Based on the true story of American diplomat Townsend Harris, his time in Japan in the 1850s and 60s, and his romance with a 17-year-old geisha named Kichi. Their story is one of the most well-known folk tales in Japan. The real Harris died in New York in 1878, and the real Kichi committed suicide in Shimoda in 1892.
John Huston wrote in his autobiography that he did not finish the movie, because of the preparation for his next feature, "The Roots of Heaven". John Wayne did it for him and Huston wasn't satisfied with the result. But he refused to sue Twentieth Century Fox, because the studio executive Buddy Adler was suffering from a brain tumor.
There is an untrue rumor that there were fisticuffs between John Wayne and John Huston during the shoot. True, they didn't see eye-to-eye on the production, and Wayne at one point yelled for all to hear, "Huston can't direct a damn story without his father or Bogart in it!" But the director was not around to hear that. It's also very unlikely that Wayne would challenge Huston, who was an experienced boxer, and had a well-publicized brawl with fellow boxer and actor, Errol Flynn. Like that incident, had Wayne and Huston gotten into a brawl, it would have been choice fodder for gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.
The only collaboration between John Huston and John Wayne. The latter later disparaged Huston's direction, saying, "Actors were like figures on a Japanese screen to him; they were just things in the foreground ... I found it impossible to make any contact at all."
John Huston later dismissed this film, claiming that the final version, re-cut by the studio, didn't resemble his vision at all and that he would've liked to have his name removed from the credits. Stylistically, Huston wanted to make it a particularly Japanese film in terms of photography, pacing, color and narration. According to him, only bits of this attempt were still intact and visible in the theatrical version.