Yoshiko Yamaguchi

Yoshiko Yamaguchi
山口 淑子
Yamaguchi in the 1940s
Member of the House of Councillors
In office 8 July 1974 – 7 July 1992
Constituency	National district (1974-83) National PR (1983-1992)
Personal details
Born	Yoshiko Yamaguchi (1920-02-12)February 12, 1920 Liaoyang, Manchuria, Republic of China
Died	September 7, 2014(2014-09-07) (aged 94) Tokyo, Japan
Political party	Liberal Democratic Party
Spouse(s)	Isamu Noguchi ​ ​ (m. 1951; div. 1956)​ Hiroshi Otaka ​ ​ (m. 1958; died 2001)​
Parents	Ai Yamaguchi (mother) Fumio Yamaguchi (father)
Occupation	Singer, actress, journalist, politician
Awards	Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class
Musical career
Also known as	Yoshiko Ōtaka (大鷹 淑子) Pan Shuhua (潘淑華) Shirley Yamaguchi Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭)
Genres	Popular music
Years active	1938–1958
Musical artist
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	李香蘭
Simplified Chinese	李香兰
showTranscriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Lǐ Xiānglán

Yoshiko Yamaguchi (山口 淑子, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, February 12, 1920 – September 7, 2014) was a Japanese singer, actress, journalist, and politician. Born in China, she made an international career in film in China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.

Early in her career, the Manchukuo Film Association concealed her Japanese origin and she went by the Chinese name Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭), rendered in Japanese as Ri Kōran. This allowed her to represent China in Japanese propaganda movies. After the war, she appeared in Japanese movies under her real name, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, as well as in several English language movies under the stage name, Shirley Yamaguchi.

After becoming a journalist in the 1950s under the name Yoshiko Otaka, she was elected as a member of the Japanese parliament in 1974, and served for 18 years. After retiring from politics, she served as vice president of the Asian Women's Fund.^[1]

Early life[]

Yoshiko Yamaguchi in 1933

She was born on February 12th, 1920 to Japanese parents, Ai Yamaguchi (山口 アイ, Yamaguchi Ai) and Fumio Yamaguchi (山口 文雄, Yamaguchi Fumio), who were then settlers in Fushun, Manchuria, Republic of China, in a coal mining residential area in Dengta, Liaoyang.

Fumio Yamaguchi was an employee of the South Manchuria Railway. From an early age, Yoshiko was exposed to Mandarin Chinese. Fumio Yamaguchi had some influential Chinese acquaintances, among whom were Li Jichun (李際春) and Pan Yugui (潘毓桂). By Chinese custom for those who became sworn brothers, they also became Yoshiko's "godfathers" (also known as "nominal fathers") and gave her two Chinese names, Li Hsiang-lan (Li Xianglan) and Pan Shuhua (潘淑華). ("Shu" in Shuhua and "Yoshi" in Yoshiko are written with the same Chinese character). Yoshiko later used the former name as a stage name and assumed the latter name while she was staying with the Pan family in Beijing.

As a youth Yoshiko suffered a bout of tuberculosis. In order to strengthen her breathing, the doctor recommended voice lessons. Her father initially insisted on traditional Japanese music, but Yoshiko preferred Western music and thus received her initial classical vocal education from an Italian dramatic soprano (Madame Podresov, married into White Russian nobility). She later received schooling in Beijing, polishing her Mandarin, accommodated by the Pan family. She was a coloratura soprano.

