Japan tsunami: Filipino wives gain respect

Japan tsunami: Filipino wives gain respect

JAPAN - Eleven years ago when Filipina Sally Kumagai married a Japanese factory worker in Minamisanriku, an hour's drive from Ishinomaki, she was not prepared for the treatment she was about to receive. Her sister-in-law greeted her with hostility. "She gave me a very antagonistic look from head to toe, like a tiger, not accepting me into the family," recalled Mrs Kumagai, a 40-year-old mother of two girls aged seven and nine.

Her sister-in-law would telephone every day to ask about her whereabouts and activities, and spread stories that the foreign bride was a spendthrift.

"I don't think they would have done it to me if I was a Japanese wife," said Mrs Kumagai, who struggled to gain acceptance.

Neighbours shunned her and people on the street avoided her because of her poor grasp of Japanese. She was fluent only in English and Tagalog at the time.

She was not the only one to be treated this way. There are some 50 Filipinas married to Japanese men living in Minamisanriku and nearby Ishinomaki. Most found it hard to fit in because of the differences in culture, said Mrs Amelia Sasaki, 61, a leader in the Filipino community there.

The tsunami of 2011 changed all that, said Mrs Sasaki, who married a Japanese and has lived in Japan for more than 30 years. "The Japanese people were losing hope.

They had no jobs, no earnings and everything was destroyed. The town was paralysed. It was the Filipino wives who went to the evacuation centres to get something to eat and wear, trying to make ends meet." And because of their actions, the Filipinas began gaining respect and acceptance, she said.

"Before the tsunami, the Filipinas would complain to me that they are treated like maids," she added. "When it came to important decisions in the household, they were excluded because they were foreigners."

Mrs Kumagai was in the Philippines when she was introduced to Mr Yoshio Kumagai long-distance by a mutual friend. The pair had only pictures of each other. Friendship and love blossomed through weekly long-distance calls, which Mrs Kumagai's friend helped translate.

After five months, Mr Kumagai proposed. A month later, he flew to meet her in the Philippines with a group of Japanese men also seeking Filipino brides. Within 21 days, they were married.

It coincided with the time when it was very common for Japanese men to travel to other countries in order to find a wife, said Dr Thang Leng Leng, an anthropologist and associate professor of Japanese studies at the National University of Singapore.

"Nobody wants to marry men living in rural areas. The status is not high, and the women are expected to do very hard work like tending the fields," she said. "In desperation, the men would go to find wives overseas. Twenty to 30 years ago, it was very common for foreign marriage brokers to organise large groups of men to go to the villages in the Philippines and marry women there."

Many Filipino women find it hard to integrate into Japanese society, even after a decade of living there. "Japanese in-laws are not very welcoming of foreign wives. They have in mind that the Filipinas marry their sons because they want to take away all their property," said Mrs Sasaki. "I usually ask Japanese wives if they are treated the same and they say 'no'."

She runs Sampaguita - named after the national flower of the Philippines - which is the association of Filipinas in Minamisanriku. She said that part of the difficulty is that there are customs Filipinas cannot accept.

"One Filipina complained to me that she worked very hard taking care of the household and didn't get any allowance to buy things she liked," she said. "Some would like to get a job to have an allowance but their families would tell them 'no' because they have duties at home and kids to look after." It is worse if the Filipina is the wife of a chonan - the eldest son of the family.

"The emphasis is on the eldest son who will carry on the family name," she said, adding that the wife is then expected to take care of her parents-in-law and the family. Mrs Kumagai herself married a chonan, and she was taken aback by the duties expected of her.

"Guests would show up unannounced at my door, and being the wife of a chonan, I had to make a lot of preparations, drop whatever I was doing and serve them tea and cookies, and give them my undivided attention," she said. "This was different from the Philippines where it was less strict."

As a foreigner, she was also excluded from family decisions.

"I felt like a maid. In the Philippines, the husband and wife are equal," she said.

But things changed when the disaster struck.

Mrs Kumagai said: "We were in an evacuation centre for two weeks. Our house was washed away. My husband lost his job. There was no electricity, no bed, no food, but I had to find a way to feed my children."

At the evacuation centre, she asked if she could clean rooms in exchange for bread. She would sometimes visit up to three evacuation centres a day, on foot. "I tried to prove that I could do something instead of being idle. My in-laws told me that I was kind, because even though my husband had so many bills to pay, I didn't try to run away or leave him.

"It was the first time that his relatives said something good about me, nine years after I came to Japan."

Her actions brought about other changes. Her views are now sought in important family decisions.

Mrs Sasaki said: "It's not easy for the Japanese to show their gratitude through words, and it is a custom for the Japanese not to praise the person when the person is present; they tell other people."

The months after the tsunami were a time of change for many other Filipinas who stood by their husbands.

"Because of their loyalty and resilience, the Filipinas now have some sort of a reliable position in the family circle," said Mrs Sasaki. "Now if they tell their husbands that they would like to work outside, their husbands would say 'yes'."

Some of the men have even agreed to their wives returning to their old jobs in nightclubs, said Mrs Marlene Shoji, 59, a counsellor with the Miyagi International Association, which gives support to foreigners living in the area.

While many Filipinas are training to be caregivers and English teachers, Ishinomaki has seen the number of nightspots owned by Filipinas more than triple to 17 after the tsunami. Ms Gloria Miyashita, 44, a nightclub owner for the past 15 years, said many of these Filipinas met their husbands while working in nightspots, but stopped after marriage to work in hotels, laundromats or food-processing factories.

"Because of the disaster, those who lost their jobs have returned to the nightclub business because the pay is higher," she said. "If the husband doesn't have a job, he has to rely on his wife to bring in the income, so there is no choice in the matter."

Dr Thang said that for the foreign women, the 2011 disaster proved a kind of social leveller.

"If the Filipinas were able to render help, the Japanese families would be very reciprocal. Reciprocity is a value that is very strong in Japan."

Said Mrs Kumagai of her renewed relationship with her in-laws: "It is very much different from before the tsunami when they insulted me and thought the worst of me.

"Now they say that I'm a kind woman and they tell the same thing to other people. It means a lot to me as a foreigner."


Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

This website is best viewed using the latest versions of web browsers.