Chapter 5 The Birth of Li Xianglan

It happened as far back as fifty years ago, but I still remember it

very well! At first, Major Yamaga and you spoke in Chinese, and

then midway through the conversation, you two switched to

Japanese. A native Manchurian girl who could sing, speak

Mandarin, and understand Japanese—those were precisely the

qualities we were looking for in a Man’ei star. That’s why I

became so eager to persuade you to take the job. But as I listened

carefully to what the two of you were saying, I realized that

you’re in fact Japanese, that you were already well-known as a

Chinese singer by the stage name Li Xianglan. When I called up

people like Negishi-san [Director Negishi Kan’ichi] and

Makino-san [Production Manager Makino Mitsuo] at the Man’ei

headquarters, they told me that this was even better than they

had dreamed and urged me to do my best to recruit you.

It was June 1985 when I visited Yamanashi at his home in Tokyo’s Ogikubo area for the first time in a long while. He showed me a Man’ei album as we reminisced about the past. He remembered very well the circumstances

at the time he scouted me. An important figure in the Japanese film industry, Yamanashi first worked for PCL (the predecessor to Tōhō) and then for Tōhō before

going to Man’ei. After the war ended, he served as Executive Director of New Tōhō

and President of Tōei CM.1

During that 1985 visit, he recalled more details about the time he recruited me.

“There was no one else capable of convincing Li Xianglan except Major Yamaga from the Press Division of the Northern China Expedition Force. Not

only was he familiar with Chinese films, he was also a close acquaintance with

Li Xianglan’s father. That piece of wisdom was imparted to me by Major Shibano

from the Press Division of Xinjing’s Kwantung Army. I felt so relieved when

you accepted our offer. Although I told you at the time that all you needed to

65

66

Chapter 5

do was to dub a few songs, in fact we had all along wanted you to appear in

the entire fi lm. And so I worked hard colluding with Major Yamaga not to

tell you the whole truth.”

I suppose that was why all the important figures of Man’ei had bothered to come

to Xinjing Station together to greet an amateur such as myself.

Let me tell you, we were all feeling pretty fidgety at Xinjing Station as we waited

for your arrival. We stood where the soft-seated cars had come to a stop at the

platform, but no one resembling Li Xianglan got off from the train. As we were

wondering what had happened, we saw a small girl standing all alone at the

end of the platform and that was you, with bobbed hair and wearing a plain,

blue cotton Chinese dress. You were waving goodbye to Chinese passengers

leaning forward from the windows of their hard-seated car. We were all quite

moved just by the fact that you didn’t ride in a special car with soft seats as

other Japanese did, and that you were talking affably with such ease with the

Chinese people. ‘That’s our girl!’ we thought. Man’ei’s Li Xianglan beloved by

the ordinary people of China, the birth of a star befitting the goals of ‘JapaneseManchurian Friendship’ and ‘Harmony among the Five Races!’

They all seemed to be quite impressed that I mingled with other Chinese passengers on my train journey, but for me that was the only natural thing to do. I came

to Xinjing and looked forward to quickly finishing my singing duties and returning to my own family in Fengtian. That was all.

The next morning, a car came to pick me up and take me immediately to a

squalid place that appeared to be a film studio. As soon as I arrived, I was asked

to sit in front of a big mirror before the makeup artist—that was what I thought

he was—who proceeded to plaster a sticky, yellow cream-like substance on my face.

I supposed it must have been some kind of greasepaint. Never before in my life

had I put on any makeup. I was then given a thick coat of lipstick and my eyebrows were painted to accentuate their shape. When finished, my eyes, already

resembling those of a goldfish, looked even bigger, and from the mirror I could

see that my heavily made-up face had turned into something like an actor’s from

a Beijing opera.

After a short while, I was asked to stand in front of a big camera. Ah, I thought,

finally they were going to ask me to sing. Just as I was wondering about the kind

of songs they wanted me to do, I was told to move my face in a certain way. “Look

toward here! No, no, this way, this way! That’s it. Now turn to the side, to the left.

A little more. No, that’s too much. Now, that’s it. Hold it right there. Okay, now

The Birth of Li Xianglan

67

turn in the opposite direction. Good. Now, see if you can turn your body in the

same direction. Lift your jaw as if you are giving a sidelong glance.”

At the time, I knew nothing about the art of dubbing songs and was beginning to convince myself that identifying with the main character and singing in

full synchrony with the atmosphere of particular scenes were just part of what

I was supposed to do. While I did what I was told, as time went by, I began to feel

I was breaking down. I couldn’t stand the humiliation of having to adopt various

poses by following each and every instruction.

That was not all. After the first part of my work was done, I was told to smile.

“Just give me a grin, you know, like you are really happy and feeling cheerful. Next,

give me a shy smile. Now, don’t show your teeth, and don’t close your eyes. Okay.

This time give me an enchanting smile; rather, smile like a seductress, be very sexy.”

How could I allow myself to fake a smile in front of all those people? The expression on my face stiffened, and I was just about to sob. Thereupon, I was promptly

told, “You are doing great! Now, go ahead and sob, and then show me how you

gradually turn into a tearful face!”

My tearful face was the only thing authentic about my performance. The director firing the orders couldn’t be bothered with any of my feelings; he was satisfied so long as his instructions were being acted upon. After having thoroughly

embarrassed me, he commented, “Your face looks pretty messed up, but hey, what

the heck! And you can sing. Let’s go with her. Thanks for the hard work.”

I realized too late that I had been hoodwinked; the day in fact was my screen

test. I had thought all along that all I would be asked to do was to dub some songs

as a stand-in, only to realize that from the outset I had been invited to Xinjing as

a film actress.

