Documentary Film: Fall Seven Times, Get up Eight: The Japanese War Brides

Date: Friday, May 2, 2025
Time: 7:00pm
Cost: $10 (members $7)
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.

The Director

Kathryn Tolbert was a journalist with The Washington Post for more than 25 years, as an editor, reporter, and correspondent in Tokyo. She is currently executive director of The War Bride Experience, Inc., a nonprofit organization founded by Kathryn and two other first-born daughters of Japanese war brides, Lucy Craft and Karen Kasmauski. She is the author of the oral history archive at www.warbrideproject.com and was a co-director of the documentary film Fall Seven Times Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides. The War Bride Experience has partnered with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Museum of American History to create the exhibition “Japanese War Brides, Across a Wide Divide.”