What are some 1940s-1960s films that describe post-war Japanese-American relations from either standpoint?

by krupu
248_RPA

Try "Sayonara" (1957), starring Marlon Brando, James Garner and Patricia Owens.

Plot: Major Gruver (Brando) supports the military's opposition to marriages between American troops and Japanese women, until he falls in love with a Japanese girl himself.

Trivia: Miyoshi Umeki won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Katsumi in "Sayonara", the first Asian actor to win an Oscar.

kieslowskifan

There was A Majority of One in 1961 which featured Rosalind Russell as a Jewish widow who finds romance with a Japanese diplomat played by Alec Guinness (!) in yellow-face. If you can get beneath the stereotypes and hideousness of yellow-face acting, there are some interesting observations about the postwar reconciliation, both characters lost immediate family in the war, and the new liberal order of the United Nations. Another example of a miscast American film was the 1958 costume drama The Barbarian and the Geisha which featured John Wayne as the American consul during the last years of the Shogunate, Townsend Harris. Obviously a stand-in for MacArthur and the occupation, Harris as played by Wayne has to get the Japanese to renounce tradition and embrace modernity, an analogy that would not be lost when the end of the occupation was still in recent memory.

Rod Serling struck a more pessimistic note with the 1964 episode "The Encounter" of The Twilight Zone in which two men, a white American and a Japanese-American are seemingly stuck in an endless cycle of guilt and violence.

In general, there were very few films produced by the post-Occupation Japanese studio system that addressed either the occupation or current US-Japanese relationship directly. Gojira, arguably the most famous Japanese film of this period, the allusions to the US were only indirect and coded. Shohei Imamura's 1961 film Pigs and Battleships examined the American influence on Japan critically, mixing together the underworld of Yokosuka and the American military. Likewise, 1964's Gate of Flesh directed by Seijun Suzuki has a Tokyo ghetto as its setting and Americans are one of several antagonists. But Suzuki and Imamura were very much exceptions to the broader stream of Japanese cinema. Both directors were part of the Nikkatsu studio, which sought to break out of the highly formalized and hierarchical structure of the Japanese film studio system, and Nikkatsu's films were notable for violating taboos of sex and violence, so addressing the US influence in a critical manner was part of wider transgressiveness.