Yoshiko Yamaguchi, 94, Actress in Propaganda Films
By PAUL VITELLO

Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a singer and actress who starred in Japanese propaganda films during Japan’s brutal military occupation of China in the 1930s and ’40s and who, after narrowly escaping execution by the Chinese after the war, helped normalize relations between the nations, died on Sept. 7 in Tokyo. She was 94.

Her death was announced by a family spokesman, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Ms. Yamaguchi’s life was marked by a series of self-reinventions, most of them forced on her by the same historic events that changed the face of Asia in the 20th century. In recent years, her story became a touchstone for film histories, television dramas, a novel and an opera — all in some way exploring national identity in Asia.

Beginning in 1938, when she was 18, she was a movie star known in China as Li Xianglan, the Chinese pseudonym she assumed to hide her Japanese identity in films promoting Japanese occupation. After the war, she lived as an exile from China, the country of her birth; acted in 1950s Hollywood B-movies under the name Shirley Yamaguchi; and became a cosmopolitan voice for Chinese-Japanese détente in the Japanese Parliament.

In the United States Ms. Yamaguchi had starring roles in King Vidor’s “Japanese War Bride,” a 1952 film co-starring Don Taylor; “House of Bamboo,” a 1955 film noir directed by Samuel Fuller and co-starring Robert Stack; and a short-lived 1956 Broadway musical, “Shangri-La,” based on the James Hilton novel “Lost Horizon.”

She played her major roles, on and off the screen, in Asia.

Born to Japanese parents in Manchuria, the northeast region of China that was invaded by the Japanese in 1931 and held at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilian lives over the next 14 years, Ms. Yamaguchi was an 18-year-old Mandarin speaker when the Manchurian Film Association cast her in the first of a series of Chinese-language propaganda films.

At the time, she wrote in “My Life as Li Xianglan,” her 2004 autobiography, she did not understand the not-too-subtle message in the melodramatic romances she made, like “Honeymoon Express” (1938), “China Nights” (1940) and “Song of the White Orchid” (1942).

In each film Ms. Yamaguchi played essentially the same role: a downtrodden but beautiful Chinese woman who initially spurns help from a handsome Japanese sailor or soldier, then falls in love with him. (In “China Nights,” after she is slapped and hurled into a wall by one exasperated Japanese savior, she pleads: “Forgive me! It didn’t hurt at all to be hit by you. I was happy, happy! I’ll be better, just watch.”)

The Japanese owners of the film studio knew that Ms. Yamaguchi was Japanese, and a Japanese citizen, but presented her as Chinese to suit the underlying allegory of the films: An oppressed China, resisting the occupation at first, soon embraces Japan as its rescuer.

“I thought my films were simple romances,” Ms. Yamaguchi told The Boston Globe in 1991. “I thought I was working for the good of the Manchurian people.”

After Japan’s defeat, the Chinese authorities arrested her for treason amid calls for her execution. As Nationalist and Communist forces fought in China’s civil war, she spent nine months in prison before she could produce a copy of her birth certificate, proving she was not Chinese but Japanese.

Her Japanese citizenship legally absolved her of treason. But in ordering her deported to Japan, a Chinese judge condemned her wartime role as “a Chinese impostor who used her outstanding beauty to make films that humiliated China and compromised Chinese dignity.”

Ms. Yamaguchi, who settled in Japan in 1946, openly apologized for what she said had been her unwitting role as a propaganda tool during the war. And she was one of the first prominent Japanese citizens to acknowledge the history of Japanese brutality during the occupation, an episode for which many Japanese nationalists still refuse to apologize.

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. (Japanese leaders later apologized to the women.)

As “Ri Koran,” a Japanization of Li Xianglan, Ms. Yamaguchi began re-establishing her film career in Hong Kong and Japan in the late 1940s. She appeared in a dozen Japanese films, including Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film “Scandal,” in addition to her work in Hollywood, before retiring from acting in 1957. She married Hiroshi Otaka, a Japanese diplomat, the same year. He died in 2001. A previous marriage, to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, ended in divorce. Information about her survivors was not available.

