We watched a movie last night called Bridge to Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_the_Sun

It’s based on the book of the same title, by the film’s leading character, Gwen Terasaki. It’s the true story of an American woman who marries a Japanese diplomat, Hidenari Terasaki, in the 1930s, and how she had to navigate the casual racism of her friends and family at home, and the trouble she had to endure as the wife of a Japanese national, and an influential one at that, after Pearl Harbor.

It’s a powerful tale, that resonates today, especially with people like George Takei keeping the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War in people’s consciousness.

I haven’t read the book yet, but from various reviews and summations of that text, it looks like the film played a little fast and loose with the real story, not least with the timeline, but I think it did manage to convey the problems Gwen struggled with. It didn’t deal at all with Gwen’s work before and after Hidenari’s death in 1951 to set up a “peace bridge across the Pacific” to bring the two nations closer together after the war. Also, while the film and book featured the Terasaki’s daughter Mariko, it didn’t go any further to tell of her involvement in the movement to bring the two countries cultures together in the decades after the war.

However, this does raise the reason why we watched the movie at all. In my family tree research I discovered that Mariko Terasaki was married to a fourth cousin of mine, Mayne Miller. Mayne was a lawyer and was only four generations away from the first of my family Maynes to land in the USA in 1822, as am I, hence the fourth cousin designation.

Mayne was the same generation as my dad, and died in 1979. Mariko was a little younger and died in 2016. They had four sons, two of whom survive today, so there is still a living link with me and Gwen and Mariko Terasaki, of which I am very proud.