Two days later, I found myself on a Beijing-bound train with a large film crew.

As soon as the train began to move, the staff began filming inside the sleeper car.

The script called for a newlywed wife in pajamas (me!) snuggling against the shoulder of her husband, also wearing pajamas and played by a new actor named Du

Hanxing, as she breathed a sweet “Darling!” into his ears, to which he replied, “Yes,

my dear?”2

Now that was not our mutual agreement! I strongly protested to Makino, the

producer. “I accepted the job only as a singer. I cannot possibly perform such an

embarrassing scene.”

“It’s okay! It’s okay! Just leave everything to me! You’re playing the lead. Once

you’re in the thick of it, it will turn out to be fun. Just follow the director’s instructions, and it’ll be all right. Now, be a good girl and just leave everything to me!”

From then on, much misery would befall me as a result of Makino’s line, “Be

a good girl and just leave everything to me.” I got easily sucked into the paternal

68

Chapter 5

ambience of his open, gallant laughter and his fast-jabbering Kansai speech, and

before I knew it, I was already wheedled into whatever he wanted me to do.

Makino Mitsuo was the second son of Makino Shōzō, the renowned producer

and director celebrated for his work during the early years of Japanese film. After

becoming Assistant Manager of Nikkatsu Productions, he entered Man’ei in the

footsteps of his esteemed superior, Negishi Kan’ichi, who had switched from his

former position as Director of Tamagawa Film Studio to serve on Man’ei’s board of

directors. One of the most conscientious producers in the Japanese fi lm industry

of the time, Negishi was responsible for giving the world such distinguished

films as Uchida Tomu’s Theater of Life (Jinsei gekijō) and The Naked Town (Hadaka no machi); Tasaka Tomotaka’s The Road to Truth (Shinjitsu ichiro) and Stone

by the Wayside (Robō no ishi); and Kumagai Hisatora’s Takuboku, The Poet of Passion (Jōnetsu no shijin Takuboku) and Common People (Sōbō).

Cajoled by Makino’s “Be a good girl and just leave everything to me,” I first

appeared as actress Li Xianglan in Honeymoon Express (Miyue kuaiche, or Mitsugetsu kaisha in Japanese), a film made for popular entertainment. I played the newlywed wife, Shuqin, and the director was Ueno Shinji, originally from Avant-Garde

Cinema (Shinkō Kinema) and the man who had mercilessly ordered me to laugh

and cry at whim during my screen test. The script was by Shigematsu Shū and the

cameraman was Ikeda Sentarō. This adaptation by Makino of Ōtani Toshio’s 1935

The Spied-on Bride (Nozokareta hanayome), produced at Nikkatsu’s Tamagawa Studio, was made with the hope of riding the latter’s coattails as a big hit in Japan.

Since Makino himself was married to Hoshi Reiko, the star of The Spied-on Bride,

the auspiciousness of the occasion got him all the more fired up for his pronouncements of “Just leave everything to me.” Yet the simple plot was based on a direct

Chinese translation of the original Japanese scenario, and the fi lm ended up being a silly comedy about the commotion on a sleeper train in which the newlyweds

are travelling on its Xinjing-Beijing run.

“When I called you ‘My dear,’ you answered, ‘Yes, my dear?’ The echoes from

the hills ring with joy! ‘My dear!’ ‘Yes, my dear?’ The sky is blue, and we are young!”

And so goes “We Are Young” (Futari wa wakai), a love song for newlyweds that

has now become a nostalgic number, with lyrics by Tamagawa Eiji (a pseudonym

for Satō Hachirō) and music by Koga Masao. I remember singing the rather odd

version in Chinese translation inside the train.

At last, the fi lming was completed as the train pulled into Beijing. Relieved,

I couldn’t wait to run back to the Pan residence. But that was not to be the end.

The next day, a member of the Man’ei staff appeared at the house to tell me that

while the location shots were done, the next fi lming episode would take place

at the Xinjing studio. With that, I was reluctantly dragged back to where we

came from.

The Birth of Li Xianglan

69

I cannot forget to this day how embarrassing and miserable I felt while making my first fi lm. I was mortified that each time I felt perplexed about what to do,

I was scolded with harsh and angry words. Director Ueno, an unusually shorttempered man, would scream at me, “That’s all you can do? Just get out of my sight!”

With my pride bruised, all I could do was capitulate to his wishes before returning to my hotel to cry alone. I told myself that I would be liberated as soon as the

fi lming was finished, and with that I clenched my teeth to endure the ordeal. It

was during the making of this fi lm, however, that, with Yamaga as an intermediary, Man’ei convinced my parents in Fengtian to agree to the proposal of an exclusive contract between me and the company, saying that doing so would be “for

the sake of our nation.” Without my knowledge, my fi lming schedule for the rest

of the year had also been crammed into place. Thereupon, plans for the second

and third fi lms by Li Xianglan were being hammered out against the rallying

cry of “Be a good girl and leave everything to me!” and the slogan of “JapaneseManchurian Friendship.”

My second film with Man’ei was its first omnibus production called The Spring

Dream of Great Fortune (Fugui chunmeng, or Fūki shunmu in Japanese), a Frank

Capra–style satire about the fate of several groups of people who received an extraordinary sum of money. In the last scene, the gods of poverty and fortune look

at the human world from above and ponder what it would take to make man happy.

My third fi lm also had a rather peculiar slant. Ōtani Toshio was the director and

Takayanagi Haruo the scriptwriter for the first ghost film Man’ei made called Retribution of the Vengeful Spirit (Yuanhun fuchou, or Enkon fukkyū in Japanese), a

creepy fi lm with the didactic goal of exhorting virtuous deeds while chastising

evil behavior. And those were Man’ei’s first musical, first omnibus, and first supernatural fi lms, not a surprising outcome considering the fact that the productions from the newly-founded Man’ei were all experiments.

