My great grandfather, Koho Higa, came to America in 1913 on the Shinyo Maru. As my grandma’s sister puts it, his dream when he first came to America was to make “a pocketful of money and return to Okinawa, but instead, he was blessed with a pocketful of nine wonderful babies”. Therefore, he brought little in terms of physical possessions. Six years after Koho arrived, and after divorcing his first wife, he married Koho Nakao by proxy. These marriages, arranged through an exchange of photographs, were often among young people from the same village, whose families knew each other. There was sometimes deception within this process though. In the case of my great grandmother, she was looking forward to living in the huge house in a photograph sent by my great grandfather, but it turned out that he only worked there as a yard man. Kana also was unable to bring very many personal possessions; she travelled here by way of slow boat after two years of persuasion by her mother adorning an Okinawan formal kimono, which slightly differs from the traditional Japanese kimonos. Okinawan women wore a kimono of dark colors whose only pattern was within the weave of the fabric and was typically tied at the waist by a narrow belt. The patterns on the fabric were often imitations of the indigo or blue tattoos that picture brides often wore on their hands; this was a custom which originated in the 16^th century as a precautionary measure mothers took to protect their daughters from being raped by warriors who roamed the country.

My great grandmother (Left) and my great grandfather’s sister and family (Right) before leaving for America.

Okinawa is a prefecture of Japan located in the central Ryukyus, south of Japan. Okinawan immigrants to Hawaii were often discriminated against by the Japanese immigrants who arrived there fifteen years earlier. This drew the Okinawans together and helped them cultivate a strong pride in their culture that they still pass on to their descendants to this day. My grandma and her siblings, with the exception of the youngest son, were all born in plantation camps in Hawaii. Life in the camps was hard and all the Higa children worked on the sugarcane plantations or as maids for “haole”, or Caucasian, families from a very young age in order to help their parents. The support of the Okinawan community which was imbibed with a fervent sense of pride in their Okinawan heritage helped them stay strong and overcome their times of trifle. Kana’s kimono served as a physical representation of home and the culture which filled her with the tenacity she needed to take care of her family and survive. Unfortunately, after the attack on Pearl Harbor there was little remaining of Japanese culture. My grandmother’s siblings recall running home through the sugarcane field and being swarmed by military soldiers who ransacked their houses. They were stripped of their cultural possessions, their language, and even their Japanese names. So, sadly, the kimono survives only in photographs but it serves as a memorable representation of the Okinawan culture my ancestors came from which helped them endure the hurdles of poverty and plantation life.