Yoshiko Yamaguchi


Yoshiko Yamaguchi was a Japanese actress and singer, born in China, who made a career 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 Xianglan, 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.
She was elected as a member of the Japanese parliament in the 1970s and served for 18 years. After retiring from politics, she served as vice president of the Asian Women's Fund.

Early life

She was born on 12 February 1920 to Japanese parents, Ai Yamaguchi and Fumio Yamaguchi, who were then settlers in Fushun, Manchuria, Republic of China. She was born 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 and Pan Yugui. By Chinese custom for those who became sworn brothers, they also became Yoshiko's "godfathers" and gave her two Chinese names, Li Xianglan and Pan Shuhua.. 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. She later received schooling in Beijing, polishing her Mandarin, accommodated by the Pan family. She was a coloratura soprano.

Career in China

Yoshiko made her debut as an actress and singer in the 1938 film Honeymoon Express, 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. 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.
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. Though in her subsequent films she was almost exclusively billed as Li Xianglan, she appeared in a few as "Yamaguchi Yoshiko."
Many of her films bore some degree of promotion of the Japanese national policy and can be termed "National Policy Films". While promoting Manchurian interests in Tokyo, Yoshiko 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, Yamaguchi was already involved with the architect Isamu Noguchi.
The 1940 film China Nights, also known as Shanghai Nights, 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 Xianglan 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. But after the war, one of her classic songs, "Suzhou Serenade", was banned in China and continues to be. A few years later when confronted by angry Chinese reporters in Shanghai, Yoshiko 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.
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?"
In 1943, Yoshiko appeared in the film Eternity. The film was shot in Shanghai commemorating the centennial of the Opium War. A few top Chinese stars in Shanghai also appeared in the film and consequently endured the repercussions of controversy. Though the film, anti-British in nature, was a collaboration between Chinese and Japanese film companies, its anti-colonization undertone might also be interpreted as a satire of the Japanese expansion in east Asia. Despite all this, the film was a hit and Yoshiko became a national sensation. Her film theme songs with jazz/pop-like arrangements such as "Candy-Peddling Song" and "Quitting Song" elevated her status to among the top singers in all Chinese-speaking regions in Asia overnight. Many songs recorded by Yoshiko during her Shanghai period became classics in Chinese popular music history. Other noteworthy hits include "Evening Primrose / Fragrance of the Night", "Ocean Bird", "If Only", and "Second Dream". By the 1940s, she had become one of the Seven great singing stars.

United States, Hong Kong and Japan

At the end of World War II she was arrested by the Chinese government for treason and collaboration with the Japanese. After her childhood Russian friend helped locate Yamaguchi's Japanese birth certificate, she was cleared of all charges and possibly the death penalty, since she was not a Chinese national after all. Before long 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 post-war 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, 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 produced by Toho and based on the novel Shunpuden. 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. In 1952, Yamaguchi appeared in Woman of Shanghai in which she reprised her pre-war persona as a Japanese woman passing for Chinese, who becomes caught between the two cultures.
In the 1950s, she established her acting career as Shirley Yamaguchi in Hollywood and on Broadway in the US. She married Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 1951. 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. 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", "Plum Blossom", "Childhood Times", "Only You", and "Heart Song".

TV presenter and politician: Yoshiko Otaka (1958–2014)

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 Hiroshi Ōtaka, she lived for a while in Burma. They remained married until his death in 2001.
In 1969, she became the host of The Three O'Clock You TV show on Fuji Television, reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as well as the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, Yamaguchi became very active in pro-Palestinian causes in Japan and personally favoring the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1974, she was elected to the House of Councillors as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, where she served for 18 years. She co-authored the book Ri Kōran, Watashi no Hansei. 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. 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 post-war persecution nearly led to her execution as a Chinese traitor. She had always expressed her guilt for taking part in Japanese propaganda films in the early days of her acting career. Because of this, she did not visit China for about 20 years after the war, since she felt that the Chinese had not forgiven her. During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing particularly refused to acknowledge that Yamaguchi had been a big star in the Shanghai era in the 1930s and 1940s, and thus Yamaguchi's material was also denounced as capitalist and against Maoism. Despite her controversial past, Li Xianglan influenced future singers who covered her evergreen hits. Jacky Cheung recorded a cover of Kōji Tamaki's "行かないで" and renamed it "Lei Hoeng Laan." 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.
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." 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.

Names

She was credited as Shirley Yamaguchi in the Hollywood movies Japanese War Bride, House of Bamboo and Navy Wife. She was once nicknamed The Judy Garland of Japan.
Other names used as movie actress:

In the media

Movies about her