In Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America, Sonia C. Gomez (2024) offers a new account of Japanese American immigration history, using gender as a critical axis to challenge established historiography. Much discussion of Japanese immigration to the United States has revolved around the earliest wave of laboring men, whose arrival start after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and end with the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1908. “By making the primary focus the exclusion of men,” she argues, “many scholars have failed to attend to the gendered dimensions [of the Gentlemen’s Agreement].”[1] As she points out, Read more