Bridge to the Sun: A Memoir of Love and War - Tapa blanda

National Book Award Finalist Non-Fiction (1958) * Washington Post Non-Fiction Book of the Year (1958) * New York Times Bestseller

Bridge to the Sun is a beautiful, tender, and moving love story-the true report of an international and interracial marriage of a an American girl from the mountains of Tennessee and a Japanese diplomat. They were married in 1931, just as tension between their two countries was mounting, and their constant dream was of a "rainbow across the Pacific," a bridge of peace between Japan and the United States.

In the following ten years, Mr. Terasaki's service with the Japanese Foreign Office took them to Japan, China (where their daughter Mariko was born), Cuba, and Washington, where they were living at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As head of Japanese intelligence in the Western Hemisphere, Terasaki took enormous personal risks to avert war between the two countries. Mrs. Terasaki describes with rare perception and fine humor her months of internment with the Japanese diplomatic corps at Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs, the long voyage back to Japan via Africa on the famed exchange ship Gripsholm, and the struggle of the war years in Japan which were marked by illness and near starvation. After the surrender, Mr. Terasaki, a courageous and brilliant man who had risked everything to avert the war, was appointed liaison between the Emperor and General MacArthur, and in this capacity, he made a lasting contribution to post-war relations between the two countries.

Gwen Harold Terasaki, author of Bridge to the Sun, was born in Johnson City, Tennessee. The memoir chronicles her life and marriage to Hidenari Terasaki, a Japanese diplomat who was serving as head of intelligence in the Western Hermisphere for the Empire of Japan when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She accompanied her husband back to Japan, where she lived during the war years and the early occupation period. Her memoir was a New York Times bestseller, nominated for a National Book Award, and won The Washington Post non-fiction book of the year award in 1958. It was made into a film by MGA starring Carol Baker and James Shigeta, which premiered in 1961. She toured Japan and the United States in subsequent years, speaking on the subject of Japanese – American relations from an entirely unique perspective. She kept in touch with her Japanese friends and gave frequent talks about the “bridge across the Pacific” she and her husband had dreamed of building when they married in 1931. As she grew older she surrounded herself with mementos — letters written home during the occupation, family photographs, fan mail from readers, faded newspaper clippings that chronicled their public lives together. Among the papers her daughter discovered were letters Terry had written to Gwen during their courtship. Gwen had saved them all. They are written in the clear hand of youth, on stationary printed with the words “Higher Than Mount Fujiyama / Deeper Than The Pacific.” Gwen missed this romantic young diplomat for the rest of her life, and spoke of him almost every day until she died, on December 15, 1990.