Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025
Time: 1:00pm
Cost: $5 (with paid admission)
Location: Morikami Theater
Film Run Time: 26mins.
Despite lingering wartime enmity, tens of thousands of Japanese wives — the biggest influx of Asian women in U.S. history — crossed the Pacific. They began new lives in difficult and to them mysterious circumstances, scattered across the country in places where they were often the first Japanese ever seen. What was it like to abandon family, friends and country, and marry a former enemy? Even for those whose choice of spouse proved to be a tragic mistake, there was no turning back. Many in Japan viewed them as social outcasts and even today the words “war bride” in Japanese carry such a stigma — of bar girls, even prostitution — that people don’t like to say them. Now these women are in their 80s. This is their story, of lives shaped by one irrevocable decision.
A discussion will be held after the screening with Co-Director Karen Kasmauski and moderator Carla Stansifer, Curator of Japanese Art.
Enjoy a free teachers guide for our film: Open Teachers Guide
Steve and Emmy in Japan about 1952
Co-Directors: Karen Kasmauski, Lucy Craft, Kathryn Tolbert, May 2014, Seattle (War Bride Daughters LLC)
The Director
Karen Kasmauski is an award-winning photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and for organizations like the CDC and the Gates Foundation. She received the first Getty Images “Grant for Good” to examine challenges faced by a Tennessee-based environmental nonprofit. She produced 25 major stories for National Geographic, focusing extensively on global health, including early AIDS coverage across Africa, Asia, and the United States. Her book, Impact: From the Frontlines of Global Health, illuminates the social, environmental, and economic conditions that allow pandemics like COVID 19 to rapidly spread across our planet, and was the basis for exhibitions and her TEDx talk.
Drawing on her roots as the daughter of a Japanese war bride, Kasmauski collaborated with two colleagues to create the BBC-licensed documentary Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides, a 30-minute film exploring the challenges of biracial upbringing in the United States. A Knight Fellow with an M.A. from Ohio University, she has taught photography and journalism at several universities, including George Washington and George Mason.