Japanese behind Casablanca
The prominent movie Casablanca has some linkage with Japan, though the work produced during WWII was a kind of anti-Axis propaganda.
In the movie Europeans were trying to flee to the US, leaving Nazi Germany-controlled Europe. They were waiting for a chance to sail to the US at the port city Casablanca in northwest Africa or Morocco under governance of France.
Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894 – 1972) was an Austrian politician, geopolitician, philosopher and count of Coudenhove-Kalergi, who was a pioneer of European integration. He was the founder and President for 49 years of the Paneuropean Union. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an antiques-dealer and oil tycoon in Tokyo.
Coudenhove-Kalergi is recognized as the founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe. His intellectual influences ranged from Rudolf Kjellén and Oswald Spengler to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In politics, he was an enthusiastic supporter of "fourteen points" made by Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918 and pacifist initiatives of Kurt Hiller. In the early 1920s he joined a Masonic lodge at Vienna, where he would reach several degrees. In 1922 he co-founded the Pan-European Union (PEU) with Archduke Otto von Habsburg, as "the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia".[5] In 1923, he published a manifesto entitled Pan-Europa, each copy containing a membership form which invited the reader to become a member of the Pan-Europa movement. He favored social democracy as an improvement on "the feudal aristocracy of the sword" But his ambition was to create a conservative society that superseded democracy with "the social aristocracy of the spirit".[6]
From April 1924 to March 1938, Coudenhove-Kalergi worked as an editor and principal author of the journal Paneuropa. He published his main work, the three volumes of Kampf um Paneuropa (The fight for Paneuropa) between 1925 and 1928. In 1926, the first Congress of the Pan-European Union met in Vienna funded with 60,000 marks by banker Max Warburg, and the 2,000 delegates elected Coudenhove-Kalergi president of the Central Council
After the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich in 1938, Coudenhove-Kalergi fled to Czechoslovakia, and thence to France. As France fell to Germany in 1940, he escaped to the United States by way of Switzerland and Portugal. During the war, he continued his call for the unification of Europe along the Paris-London axis. His wartime politics and peripeties served as the real life basis for fictional Resistance hero Victor Laszlo, the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Richard_Nikolaus_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi
So, the original movement for unification of Europe was driven by an Austrian politician whose mother was Japanese.
But how did she become the wife of Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat?
Mitsuko, Countess of Coudenhove-Kalergi (1874 – 1941), formerly known as Mitsu Aoyama , was one of the first Japanese people to emigrate to Europe, after becoming the wife of an Austrian diplomat, Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, in Tokyo. She was the mother of Richard Nikolaus Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi.
The daughter of an antiques-dealer and oil tycoon in Tokyo, aged 17 she met the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Dr. Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi when she came to help him when his horse slipped on ice (Heinrich often visited her father's shop, not far from the Austrian legation). Heinrich gained her father's permission for her to be employed as a parlour maid in the legation and then (after they fell in love) for them to marry. The latter request was refused, but the couple defied him, marrying on 16 March 1892 in Tokyo with the consent of the Austrian and Japanese foreign ministries. This left her disinherited and banned from her father's house. In 1896 she was received at an imperial reception for foreign diplomats' wives by Empress Eishō (as a commoner Mitsuko would never have been granted such an audience, but as a countess and ambassador's wife she was) and again on the end of Heinrich's diplomatic work shortly afterwards.
The couple then returned to Europe, where Mitsuko and their two sons Johannes and Richard took over management of the family estates in Bohemian Ronsperg.
Heinrich died in 1906 and Mitsuko took over the estates and the children's upbringing and education, while studying law and economics herself. Mitsuko never again returned to Japan and when she died in 1941 she was buried in the Hietzinger Cemetery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuko_AoyamaShe must have experienced prejudice and discrimination in Europe on many occasions, since it was still the 19th century that she became Countess in Europe. It might give some hint to her son Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi about evil of a divided world so that he might want to realize unified Europe where even his Japanese mother could live with less social pressure.
Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi once renounced Richard when he married a famous actress while he was a student, though decades later she renounced this renunciation.
Old Mitsuko wished to be buried in her husband's grave but it was not realized. She also wanted to have her coffin wrapped with a flag of the Rising Sun, the Japanese National Flag.
She never returned to Japan since she had left Japan for Europe with her husband in 1896, though she met mostly Japanese in Vienna in her last days.
In addition, though she died two months before the Pearl Harbor Attack, she was protected by the Japanese Embassy in Vienna from Nazis unlike her son Richard.
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Mat 5:24 Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.
Mat 5:25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.
Mat 5:26 Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.