さよなら
I saw a great movie last night: Sayonara (1957), starring Marlon Brando at his best and the lovely Miiko Taka, is the story of two US servicemen during the Korean war who fall in love with and marry Japanese girls while on leave. At the time, in 1951, these men were unable to bring their wives back to the US, but, if the movie is correct, 10,000 servicemen married Japanese girls knowing this before the law was changed. The movie is a great love story, the kind Hollywood used to make.

This is the type of film some folks like to label as being "ahead of its times," as if history where marching forward to some yet-unattained utopia. Yet it is a very conservative movie. Laws against racial intermarriage were the result of false Progressivist ideas of race and nation that came about in the 19th Century and before, but were non-existent in earlier, better times. The men are fighting to conserve a freedom that had been taken away from them by an unjust law. I could even see some people using this movie as support for the wrong side in the current marriage debate, but that would be a mistake. Marriage is seen in this movie not so much as a right, but as an "obligation" (that word is even used), a duty that is essentially procreative.

All in all, this is a fantastic movie and has earned a place in my top 10 list.