Career in China[]

Li Hsiang-lan & Kazuo Hasegawa

Yoshiko made her debut as an actress and singer in the 1938 film Honeymoon Express (蜜月快車), by Manchuria Film Production. She was billed as Li Hsiang-lan, pronounced Ri Kōran in Japanese. The adoption of a Chinese stage name was prompted by the film company's economic and political motives—a Manchurian girl who had command over both the Japanese and Chinese languages was sought after. From this she rose to be a star and Japan-Manchuria Goodwill Ambassadress (日滿親善大使). The head of the Manchukuo film industry, General Masahiko Amakasu decided she was the star he was looking for: a beautiful actress fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese who could pass as Chinese and who had an excellent singing voice.^[2]

The Chinese actors who appeared in the Manchuria Film Productions films were never informed that she was Japanese, but they suspected she was at least half Japanese as she always ate her meals with the Japanese actors instead of with the Chinese actors, was given white rice to eat instead of the sorghum given to the Chinese and was paid ten times more than the Chinese actors were.^[3] Though in her subsequent films she was almost exclusively billed as Li Hsiang-lan, she appeared in a few as "Yamaguchi Yoshiko".

Many of her films bore some degree of promotion of the Japanese national policy (in particular pertaining to the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere ideology) and can be termed "National Policy Films" (国策映画).^[4] While promoting Manchurian interests in Tokyo, Li would meet Kenichiro Matsuoka, future television executive and son of Japanese diplomat Yōsuke Matsuoka, whom she would write in her biography Ri Kōran: My Half Life, to be her first love. Although she had hopes of marriage, he was still a student at Tokyo Imperial University and not interested in settling down at the time. They would meet again after the war, at which time Kenichiro attempted to rekindle the relationship, but by then, Li was already involved with the architect Isamu Noguchi.^[5]

The 1940 film China Nights (中國の夜), also known as Shanghai Nights (上海の夜), by Manchuria Film Productions, is especially controversial. It is unclear whether it was a "National Policy Film" as it portrays Japanese soldiers in both positive and negative lights. In this film, Li played a young woman of extreme anti-Japanese sentiment who falls in love with a Japanese man. A key turning point in the film has the young Chinese woman being slapped by the Japanese man, but instead of hatred, she reacts with gratitude. The film was met with great aversion among the Chinese audience as they believed that the Chinese female character was a sketch of debasement and inferiority. 23,000 Chinese people paid to see the film in 1943.^[6] But after the war, one of her classic songs, "Soochow Serenade" (蘇州夜曲), was banned in China. A few years later when confronted by angry Chinese reporters in Shanghai, Li apologized and cited as pretext her inexperienced youth at the time of filmmaking, choosing not to reveal her Japanese identity. Though her Japanese nationality was never divulged in the Chinese media until after the Sino-Japanese War, it was brought to light by the Japanese press when she performed in Japan under her assumed Chinese name and as the Japan-Manchuria Goodwill Ambassadress. Oddly enough, when she visited Japan during this period, she was criticized for being too Chinese in dress and in language.^[7]

	"The Evening Primrose/Tuberose" (夜來香) Menu 0:00 A 1940s shidaiqu style mandopop song by Li Hsiang-lan
Problems playing this file? See media help.

When she landed in Japan in 1941 for a publicity tour, dressed in a cheongsam and while speaking Japanese with a Mandarin accent, the customs officer asked her upon seeing she had a Japanese passport and a Japanese name: "Don't you know that we Japanese are the superior people? Aren't you ashamed to be wearing third-rate Chink clothes and speaking their language as you do?"^[8]

In 1943, Li appeared in the film Eternity. The film was shot in Shanghai commemorating the centennial of the Opium War. The film, anti-British in nature, was a collaboration between Chinese and Japanese film companies, was a hit and Li became a national sensation. Her film theme songs with jazz and pop-like arrangements such as her "Candy-Peddling Song" (賣糖歌) and "Quitting (Opium) Song" (戒菸歌) elevated her status to among the top singers in all Chinese-speaking regions in Asia overnight. Many songs recorded by Li during her Shanghai period became classics in Chinese popular music history. Other noteworthy hits include "Evening Primrose / Fragrance of the Night" (夜來香), "Ocean Bird" (海燕), "If Only" (恨不相逢未嫁時), and "Second Dream" (第二夢).^[9] By the 1940s, she had become one of the Seven Great Singing Stars.^{[10][unreliable source?]}