In 1938, when I first joined Man’ei, its office was still housed on the second

floor of the Nikke (Japan Wool) Building on Datong Street. Facing a tree-lined

boulevard with a chic tea house, the structure had a fashionable ambience about

it, as it was the most modern building of its day. South along Datong Street, Xinjing’s thoroughfare, were offices of the Great Xinjing Daily News and the Manchukuo Communications Company, as well as West Park, otherwise known as

Kodama Park. Past the Nikke Building and Kangde Hall was Datong Square, surrounded by such buildings as the Central Bank, Telegraph and Telephone Company, the Xinjing Broadcasting Company, the Capital Police, and the headquarters of the Kyōwa Association. Then, beyond the square, government buildings

spread out around the area surrounding Central Park.

While the Man’ei office itself was quite impressive, the film studio in which we

actually worked was just an exceptionally primitive shed-house. The main studio,

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Chapter 5

which was to be the largest in Asia with an area of fift y thousand tsubo,3 was still

under construction on Hongxi Street in the southern suburbs of Xinjing, and

until its completion, we had to use a temporary one converted from a railroad depot owned by the then-defunct North Manchurian Railroad in Kuan’chengzi outside the city. In that abandoned structure next to a desolate Russian village surrounded by poplar trees, even soundproofing equipment for making talkies proved

ineffective as the studio’s doors could not even close completely. In the winter, despite heating from a coal stove, the temperature would drop to minus twenty degrees Celsius. Under such conditions, we had to warm our bodies before we could

proceed to fi lm each one-cut scene.

At the beginning, virtually all the fi lm staff, including the director and cameraman, were Japanese, while all the actors were Chinese. By way of exchanging

greetings, the Japanese staff used to say ohayō gozaimasu (“Good morning!”) regardless of the time of day before it came to be abbreviated into ossu. Young Chinese actresses, not knowing what was going on, would address the producers and

directors and others as “ossu,” an extraordinary spectacle that even I, who was

supposedly Chinese, couldn’t help laughing at.

With the exception of those cast members on active filming duty, every morning we had to go to a study center like elementary school pupils to listen to lectures on acting and instructions on practical skills. The center head was Kondō

Iyokichi, a former Shingeki and renowned beau-part actor who first appeared in

Japan’s earliest art fi lm, The Glory of Life (Sei no kagayaki, 1919, directed by Kaeriyama Norimasa).4 Almost all the other Japanese staff, including directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, and composers, served as lecturers, though they spoke no

Chinese, and the Chinese actors who came as students had no knowledge of Japanese. Communication between the two groups could be likened to scratching

the itch at the sole of one’s foot without removing one’s boots.5 Their miscomprehensions of one another’s intentions seemed to play out in a real exercise in

comic acting.

“Jinteng Xiansheng” 6 naturally gave his lecture in Japanese while the Chinese actors listened as if they were bored to tears. It wasn’t until the interpreter

gave a Chinese rendition at the right intervals that the content of the lecture was

first conveyed to the audience. As our Japanese lecturer warmed up during the

course of his talk, he would manifest all kinds of emotions on his face and

through his bodily gestures. At times, he would raise his voice in excitement; at

others he would speak soft ly as if he were in a dreamy trance. And yet during all

that time, his Chinese audience could hardly understand what he was saying and

seemed to be watching a pantomime performance.

When the Chinese interpreter offered his renditions, he did so unhurriedly,

translating word for word and standing in a perpetually formal posture with no

The Birth of Li Xianglan

71

bodily or hand movements. Likewise, his audience listened placidy, with no affect. Even if the substance of the lecture could be adequately conveyed to the listeners, the timing between speech and performance was all out of sync, resulting

only in a severely watered-down version of the original classroom atmosphere. The

only person who understood both Japanese and Chinese was me. Tickled by the

different tempos between the talk and the interpretation, as well as the miscommunications between different parties, I was ready to burst out laughing. To suppress my impulse, I had to bite my tongue hard and stare at the ground.

On one occasion, Kondō’s anger finally erupted, and this time he was not giving an acting demonstration. Speaking to the interpreter, he said, “Listen, if I get

angry, you get angry too while you interpret for me!” Having no idea how to translate Kondō’s fury and his fuming gestures, the poor interpreter was completely

befuddled. On another occasion, the actress Zhang Min, my costar in The Honeymoon Express, still remembers an episode about Trachom, a German word meaning “trachoma” and pronounced “torahōmu” in Japanese. After an explanation in

Japanese was given about the main character of a story, a girl blinded by the disease, the interpreter translated it as “the girl ends up disguising herself by taking

the form of a tiger (tora).”

Taking Mandarin lessons was also a mandatory exercise. Because all dialogues

had to be delivered in the Beijing dialect, it was necessary to make speech corrections for those actors with Northeastern Chinese accents. On the Chinese classics and Chinese poetry, the scriptwriter and poet Li Peng gave us engaging lectures. On martial arts, er’hu, and classical dancing, the instructor was Zheng

Xiaojun, who, despite her young age, was already a master in those forms. On many

occasions, directors and musicians alike requested the favor of her instructions.

Teaming up with her, I often went for performance tours within China itself, as

well as in Japan. When it came to Western ballet, Ishii Baku, in Xinjing at the time,

gave us meticulous lessons, himself in tights. His daughter, Kanna, was also a frequent visitor to our studio.7 Additionally, the Yoshimuras, Ishii’s disciples, presented us with duet performances. I accompanied Ishii on the piano as he gave

his lessons.

