Hatsue Miyamoto

Character from "Snow Falling on Cedars" (1999) film and novel.
Hatsue Miyamoto is the wife of Kabuo Miyamoto, the man accused of Carl Heine’s murder. She is known on San Piedro for her remarkable beauty. Hatsue was first Ishmael Chambers’s friend, and later, his teenage love. Because of the heightened prejudice against people of Japanese descent during WWII, the young couple was forced to keep their relationship secret. Hatsue broke off the relationship when the pain of lying to her family and to herself became too much for her to bear. Despite her feelings for Ishmael, her love for him was imperfect: she always nursed doubts about their relationship and felt torn between her desire for him and her duty towards her family and heritage. Because of this, Hatsue eventually marries Kabuo Miyamoto, who is also of Japanese descent, because their union feels “right” to her. Throughout the novel, Hatsue struggles to reconcile the duty she feels to honor her Japanese heritage with her desire to be part of the larger society. Hatsue wants to embrace her Japanese identity, but she also dreams of a world free of prejudice, where her ethnicity wouldn’t matter as much as it does. She takes refuge in nature, which lies beyond the grasp of society’s prejudices. Hatsue has a withheld quality to her personality. She keeps her thoughts to herself, and it’s often hard for other characters, like Ishmael, to know what she is thinking.