If I hadn't been laid up at home today, I suspect I never would have watched this movie when it popped up on TCM today, especially after seeing the highly unlikely beginning: tourist from Tennessee and sophisticated Japanese diplomat meet and fall in love at a reception at Japanese Embassy in DC.I'm so glad I stayed with it, a very good examination of cross cultural marriages and, as others have mentioned, a look at daily life in Japan in WW II.As a retired diplomat, who lived outside USA for most of my adult life, now back in USA, I'm so grateful to TCM for a review of film history and especially American cultural history.

The memoirs of the real Gwen Terasaki serve as the basis for Bridge To The Sun. Carroll Baker and James Shigeta would have troubles enough in an interracial marriage in the Thirties in America, especially Baker who was from Johnson City, Tennessee. But as America and Japan edge closer and finally go to war, this star-crossed couple has to make some choices that not too many others have to face.But Baker and Shigeta are soul-mates and that fact is what keeps them together despite the upbringings of both. For Baker she's a southern girl born and bred. She has an easier time of overcoming that than Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, but it's there.As for Shigeta he's a Japanese diplomat who thinks the militarists are leading his country down the wrong path. But he's also traditional Japanese who believes that the woman is most inferior. There's a great scene of dinner at their house in Japan where the women eat separately at their own table. Some political remarks are made and she commits the ultimate social sin of speaking up. That leads to a nasty quarrel. It reminds of the scene in Giant where Elizabeth Taylor speaks up in a political discussion to Rock Hudson's chauvinistic chagrin. Texans and Japanese have chauvinism much in common.Of course when war is finally declared Shigeta is shipped home and Baker takes their daughter and accompanies him. Her insights into the Japanese home front are the best part of the film and her life story.It's not true that Gwen Teresaki took their daughter back to America much less Tennessee. She would know better than to take a mixed racial child anywhere in Dixie. 'Terry' Teresaki did die young and Gwen enjoyed a long widowhood in life not dying until 1990. But not within a year of their departure. The real Teresaki became part of the Japanese new government under the occupation and he died in 1951 just before the occupation ended.Bridge To The Sun should have been done in color, but I'm supposing that was to allow that black and white newsreel footage to be integrated into the story. Baker and Shigeta are fine in the leads and the story is an eternal that while love can be on a rocky road, it finds a way if it's real.

This film took me by surprise with the great acting by Carroll Baker as Gwen Terasaki who is a Southern gal from the United States who meets up with a Japanese young man named Hedenari Terasaki, (James Shigeta) in the late 1930's and this couple fall deeply in love which I would call one Soul Mate meeting another. After awhile this couple have a baby girl which they love very much and she grows very close with her mom and dad. Everything is going just fine until the Japanese Government declares war on America, Dec. 7, 1941 when they bombed Pearl Harbor. The American Government immediately investigated all men who were Japanese and deported them back to Japan. Gwen Terasaki was allowed to stay in America with her daughter, however, Gwen decided to go back to Japan which they both knew would become a horrible experience for all of their family. This is a true story and it is a heart breaker, but it clearly shows that when you find your Soul Mate in life, you will do whatever is possible to stay with your loved one and sacrifice everything for each other. Don't miss this great film Classic, Enjoy.

This is the true story of Gwen Terasaki who married a Japanese diplomat before World War Two and then returned with him to Japan after Pearl Harbor. It tells the story of the war from an entirely new perspective, and is the first film to depict the racial nature of the Pacific war, and to depict the suffering of the common Japanese people.