Word: saito
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...Japan's Yoshishige Saito, 56, Best Foreign Painter. A pioneer abstractionist in his own country, Saito turns out paintings that look disconcertingly like road maps...
...most popular of the moderns, Kiyoshi Saito, 52, has achieved a success almost worthy of the top Ukiyo-e artists. In 1955 he exhibited 67 of his pieces in the U.S., in a grand gesture gave them all to the University of Michigan. In debt, like most of his contemporaries, to Western influence and a Western audience, Saito lately visited ancient Kyoto to recapture special Japanese qualities he feels his works lack, ruefully muses: "We have lost our Japanese origins. I keep on going to Kyoto to try to rediscover them." But to a Western eye, his origins are unmistakable...
Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), refuses to let his officers do manual work. The Geneva Convention, he informs Saito, expressly forbids it. Saito smiles. He is a Japanese officer, and he will show the arrogant British who is master...
...Saito gives the ultimatum: work or die. To his astonishment, Nicholson calmly chooses to die, and his officers with him. Saito is forced to spare them, a fearful loss of face. And so begins a contest of chivalries-Bushido v. What England Expects-that hilariously exposes the ridiculous in what men fight for, and subtly reveals the sublime...
...suspense this situation generates is impressive. Beaten, starved, baked in a sheet-iron oven-how can the colonel possibly hold out? But he does. Backed by bayonets, stiffened by his code-how can Saito possibly give in? But he does. The British troops so successfully sabotage the bridge they are supposed to build that Saito is forced to ask the colonel's help, and to capitulate to his terms...