Just as its name implied, Xinjing was a new capital. While Manchukuo was a

puppet state created solely by Japan and without recognition from the League of

Nations, in time it was somehow able to take on the semblance of a real state. The

pioneering Han Chinese built Fort Changchun on what had been a Mongolian

pastureland before the Qing Dynasty established an administrative agency in the

area to represent the central government. Nonetheless, it was not until 1898, when

the Russians built a railroad station near the vicinity of Kuan’chengzi to the east,

that the area first thrived as a settlement. In the peace treaty in the aftermath of the

Russo-Japanese War, Russia ceded to Japan railroad rights south of Changchun.

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Chapter 5

Thereupon, Japan’s Mantetsu purchased a vast area of grassland south of

Kuan’chengzi. This was followed in 1932, after the establishment of Manchukuo,

by the change of the name “Changchun” to “Xinjing” before Japan began its enterprise of constructing its Manchurian capital.

Seen in this light, the city of Xinjing was a totally artificial structure. Virtually every other big city in Manchuria, such as Harbin, Fengtian, and Dalian, had

been designed and built during the Tsarist period. In contrast to those cities, where

vestiges of their European heritage persisted, Xinjing’s city planning, along with

that of Andong and others, represented a compromised fusion between Japanese

and Manchurian city styles. In building Xinjing, Mantetsu took the city design

from Japan’s old capitals of Nara and Kyoto and added to it a continental flavor.

Radiating in a southerly direction from North Square in the foreground of Xinjing

Station were three major thoroughfares leading to the East and South squares,

namely Datong Street in the middle, along with Nihonbashi-dōri and Shikishimadōri on either side. Between those major boulevards were other city streets running

neatly in a north-south and east-west direction. That was the basic design for the

city of Xinjing. The north-south streets were named numerically as Ichijō, Nijō,

Sanjō, following the Kyoto style, while the east-west ones began with Izumi-chō,

Rogetsu-chō, and so on according to the iroha alphabetical order. There were others

with names like Hinode-chō and Fuji-chō, according to the hifumi arrangement,

while still others such as Akebono-chō and Irifune-chō reflected the conventional

Japanese alphabetical a-i-u-e-o order.

At the time when I first joined Man’ei, Xinjing as a whole had the feel of a

large park, and when one came to the end of a major street, one would be looking

at the suburbs or else the open fields. On the other hand, the center of Xinjing

had just seen the completion of its first five-year capital construction plan, and

all the major government buildings had been constructed in the vicinity of Datong Square (present-day People’s Square). At long last, the place was beginning

to look like a capital city. The old Ministry of State Affairs is currently the site for

the departments, hospital, and research centers associated with Bethune Medical

University, a public institution supported by the Province of Jilin.8 And then there

were the Ministries of Transportation, Legal Affairs, Finance, and National Defense, as well as the main office of the Manchurian Central Bank (currently the

Changchun branch of the People’s Bank of China). Now occupied by the Committee of the Chinese Communist Party for Jilin Province, the old Command

Headquarters of the Kwantung Army was topped by a structure resembling a traditional castle tower, giving it an unmistakable air of haughty arrogance. The new

Imperial Palace, whose construction remained unfinished through the war’s end

and which never became the emperor’s residential quarters during the entire life

span of “the Manchurian Empire,” serves today as an institute of geology. Yet all

The Birth of Li Xianglan

73

these buildings stand now as they did in the past, even though their occupants

and functions have changed. Likewise, in Datong Square’s flower garden surrounded by daphne shrubs, the Kaffir lilies so celebrated locally bloom with the

same dignified elegance as in the past.

In the spring of 1939, the Man’ei office moved from the Nikke Building into

the new Man’ei studio, the largest in Asia, after its completion on Hongxi Street

near South Lake Park (Nanhu-gongyuan) in the southern suburbs. It came with

new equipment and sophisticated facilities, greatly boosting the staff ’s and the actors’ morale. That was the beginning for Man’ei—and for Li Xianglan—to achieve

commercial success.

*

*

*

When I visited China in 1978, I returned to the same Changchun Film Studio

(Changchun Dianying Zhipian’chang) for the first time in forty years. I heard that

even at the time, it was still the largest in Asia in scale. Almost all the physical

space seemed to have stayed the same as before; this included the Number One

and Number Two studios, the sound effects room, the fi lm processing room, the

special effects room, the recording room, the storage rooms for large sets and stage

property, as well as the actors’ learning facility. And what also remained unchanged

were the faces of my dear old friends. Appearing beside a banner with the words

“A Very Warm Welcome!” a few of them couldn’t wait to rush to my side with smiles

on their faces. Those were my friends who had shared their tears and laughter with

me in the old days: the “classic beauty,” Zheng Xiaojun; “the glamor girl,” Bai Mei;

“the perky one,” Xia Peijie; “the eternal youth,” Pu Ke; “the comedy youth,” Wang

Qimin; and then there was me, “the goldfish beauty,” Li Xianglan, all meeting for

the first time in forty years. We were just kids of seventeen or eighteen when we

first made our debut, and at the time we met again, we were all close to sixty.

