in bowler hats, dark suits, and
ties and one elegantly dressed woman in a white mutton-sleeve shirtwaist
blouse and dark skirt peer out from inside the Ainu dwelling. Their eyes are
fixed on Shutratek, who is sitting on a low block of wood while she busily
weaves. Her eyes are turned away from both the onlookers behind her and

Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” 27

 FIGURE 5.Kin Hiramura. (Image no. CSA13219, the Field Museum,
photographer Charles Carpenter)

the camera before her. She is flanked on either side by Kin and Kiku. The lat-
ter looks directly at Beals’s camera, which records the multiple and complex
circuit of gazes at play: we look at Shutratek as she is looked at by the fairgo-
ers, Kiku returns our bold gaze with that of her own, and the anonymous
white fairgoers in the background stand in the shadowy liminal space of the
threshold. Their eyes remain partly hidden in the interior shadows of the
Ainu house, suggesting a kind of mirror imaging of ourselves as we peer at

28 CHAPTER 1
 FIGURE 6.Kiku Hiramura. (Image no. CSA13221, the Field Museum,
photographer Charles Carpenter)

this photograph from a vantage point that is located outside the frame and
across time itself.
The photograph is housed in the Jessie Tarbox Beals collection at the
Schlesinger Library, where archival notes misidentify those in this photo-
graph: “Four ‘Anglo’ fairgoers watching a Japanese woman weave outdoors
. . . her son stands near her, leaning against the wall of a thatched dwelling.”41
Shutratek and the children are identified as “Japanese” rather than “Ainu”—a

Those “Mysterious Little Japanese Primitives” 29

 FIGURE 7. Shutratek, Kiku, and Kin are watched by fairgoers outside the Ainu
House at the St. Louis Fair. (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in
America, photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals)

confusion perhaps attributable to the other photographs of Japanese at the

fair in the Beals collection. While it is not clear if the description of the “son”
leaning against the wall alludes to Kin or to Kiku, the traditionally dressed
children with short cropped hair seem to have created some gender confusion
in the archival description. This would not be the first time that the gender
ambiguity of the children has resulted in an error. One St. Louis newspaper
account from 1904 describes Kin as an “8 year-old boy” industriously wash-
ing his face in a pail of water outside the Ainu house:
There was not the shadow of dirt upon the youngster’s face, but still he
soused it with water and rubbed it as if he were trying to rub the skin away,
and, having completed to this own satisfaction his toilet, he trudged up to
his mother and she took a towel and gave his fades thorough cleansing.
Evidently the child was satisfied, for he went out and romped in the yard a
few minutes, and he was then back again at the water pail, going through
his washing scene once more. “My, I wish my boy would do that!” remarked
a woman, who was a close observer of the child.42

30 CHAPTER 1
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