I missed my post day last week because I was laid low with food poisoning. I won’t go into the grisly details. I can hear you thanking me for that and you should.
During my recovery, I popped a DVD into my player and was immediately carried back to my youth. It was Sayonara, a movie based on James A. Michener’s book of the same title. It stars Marlon Brando as an American ace stationed in Japan after WWII. He falls in love with a famous Japanese revue performer and all heck breaks loose. The book was published in 1954 and the movie came out in 1957 and both had pretty bold things to say about racism and prejudice for that day and time.
Michener has since become synonymous with big, book-like slabs of fictionalized history, ie: Hawaii, Texas and so on. But back then his literary rep rested pretty much on the aforementioned Sayonara and on a slender volume of short stories taken from his experiences as a Navy Lieutenant in the South Pacific theatre of war during the 40’s entitled fittingly enough, Tales of the South Pacific. The musical, South Pacific, was based on these stories. It was also a work that dealt rather daringly with issues of race.
In fact, if I were a social historian, I might try to make a case that those two books by Michener and the works based on them helped to start a national conversation about racism and prime the public consciousness for the civil rights movement. That’s probably piling more significance on them than they can bear, but, I must say that as a young person, they certainly affected me.
I remember sobbing over the doomed young Lieutenant Cable’s doomed love affair with the beautiful Tonkinese, Liat, in South Pacific. And in Sayonara, watching the exquisite Japanese actresss, Miyoshi Umeki, writhe in humiliation as Red Buttons who plays her American airman husband rails at her for trying to get her eyes surgically altered to look more Western, I began to understand how the attitudes of racism assail basic human dignity.
I don’t know how the two books hold up, but the two movies based on them hold up pretty well and still pack a punch. I recall reading that the book of Sayonara doesn’t end as bravely as the movie does, that the Michener who wrote the book was himself grappling with the idea that love between people of two different races could have a happy outcome. The very next year after Sayonara’s publication he married a Japanese national. It was his third and final marriage.
During my recovery, I popped a DVD into my player and was immediately carried back to my youth. It was Sayonara, a movie based on James A. Michener’s book of the same title. It stars Marlon Brando as an American ace stationed in Japan after WWII. He falls in love with a famous Japanese revue performer and all heck breaks loose. The book was published in 1954 and the movie came out in 1957 and both had pretty bold things to say about racism and prejudice for that day and time.
Michener has since become synonymous with big, book-like slabs of fictionalized history, ie: Hawaii, Texas and so on. But back then his literary rep rested pretty much on the aforementioned Sayonara and on a slender volume of short stories taken from his experiences as a Navy Lieutenant in the South Pacific theatre of war during the 40’s entitled fittingly enough, Tales of the South Pacific. The musical, South Pacific, was based on these stories. It was also a work that dealt rather daringly with issues of race.
In fact, if I were a social historian, I might try to make a case that those two books by Michener and the works based on them helped to start a national conversation about racism and prime the public consciousness for the civil rights movement. That’s probably piling more significance on them than they can bear, but, I must say that as a young person, they certainly affected me.
I remember sobbing over the doomed young Lieutenant Cable’s doomed love affair with the beautiful Tonkinese, Liat, in South Pacific. And in Sayonara, watching the exquisite Japanese actresss, Miyoshi Umeki, writhe in humiliation as Red Buttons who plays her American airman husband rails at her for trying to get her eyes surgically altered to look more Western, I began to understand how the attitudes of racism assail basic human dignity.
I don’t know how the two books hold up, but the two movies based on them hold up pretty well and still pack a punch. I recall reading that the book of Sayonara doesn’t end as bravely as the movie does, that the Michener who wrote the book was himself grappling with the idea that love between people of two different races could have a happy outcome. The very next year after Sayonara’s publication he married a Japanese national. It was his third and final marriage.
2 comments:
Ironically, Brando played a native Japanese in "The Teahouse of the August Moon" just the year before. This, of course, also speaks to racism in the fact that 1956 America still could not (a decade after victory) see a native Japanese played by someone actually from Japan!
We have come a long way.
Doreen
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