With Japan’s defeat in August 1945, Xinjing in old Manchuria, which had until then been under the domination of the Japanese Kwantung Army, came to be

occupied by Russian forces. Virtually all the Chinese fi lm staff and actors went

on to participate in the founding of the Northeast Film Company (Dongbei Dianying Gongsi) in accordance with the cultural policy of the Communist Eighth

Route Army, which took over the authority to carry out the city’s administration

in place of the Chinese Nationalist Army. When the Nationalists again established control over the city’s administration, the Chinese actors and staff fled

from Changchun by way of Harbin and Jiamusi and settled in Hegang before

renaming their establishment as Northeast Film Studio (Dongbei Dianying

Zhipian’chang) to continue with their struggle in filmmaking. Accompanying

them to Hegang were such Japanese staff as the celebrated director Uchida Tomu,

Kimura Sotoji (the younger brother of the painter Kimura Sōhachi), and the first

74

Chapter 5

female Japanese film director, Sakane Tazuko. Later, the Chinese actors returned

to Changchun, but with the coming of the Cultural Revolution after the birth of

a new China, those who had worked under Man’ei had to go through the bitter

experience of arrest and imprisonment under the charge of having collaborated

with the national policy of the illegitimate Manchurian Empire.

More than the roles we had performed on screen, our reunion underscored

the dramatic life experiences we had gone through. Together we went for a meal

at Nanhu Restaurant near the studio to reminisce about our past. There we saw

in our aged faces images of our bygone days, and we briefly indulged ourselves in

the good old days of our youth. Xia Peijie recalled that whenever I had free time

on my hands, I would go to the rehearsal room on the third floor to play the piano

and to do voice exercises.

In the course of our conversation, I ventured to ask my old friends a question

that had always been on my mind: Did they know at the time that I was Japanese?

Zheng Xiaojun said that after I acquired an attendant—a reference to Atsumi

Masako—she noticed that the two of us were always speaking in Japanese, which

convinced her that one of my parents had to be Japanese, just as rumor said. Xia

Peijie said that because I could speak Mandarin, she thought I was born and bred

in China with one Japanese parent. I suppose I was thought of as what one would

today call a “half.”

But even so, the treatment Man’ei gave me was a world apart from what was

in store for my other colleagues. I did not live in a dormitory but in a hotel; my

every transportation need was provided by an automobile with a chauffeur, and

my monthly pay was 250 yen, as opposed to the twenty to forty yen Chinese actors received. In those days, the starting salary of a male university graduate in

Japan was sixty yen, and if he should work in a company in Manchuria, he would

receive an extra expatriate stipend for a total of approximately 150 yen.

Since I was the recipient of such extraordinary treatment, it was only natural

that suspicions should arise about whether Li Xianglan was a Japanese woman.

One time, Pu Ke and other male actors thought of a way to confirm such suspicions. They would test me with jokes or customs only a true-bred Chinese would

know to see how I would react. For example, they would say, “Li Xianglan, our

assistant director Mr. Wang is suffering from inflammation of the trachea. What

a shame! I feel sorry for him.” If I understood the joke and guffawed, then I would

have been proven to be Chinese. If, on the other hand, I took their words at face

value and expressed my sympathy for Mr. Wang’s medical condition, that was proof

that I was Japanese: the Chinese term for inflammation of the trachea is qiguan’yan,

a homonym for “a henpecked husband.”9

Ultimately, the Chinese actors seemed to think of me as a Japanese person,

or a mixed-blood with Japanese nationality. That said, we were completely inte-

The Birth of Li Xianglan

75

grated in work and play; we did the same things together, took the same lessons

and the same meals, and never did we have an occasion to feel ill at ease with one

another. My Chinese colleagues were all gracious enough to share with me that

while they thought of Li Xianglan as a special coworker, they always treated

me as if I were Chinese since I was friendly with everyone. At least, it was apparent that no one spread the word outside of our own circle that Li Xianglan

was Japa nese.

I, for my part, did not find it necessary to display my special privileges as a

Japanese. During the time when I lived and went to school as Li Jichun’s daughter, Li Xianglan, and afterwards as Pan Yigui’s daughter, Pan Shuhua, I had essentially put any conscious thoughts about my Japanese nationality out of my mind.

Occasions such as anti-Japanese demonstrations brought me much anguish, but

under more normal circumstances, I forgot completely that I was Japanese. Back

then, Chinese was the language I used to think, to dream, and to talk in my sleep.

Of course, to a certain extent I echoed the sentiments of “Harmony among the

Five Races,” which the Japa nese military put out as its rallying cry, but I had not

been to Japan. I felt neither out of place nor resistant to appearing in Chineselanguage films with other Chinese under my Chinese name. Living on a vast

continent led me naturally to think that we all coexisted as friends, whether any

of us was Chinese, Korean, or Russian.

But acts of discrimination against the Chinese by the Japanese manifested

themselves in various arenas of Manchurian life. At parties or banquets, even

though the Japanese and Chinese would sit around the same table, eat the same

food, and drink the same wines, the Japanese were served polished rice while the

Chinese had to settle for kaoliang grain. What I had before me was the former, to

be sure, but I could not understand the mentality of how one could treat other

human beings differently, people with whom one lived together from morning

to night. At first, I didn’t touch what I had been served, and one time a boy at a

banquet told me that they were merely following instructions from the Man’ei

management. After that time, I made it a rule to refuse polished rice at such

gatherings.

Even though my good friends apparently took me as a Japanese woman, they

showed no reservations in confiding in me on subjects ranging from private love

affairs to family matters. They would invite me to their homes on weekends and

take me to various festivals and ceremonial events. While we could talk about anything, once another Japanese person entered into the conversation, very often the

subject would either be changed midway or be dropped entirely. While I was happy

that I was looked upon as a trusted friend, I was also saddened that other Japanese were not similarly regarded. Such a realization generated in me a mixed and

complex feeling.