Ms. Yamaguchi became a talk-show host on Japanese television in the 1960s under her married name, Otaka Yoshiko. She was elected to the upper house of the Japanese Parliament in 1974, and served until 1992. As chairwoman of that body’s foreign affairs committee in the 1980s, she was among the legislature’s most effective proponents of improving relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Ms. Yamaguchi was born on Feb. 12, 1920, in Fushun, a coal mining region of Manchuria, where her father, Fumio, was a Beijing-educated Japanese linguist and teacher of Mandarin. She began singing on the radio at 13 as Li Xianglan (Fragrant Orchid), the stage name that would later became the masquerade that haunted her life.

Ms. Yamaguchi’s shape-shifting persona and instinct for survival became the topic of film histories and inspired two Japanese television dramas, a 2008 novel by Ian Buruma (“The China Lover”) and an opera, “Ri Koran,” about Ms. Yamaguchi’s protean life during the occupation of Manchuria.

The opera, produced by a Japanese theater company with her cooperation, became a political phenomenon in Japan when it was first staged in 1991, mainly for its depiction of Japan’s wartime aggressions. Many Japanese raised in the 1950s and after knew little about them. A Chinese production, titled “Li Xianglan,” had a successful run in Beijing in 1992.

Ms. Yamaguchi told interviewers that as a young woman she considered China her “home country” and Japan her “ancestral country.” She had always loved them both, she told The Globe in 1991, and never fully recovered from the war between them.

“The war, in my mind, is never over,” she said.

唱紅「夜來香」 李香蘭人生謝幕

日本侵華戰爭時期以「李香蘭」之名唱紅「夜來香」等名曲的日本前參議員山口淑子，9月7日上午10時42分在因心臟衰竭，於東京千代田區的家中去世，享壽94歲。

她的家人告訴法新社說：「近年來，因為年邁，她多數時候待在家中。喜歡觀賞DVD，包括大陸和美國的電影和紀錄片。」

李香蘭二戰前是風靡一時的大明星，二戰後又以女演員、歌手身分活躍於國際舞台。她的「夜來香」、「恨不相逢未嫁時」、「蘇州夜曲」都是眾人耳熟能詳歌曲，當年與周璇、白光、張露、吳鶯音齊名，並稱上海灘「五大歌后」。

李香蘭1920年出生於日本扶持的偽「滿洲國」撫順，1933年被父親的義兄弟、瀋陽銀行經理李際春收為義女，才有中文名字李香蘭。在她公開身世前，大家都不知道她的父母是日本人。

1938年，她掩蓋日本人身分，以李香蘭之名首次演出電影。成名電影包括「白蘭之歌」、「支那之歌」，都是親日宣傳電影。二戰後，人在上海的李香蘭因漢奸罪被捕，險些遭到處決，後來證明她是日本人，不適用漢奸罪，1946年被逐回日本。

回日後，李香蘭以山口淑子本名，或是雪莉‧山口繼續從事演藝工作，與池部良合演的「拂曉的逃脫」，以及由黑澤明執導「醜聞」，都獲得高評價，其後演藝事業擴展到國際舞台。

李香蘭1958年與外交官大鷹弘結婚，婚後改姓大鷹，並退出演藝界。1969年，已近50歲的大鷹淑子圓了記者夢，成為富士電視台節目主持人。

1974至1992年，山口淑子轉戰政壇，擔任自民黨參議員18年，還曾出任環境政務次官等職，熱心於關注中東和平與慰安婦問題。2005年，她曾發表長文，勸告當時的自民黨籍首相小泉純一郎，不要參拜供奉十四名日本二戰甲級戰犯的靖國神社，因為這會「深深傷害中國人的心」。

李香蘭小檔案
本名：山口淑子
其他名字：大鷹淑子、雪莉‧山口
出生：1920年2月12日，滿洲國撫順
去世：2014年9月7日，日本東京
別名：金魚美人、雙面伊人
職業：歌手、演員、記者、政治家
配偶：野口勇（1951－1956）、大鷹弘（1958－2001）

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/movies/yoshiko-yamaguchi-94-actress-in-propaganda-films-dies.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/obits/20140923/c23yamaguchi-obit/zh-hant/

2014-09-15．聯合報．C1．影視．消費．編譯王麗娟