Yoshiko Yamaguchi was a Chinese-born Japanese actress and singer who made a career in China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.
Background
Yoshiko Yamaguchi was born in 12 February 1920 to Japanese parents, Ai Yamaguchi and Fumio Yamaguchi, who were then settlers in Fushun, Manchuria, Republic of China. Fumio Yamaguchi was an employee of the South Manchuria Railway. She was born in a coal mine's residential area in Dengta, Liaoyang.
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 (Li Hsiang-lan) and Pan Shuhua (潘淑華).
Education
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
Yoshiko made her debut as an actress and singer in the 1938 film Honeymoon Express. Many of her films bore some degree of promotion of the Japanese national policy and can be termed "National Policy Films" .
The 1940 film China Nights, also known as Shanghai Nights, by Manchuria Film. 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.
In 1943, Yoshiko appeared in the film Eternity. The film was shot in Shanghai commemorating the centennial of the Opium War. By the 1940s, she had become one of the Seven great singing stars.
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. 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.
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. She then 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 (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 dispute as well as the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, Yamaguchi became very active in pro-Palestinian causes in Japan. In 1974, she was elected to the House of Councillors (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 autumn honours list, she was decorated with the Gold and Silver Star of the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class.
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.
She died at the age of 94 in Tokyo on September 7, 2014.