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The Chinese actors, both male and female, were without exception wonderful people. We belonged to the same generation and spent the spring of our youth

together. Starting from around 1940, more opportunities for me to appear in jointventure fi lms with Japan began to open up, and for that reason, I began to split

my time evenly between living in China and in Japan. Moreover, just at the time

I entered Man’ei, my family moved from Fengtian to Beijing. While I ended up

spending less and less time in Xinjing, I always tried to see my friends whenever

I returned to the studio on Hongxi Street. The joy of being with them was comparable to what a student studying in a big city would experience when she went

back to her own hometown during a vacation break to be reunited with her old

childhood friends. As a matter of fact, whenever I went to Japan for filming or

public performances, I would describe my trips as “going to” Japan, and when I

traveled from Japan to Xinjing, the expression I used was “returning home.” Years

later, I was again made aware of this tendency of mine after the writer Niwa

Fumio drew my attention to it.

Among my Chinese contemporaries, I recall in par ticu lar Zhu Wenshun, a

handsome young man whose Japanese was so good that he could give a rendition

of Hirosawa Torazō’s naniwa-bushi;10 Wang Fuchun, an actor’s actor who could

also give great performances as a comedian (he later changed his name to Wang

Qimin and became a cameraman); and the chubby comedy actor Liu Enjia, who,

teaming up with the very tall Chang Shuda, was Man’ei’s answer to Laurel and

Hardy.11 I remember Dai Jianqiu as a famous er’hu player with a fabulous sense of

presence. Another good-looking young man, Pu Ke, who often played the role of

my love interest, is now married to Xia Peijie and prominently serves as the director of present-day Changchun Studio. He is still active in his acting career and

is renowned for his expressive eyes. There was also Sui Yinfu, a nice man who appeared any number of times with me as part of a duo.

Among the actresses, besides Xia Peijie, I remember in particular Wang Dan,

reputed to be “the queen of Harbin”; Zhang Min, the costar in my first film, Honeymoon Express, who is still active in Beijing under the stage name Ling Yuan;

and Zheng Xiaojun, an expert in Chinese martial arts and traditional music. There

was also Meng Hong, a lovely, cheerful girl, who accompanied me on my first trip

to Japan and who is now married and lives in Taipei. Ye Ling, the sweet girl with

a double tooth, was good enough to be my double when I went out for a secret

date during my filming in Japan. Bai Mei was called “the glamor girl,” but she was

in fact as refreshingly charming as a white peony. Li Ming, a tall beauty scouted

from Beijing, was to become Yamaga Tōru’s mistress.

When I visited the Changchun Studio, I was able to renew my friendship with

a number of these actors, and in June 1985, members from the same studio, led by

Associate Director Liu, came to Japan for a twenty-day study tour. They had plans

The Birth of Li Xianglan

77

to create a movieland in Changchun, and for that purpose they had come to inspect

Kyoto’s Tōei Uzumaki Movie Village and Urayasu’s Disneyland for themselves.

Among the group were some technical staff members whom I had known long ago

and missed. And then last summer, I had the privilege to attend a screening of

Along the Songari River (Songhua’ jian shang, directed by Jin Shan, 1947), produced

by Changchun Film Studio as part of the National Film Library’s retrospective on

Chinese films.12 As I watched the seasoned performances from such gifted actors as

Zhou Diao, Pu Ke, Zhu Wenshun, Xia Peijie, and others, I again recalled with nostalgia images of my friends from our bygone years at the Xinjing Studio.

*

*

*

Once fi lm production at Man’ei got underway, my life became extremely busy. By

nature, I am the type of person who gets totally engrossed in whatever I am doing.

At the beginning, acting in front of a camera was so embarrassing that I wanted to

cry. But once I got used to it, the exercise became sufficiently interesting that I was

inspired to take an active initiative in studying acting. I don’t know whether one

should call this the result of an eye-opening experience, or whether it was just a

change of heart after I found myself cornered with nowhere else to turn.

A joint-venture with Tōhō and directed by Ōtani Toshio, Travels to the East

(Dong’youji, Tōyūki in Japanese) is about two rather unsophisticated Manchurian

peasants who go on a sightseeing tour in Tokyo with the help of a friend who has

made it in the big city; the aim of the fi lm was to introduce Japan to Manchuria’s

Chinese audience. Man’ei’s participation included the Liu Enjia–Chang Shuda duo,

with me playing a typist. From Tōhō came a gorgeous cast including Hara Setsuko,

Kiritachi Noboru, Takamine Hideko, Sawamura Sadako, Fujiwara Kamatari, and

others. Next, I appeared in Yamauchi Eizō’s Blood of Arms and Heart of Wisdom

(Tiexie huixin; Utsukushiki gisei in Japanese), a fi lm about a police force exposing

the activities of a group of smugglers. To shoot the police cavalry chasing a

horse-riding gang in an open field just like a scene in a Western, an ambitious

decision was finally made to fi lm on location in the city of Anshan. The animals

used in the shooting were race horses loaned from the local Anshan Racecourse. I had already taken riding lessons when I was living with the Pan family, so

the male actors who fell from their horses and suffered many NG takes were surprised at how good a rider I was.

It is no exaggeration to say that prominent Japanese travelers from all walks

of life who came to Manchuria on inspection tours would all stop by Xinjing for

a visit. Just at that time, a group of Japanese literary men visited Xinjing for a few

days and toured our studio. They were members of the first contingent sent by the

Ministry of Colonial Affairs (Takumushō) from the Literary Association for Continental Colonization (Tairiku Kaitaku Bungei Konwakai), a writers’ group formed

78

Chapter 5

to promote Japan’s national policy by sending Japanese pioneers to Manchuria and

by creating an ideal state based on racial harmony. The head of the association

was the playwright Kishida Kunio. Stopping by Xinjing on their way back from

their tour of the pioneering village at Jiamusi were Itō Sei, Tamura Taijirō, Fukuda

Kiyoto, and Kondō Haruo. By coincidence, another group of Japanese led by the

writer Kume Masao was also in Xinjing to gather materials for the story “Song of

the White Orchid” (Byakuran no uta), which was slated to be serialized in the

Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun (present-day Mainichi Shimbun). Man’ei hosted a joint

dinner banquet to welcome those parties at a Chinese restaurant. I attended the

event with Director Negishi and Production Manager Makino.