United States, Hong Kong and Japan[]

Yoshiko Yamaguchi with comedian in 1948

Yoshiko Yamaguchi in the 1950s

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At the end of World War II, Li was arrested in Shanghai by the Kuomintang and sentenced to death by firing squad for treason and collaboration with the Japanese. As tensions subsequently arose between the Kuomintang and the Communists, she was scheduled to be executed at a Shanghai horse track on December 8, 1945. However, before she could be executed, her parents (at the time both under arrest in Beijing) managed to produce a copy of her birth certificate that proved she was not a Chinese national after all, and have her childhood Russian friend smuggle it into Shanghai inside the head of a geisha doll, and Li was cleared of all charges (and possibly from the death penalty).

In spite of the acquittal, the Chinese judges still warned Li to leave China immediately or she would risk being lynched, and so in 1946 she resettled in Japan and launched a new acting career there under the name Yoshiko Yamaguchi, working with directors such as Akira Kurosawa. Several of her postwar films cast her in parts that dealt either directly or indirectly with her wartime persona as a bilingual and bicultural performer. For example in 1949, Shin-Toho studios produced Repatriation (歸國「ダモイ」), an omnibus film which told four stories about the struggles of Japanese trying to return to Japan from the Soviet Union after having been taken prisoner following the defeat. The following year, Yamaguchi starred with actor Ryō Ikebe in Escape at Dawn (曉の脫走) produced by Toho and based on the novel Shunpuden (春婦傳). In the book, her character was a prostitute in a military brothel, but for this film her character was rewritten as a frontline entertainer who falls into a tragic affair with a deserter (Ikebe). In 1952, Yamaguchi appeared in Woman of Shanghai (上海の女) in which she reprised her pre-war persona as a Japanese woman passing as Chinese, who becomes caught between the two cultures.^[11]

In the 1950s, she established her acting career as Shirley Yamaguchi in Hollywood and on Broadway (in the short-lived musical "Shangri-La") in the US. She married Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 1951.^[12] Yamaguchi was Japanese, but as someone who had grown up in China, she felt torn between two identities and later wrote she felt attracted to Noguchi as someone else who was torn between two identities.^[13] They divorced in 1956. She revived the Li Hsiang-lan name and appeared in several Chinese language films made in Hong Kong. Some of her 1950s Chinese films were destroyed in a studio fire and have not been seen since their initial releases. Her Mandarin hit songs from this period include "Three Years" (三年), "Plum Blossom" (梅花), "Childhood Times" (小時候), "Only You" (只有你), and "Heart Song" (心曲 – a cover of "Eternally").

TV presenter and politician[]

She returned to Japan and after retiring from the world of film in 1958, she appeared as a hostess and anchorwoman on TV talk shows. As a result of her marriage to the Japanese diplomat , she lived for a while in Burma (modern Myanmar). They remained married until his death in 2001.

In 1969, she became the host of The Three O'Clock You (Sanji no anata) TV show on Fuji Television, reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the Vietnam War.^[14] In the 1970s, Yamaguchi became very active in pro-Palestinian causes in Japan and personally favored the Palestine Liberation Organization.^[15] In 1974, she was elected to the House of Councilors (the upper House of the Japanese parliament) as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, where she served for 18 years (three terms). She co-authored the book Ri Kōran, Watashi no Hansei (Half My Life as Ri Kōran). She served as a Vice-President of the Asian Women's Fund. As part of the 1993 fall honors list, she was decorated with the Gold and Silver Star of the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class.

