Akiko Kirkham was among about 650 Japanese women who migrated to Australia after marrying Australian servicemen from the Allied occupation forces stationed in Japan in the aftermath of World War II.
In Australian society at the time, which favored white people, these brides from a former enemy nation were greeted with icy stares and subjected to discrimination. Some were forced to conceal their Japanese identity simply to make a life in their new country.
Born in 1927 in Osaka Prefecture, Akiko Hirano was working at a munitions factory in Hiroshima Prefecture when the war ended. In the aftermath, she found work as a typist at an Allied occupation facility in Kure, Hiroshima, where she met and later married Glenn Kirkham, an Australian serviceman 18 years her senior. In 1953, after his assignment concluded, she accompanied him to Australia.
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