After the serialization of “Song of the White Orchid” was completed, Tōhō

had plans to turn it into a fi lm.13 With General Manager Yamanashi then visiting Man’ei as a go-between, Tōhō proposed the project as a joint venture with

Man’ei and made an informal decision to have Li Xianglan play the young Chinese heroine.

That was my first time meeting with Japanese literary men. I was ner vous at

first as I listened to their conversation, but in time, the atmosphere became profoundly refreshing in a way that I had never felt. To be sure, I knew something

about the world of music and fi lms, but my knowledge of Japanese literature was

limited to children’s tales and the kind of novels for teenage girls that I had read

in elementary and middle school. I could sense in their cosmopolitan sophistication something alien to me until then. I was so totally mesmerized by their artful

rhetoric, witty exchanges, and unpretentious humor that I thought I had rediscovered the beauty of the Japanese language. I suppose I should clarify and say that

I was actually discovering the beauty of the Japanese language spoken by the

Japa nese actually living in Japan. I felt an instantaneous and swelling sense of

yearning for my own country, one that I had not yet seen, captivated as I was by

an obsessive determination to go to see Japan.

That night, I was quite caught up in the moment in my excitement. I suppose

I must have peppered the guests with all kinds of trivial questions. “If you’re really so interested in Tokyo, why don’t you come for a visit? If you wish, we could

talk to Man’ei about it. You will be most welcome. We’ll take you anywhere you

want to go,” said Tamura Taijirō, who was sitting across the table from me. He

was the youngest among our guests, a literary youth who struck me as being virile, impertinent, rustic, and shy at the same time.14

“Do you mean it?”

“I can assure you that if Li Xianglan comes to Tokyo, I’ll invite her first to

my party.”

Kume Masao, sitting next to me, was wearing a nice smile, nodding in agreement with what I was saying even though I knew little about Japan. I heard that

The Birth of Li Xianglan

79

he was in the process of writing up “The Song of the White Orchid” based on what

Tōhō was planning to do, which involved having Hasegawa Kazuo play the main

character, a Japanese structural engineer, and me play the role of a young Chinese girl and his lover. This heroine, the daughter of a powerful local clan, would

be called Li Xuexiang, a name that differed from mine in only one Chinese character. She would be portrayed as a student taking singing lessons in Fengtian, similar to my own experience during my Fengtian years.

At the time, I couldn’t take in a drop of alcohol, and yet I declared, in a state of

apparent intoxication, that I would study hard from then on so that I would become famous. Turning to Kume Masao, I boldly challenged him, “Sensei, let’s have

a competition between us!” While I had no recollections that I made such a shameless remark, I was utterly embarrassed when Tamura later told me that I did.

Our conversation lasted late into the night, well past midnight, even though

our guests were scheduled to depart early the next morning.

“What about a song for remembrance’s sake?” Kume said. With that, I sang

“When Will You Return?” (He’ri jun zai lai) with all my heart.

“Naturally, I will come back to Manchuria again someday, but the real question

is when will you come? You must come to Japan soon. Promise me. Zaijian is the

word to bid farewell, but it can also mean a promise to meet again,” Tamura said.

“Hai,” I answered as obediently as an elementary school girl, “I’ll see you off

at the train station tomorrow.”

“That’s all right. No need to bother yourself with that. You see, dawn will come

in no time.”

While Tamura was considerate enough to make that remark, I went to the

train station as promised at five o’clock the next morning, braving the snow at fifteen degrees below zero and wearing a shuba overcoat and a muffler covering my

face like Tolstoy’s Katyusha.15

During my subsequent visit to Japan, Tamura kept his promise, took me on

daily trips to many different places, and introduced me to various people. One of

them was Niwa Fumio, Tamura’s mentor and senior colleague at the journal

Waseda Literature (Waseda bungaku).16 At our first meeting, Niwa turned to Furukawa Roppa (a comedian and now deceased), who was sitting next to him and

said simply, “People say that this girl is Japanese, but it’s not true. She is really

Chinese.” For some reason, those words sank deeply within me and remain so

until this day.

Several years ago at Tamura’s wake, Niwa was kind enough to come over and

ask how I was doing. We went on to reminisce about various things, but he had

forgotten about the comment he once made that I was really Chinese. Recalling

my first trip to Japan, he said to me in a composed tone of voice, “The friendship

between you and Tamura was just beautiful.” Indeed, Tamura and I were bound

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Chapter 5

by this “beautiful friendship.” We were both single at the time, and while we cared

for each other, our relationship did not develop into a romance. In part, it was

the consequence of Man’ei’s attempt to pull me away from Japanese writers, as the

company was not too happy about what was happening between Tamura and me.