Yamaguchi was considered by many Chinese in the post-World War II period to be a Japanese spy and thus a traitor to the Chinese people.^[16] This misconception was caused in part by Yamaguchi passing herself off as Chinese throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Her Japanese identity not being officially revealed until her postwar prosecution nearly led to her execution as a Chinese traitor.^[17] She had always expressed her guilt for taking part in Japanese propaganda films in the early days of her acting career. In 1949, the People's Republic of China was established by the Communist Party, and three years later Yamaguchi's former repertoire from the Shanghai era in the 1930s and 1940s (along with all other popular music) was also denounced as Yellow music (黃色音樂), a form of pornography. Because of this, she did not visit China for more than 50 years after the war, since she felt that the Chinese had not forgiven her.^[18] Despite her controversial past, she influenced future singers such as Teresa Teng, Fei Yu-Ching, and Winnie Wei (韋秀嫻), who covered her evergreen hits. Jacky Cheung recorded a cover of Kōji Tamaki's "行かないで" ("Ikanaide") and renamed it "Lei Hoeng Laan." (Both the original version and subsequent remake does not have any references Li Hsiang-lan. The Chinese title instead refers to the unknowable quality and identity of the singer's lover.) In January 1991, a musical about her life was released in Tokyo, which generated controversy because its negative portrayal of Manchukuo upset many Japanese conservatives.

Yamaguchi was one of the first prominent Japanese citizens to acknowledge the history of Japanese brutality during the wartime occupation. She later campaigned for greater public awareness of that history and advocated paying reparations to so-called comfort women, Korean women who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military during the war.^[19]

A recording of a 1950 concert performance in Sacramento, California, was uncovered by a professor from the University of Chicago in 2012. The concert included six songs and was performed before an audience of Japanese Americans, many of whom had likely been interned during World War II. Speaking in 2012 about the concert, Yamaguchi said: "I sang with hope that I could offer consolation to the Japanese-Americans, as I heard that they had gone through hardships during the war."^[20] She died at the age of 94 in Tokyo on September 7, 2014, exactly ten years after one of her fellow Seven Great Singing Stars Gong Qiuxia.^[21]

Names[]

She was credited as Shirley Yamaguchi in the Hollywood movies Japanese War Bride (1952), House of Bamboo (1955) and Navy Wife (1956). She was once nicknamed The Judy Garland of Japan.^[22]

Other names used as movie actress:

• Li Hsiang-lan
• Li Hsiang Lan
• Ri Kōran
• Li Xiang Lan
• Hsiang-lan Li
• Xianglan Li
• Li Xianglan
• Yoshiko Yamaguchi

Selected filmography[]

In the media[]

Movies about her[]

• Fuji Television made a TV movie, Sayonara Ri Kōran, starring Yasuko Sawaguchi in 1989, as a special project to mark the company's 30th anniversary.
• A two-part TV movie, Ri Kōran, starring Aya Ueto was made in 2006. It was broadcast in Japan by TV Tokyo on February 11 and 12, 2007.
• Japanese film-maker Hirokazu Koreeda is planning a feature film based on her story.

Other media[]

• The novel The China Lover (2008) by Ian Buruma is a fictionalized account of her life.^[23]
• A Japanese musical based on her life was produced by the Shiki Theater Company.^[when?]
• The character Li Kohran from the SEGA multimedia Sakura Wars game franchise is named for her stage name.

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Yamaguchi, Yoshiko (1987). Ri Kōran: My Half-Life. Tokyo: Shinchosha. ISBN 9784103667018.
• Yamaguchi, Yoshiko (2015). Fragrant Orchid: the Story of my Early Life. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3984-0.
• Baskett, Michael (2008). The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3223-0.
• Hotta, Eri (2008). Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931-1945. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230609921.

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Shirley Yamaguchi.

• Shirley Yamaguchi at IMDb
• Yamaguchi Yoshiko at the Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese)
• 【李香蘭MV】 別走（行かないで）玉置浩二 on YouTube – Kōji Tamaki's "行かないで" ("Ikanaide"), the theme song of Japanese 1989's TV drama "さよなら李香蘭" ("Goodbye Ri Kōran")