13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

SABATINO, Noriko

The ‘Cloud of Unknowing’: memory, myth and narratives of transition of Japanese war brides in Australia

The Japanese women who married Australian members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces migrated from a land devastated by war and nuclear cloud to one of unknowing. In the eyes of some of their countrymen, they had married ‘the barbarians’, enacting a Japanese version of the Europa myth. According to her dream, Europa ‘was to be an Asian girl carried off by a stranger’. Another version has a bull (Zeus) carrying her across the ocean to an unknown continent. Even the label of ‘sensoo hanayome’ - ‘war bride’ had pejorative connotations.

In the new land, these women were seen by some as ‘the enemy’ - members of a race that had killed/tortured Australian men and women, another version of ‘the yellow peril’ that the ‘White Australia Policy’ was meant to exclude. One method of assimilation took the form of immersion in ‘the Cloud of Forgetting’- leaving all that was known and familiar and merging into the background, almost to the point of invisibility.

Time and the changes it has wrought make possible the reclaiming of these memories for these women in affirming their identity as Japanese-Australians and as a legacy for their children.