Another factor was that Tamura was soon drafted to fight on the front lines. In

the April 1941 volume of the journal Literary Arts (Bungei), Niwa wrote a compassionate essay on Tamura’s and my “friendship.” This is what he said:

At that time, a party was held at the Rainbow Grill to celebrate the publication of Tamura Taijirō’s University (Daigaku) and Young Girl (Shōjo). Li Xianglan was also at the party. There, I took it upon myself to ask her to sing “When

Will You Return?” which she did to great applause. She managed to come to

our gathering by seizing an opportunity to sneak out from her performance

duties at the Nichigeki. That night, the celebration after the fi rst party for

Tamura continued at Kagurazaka, and Li Xianglan also came along. Her unusual affection for Tamura was something that came as a surprise to us in private. In time, Tamura continued to meet with Li Xianglan any number of times

before he took her into the side streets of Shinjuku. Li Xianglan became good

friends with us before returning to Manchuria. From time to time, she would

also send me letters. However, since she was spending far too much time with

us while she was in Tokyo, she apparently was warned by Man’ei’s Publicity

or Planning division that she must act with greater prudence befitting her role

as a popu lar actress. And then when she came to Tokyo the second time, she

had changed completely and did not even try to see us. Considering what publicity could do to a fi lm star, I thought that her sudden turnaround was something unavoidable and worthy of our understanding. Tamura Taijirō seemed

to be quite hurt by this. They were so close before, and this time when she was

in Tokyo, she did not even send any personal greetings and treated him as if

he were a total stranger. On the other hand, if she were a craftier woman and

a more scheming actress, she surely could have come up with a performance

not to alienate Tamura’s feelings and ours.

Here Niwa presented a thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of the events at that

time. In any case, my relationship with Tamura Taijirō did not end there but extended all the way into the postwar period.
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Chapter 5: The Birth of Li Xianglan

1. PCL stands for Photo Chemical Laboratories; Tōei CM’s full name is Tōei

Shīemu Kabushikigaisha, which was established in October 1969 with Yamanashi as

its first president.

2. The endearing exchange between the newlyweds (“Anata!”/“Nandai?”) has

been immortalized in the ever-popular Koga Masao song Futari wa wakai mentioned

later in this chapter.

3. A tsubo is 3.954 square yards.

4. For a brief discussion of the fi lm, see Donald Richie, A Hundred Years of

Japanese Film (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005), p. 34.

5. The fitting expression used here is “kakka sōyō,” a Japanese rendering of the

original Chinese saying “Gexue sao’yang.”

6. “Instructor Kondō” in Chinese pronunciation.

7. Ishii Baku (1886–1962) was often regarded as the father of modern Japanese dance. A student of ballet under the Italian choreographer and stage director

Giovanni Vittorio Rosi and an advocate of the “pure dance movement,” he joined the

New Theater founded by the renowned composer Yamada Kōsaku and the dramatist

Osanai Kaoru. After an extended sojourn in Europe and the United States, he founded

the Ishii Baku Dance Research Institute and the Ishii Baku Dance School in Tokyo.

Among his many works, the most renowned was Yomigaeru shinsekai published in

1933.

8. Built in honor of Dr. Henry Norman Bethune (1890–1939), a Canadian

physician who joined the Chinese Communist Party after traveling to Yan’an in 1938

to offer his medical expertise and ser vices to the Chinese Communists in their struggle against the Japanese invaders.

9. Qiguan’yan means something like “having to live under the authoritarian

control of one’s wife.”

10. Also known as rōkyoku, chongare-bushi, or ukare-bushi, naniwa-bushi is a

popular genre of narrative singing by a solo performer with the accompaniment of

shamisen. It originated in the Osaka region during the Edo period before achieving

greater popularity after Meiji. The art form continued to gain public appeal until it

declined in the aftermath of World War II.

11. The Liu-Chang act was described colorfully in Japanese as a dekoboko

combi, something like an “asymmetrical duo.”

12. The classic fi lm from postwar Chinese cinema famously depicts Chinese

resistance against the Japanese during the occupation of Manchuria, with a main

316

Notes to Pages 78–83

cast consisting of Zhang Ruifang, Pu Ke, Zhu Wenshun, and Fang Hua. It was also

the name of a much celebrated war time song composed by Zhang Hanhui in 1936.

13. The Chinese name of the fi lm is Bailan zhi ge.

14. Tamura Taijirō (1911–1983) was best known for his Nikutai no mon (1947),

a bold study of existentialist contradictions and brutal survival among a group of

prostitutes in a burnt-out ghetto of postwar Tokyo, a work that Suzuki Seijun turned

into a 1964 fi lm. Yamaguchi’s postwar fi lm Akatsuki no dassō (1950, directed by

Taniguchi Senkichi) was based on Tamura’s 1947 Shunpuden and represented a dramatically different direction from her other works in the so-called “continental trilogy.” Tamura was conscripted into the army in 1940 and fought in China before his

return to Japan in early 1946, an experience that decisively shaped his postwar literary vision. An account of his brief wartime interactions with Yamaguchi can be found

in chapter 11.

15. Katyusha is the female protagonist in Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899). Shimamura Hōgetsu wrote the script when it was adapted for the stage. It opened to wide

appeal in Japan in 1914, with Matsui Sumako playing Katyusha and singing “Katyusha’s Song,” composed by Nakayama Shimpei.

16. The literary career of Niwa Fumio (1904–2005) first began in the late 1920s,

but it was Ayu (1932) and especially Zeiniku (1936), a portrait of an entangled sonmother relationship, that established him as a rising novelist. A series of so-called “madame fiction” focusing on the lives of abandonment led by bar madames gave way to

a new creative trajectory toward urban realism during the war years, during which

time he fought in China and in the Solomon Islands. Postwar realities and changing

social mannerisms inspired such works as Iyagarase no renrei (1947), a study of the

cruel physiology and mental attitudes of old age, whilst a new spirit of experimentation produced works such as Shadanki (1952). Aomugi (1953) gives an impressively unsettling portrait of his father, a True Pure Land Sect priest. His most important works

in his later life brought him back to the study of the Buddhist sect and its saints, as

manifested in Shinran (1965) and Rennyo (1971–1973).