The China Doll - or was she?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/11/30/the-china-doll-or-was-she/b36a0403-d21b-4927-95a9-934cf93d93da/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cce12c5ceb0

THE CHINA DOLL - OR WAS SHE?

By Paul Blustein

November 30, 1991

"TOKYO -- Kill her, the traitor! She sold her country to hateful Japan. Kill Ri Koran, kill her!

-- The Chinese mob in the musical "Ri Koran"

They didn't kill her. But the woman who was known as Ri Koran in the 1930s and 1940s, when she was one of the most popular singers and movie stars in Asia, will never forget how close she came to being put to death.

She was held in a Shanghai detention camp at the end of World War II for nine months. Prosecutors charged that she had committed treason against her native China by using her alluring voice and dazzling screen presence to boost the cause of the brutal Japanese occupation. They cited her roles in propaganda films, such as that of a sweet young Chinese swept off her feet by a handsome Japanese soldier. "The newspapers were saying, 'Death Penalty for Ri Koran,' " she recalls.


At least one paper triumphantly reported she had been executed -- a story read, and believed, by her parents. But she was acquitted when she provided evidence showing that she could not legally have committed treason against China. What she revealed was something her once-adoring public had never known -- that she was Japanese.

She now goes mostly by the name she was born with, Yoshiko Yamaguchi. She is 71, one of the dwindling generation of Japanese who played a part in their nation's wartime misadventures. Unlike many of her fellow Japanese, Yamaguchi wants her country's actions revisited and aired fully -- and her own story is being told in dramatic fashion.

A hit musical drama about her has been produced this year by a leading Japanese theatrical company, and its depiction of Japan's invasion of China is awakening painful memories for older Japanese while providing a mini-education for the generation raised in the '50s, '60s and '70s. Most Japanese know little about their nation's aggression in Asia, because high school history courses usually end conveniently around the early 20th century, and textbooks present bland, abbreviated accounts of the Imperial Army's atrocities.


"I hope of course that many people see it, but especially the younger generation," Yamaguchi says of the musical. It has been widely acclaimed here for its "historical accuracy," and although the show dwells less on Japanese cruelty and more on Japan's own wartime misery than foreign critics might like, it marks a breakthrough of sorts simply by tackling the subject of the China invasion. Yamaguchi says one Japanese teenage girl told her that she had attended "Ri Koran" 10 times, in an effort to comprehend what she had never been taught about her country's action six decades ago.

Yamaguchi is speaking in her office in Nagatacho, Tokyo's Capitol Hill, where she now holds a job rather different from that of film goddess -- Foreign Affairs Committee chairman of the House of Councillors (the upper chamber of Japan's parliament). Her eyes, which once held audiences in deep thrall, are framed behind oversized glasses, and she wears a boldly patterned dress, rare for a Japanese septuagenarian. She emits the electricity one might expect of a person who has led her sort of life.

And what a life. After her escape from the firing squad, she resumed her acting career in Japan and later in Hollywood and on Broadway, where she starred in several films and plays under the name Shirley Yamaguchi. She married Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese American architect, but they divorced, and she subsequently married a Japanese diplomat, Hiroshi Otaka. After 10 years of being a dutiful diplomatic wife, she ventured into journalism and politics; still married to Otaka, she has been a member of the House of Councillors for 18 years.


But remarkable as her career after 1945 has been, she will surely be remembered most for the experiences that are being portrayed on stage -- those of the 1930s and early 1940s when, as 72-year-old Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa put it recently, "for our generation, she was the shining star of our youth," the beautiful symbol of a bridge between Japan and the Asian continent.

It is a timely story, both for Americans and Japanese, given the mounting attention being paid to next month's 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Americans tend to think of the war in the Pacific as a neat, simple morality tale beginning with Pearl Harbor and ending with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi's tale highlights a period before 1941 that Americans tend to overlook, because it didn't involve the United States directly. It is also a period that Japanese tend to repress, because it includes events like the 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking. What emerges from the story are insights into the origins of the war, for it helps explain how the Japanese were able to rationalize embarking on a savage colonial enterprise at a time when the rest of the world was starting to conclude that colonialism was a bad idea.


Black hair, black eyes

China and Japan

Japan and China

Love the two countries

Black hair, black eyes.

-- From "Ri Koran"

That song seems almost comical in light of the pain Japan inflicted on its neighbor. But Yamaguchi says -- and American historians generally agree -- that the song reflects an idealism many Japanese felt in the 1920s and 1930s, when about 200,000 people emigrated from Depression-era Japan in hopes of making a new life in the northeast Chinese province of Manchuria.

"They had the frontier spirit," Yamaguchi says, and also a belief that a special kinship existed between "the five peoples" of East Asia -- Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians and Manchurians. Much of Asia was under the domination of Western nations, and many of the Japanese idealists believed Tokyo should take the lead in expelling the Westerners and building a new pan-Asian dream.

The trouble with the idealism -- and the most important point of the story, in Yamaguchi's view -- is how it was perverted and manipulated by the military, ultranationalists and business interests who coveted Chinese territory as a rich source of raw materials and as a colonial trophy essential to Japan's great-power status. Moreover, even many of the Japanese idealists looked upon other Asians with condescension bordering on contempt, as "little brothers and sisters" who should be grateful to be dominated by the rapidly industrializing Asian sibling rather than white nations.

"It is very clear from the diaries of that period, from internal memoranda and so forth, that there was a great deal of idealism among the Japanese about what they were doing in Manchuria, as well as the crudest kind of self-serving cynicism," says Mark R. Peattie, a scholar at Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. "The Japanese really did believe that they could set up a paradise of five races in Manchuria. They believed they were uniquely qualified to do so."

Yamaguchi's father, Fumio, was an especially fervent idealist. The son of a Chinese classics scholar, he emigrated to Beijing from Japan at 17 and got a job teaching Mandarin to the employees of the Southern Manchurian Railway, a Japanese company. The Japanese have long held ambivalent views toward China, regarding it both with reverence (because of its role as the cradle of Japan's own civilization) and derision (because of its military weakness and impoverishment). But Fumio Yamaguchi saw only greatness in China, his daughter recalls, and he detested the notion that Japan should try to push China around.

"My father felt, we are the younger brother nation, China is the older brother," Yamaguchi says. "He would say, 'You can do nothing to change China; China is so big, so deep; it has such a long history.' He would say, 'What is the sense of taking one drop of the Isuzu River {a sacred river in Japan} and putting it in the Yalu River {a broad, long river in China}?' "

Narrator: Behind the slogans, "Harmony of the Five Peoples," "Realm of Peace and Prosperity," Men sharpened their claws. Here they come.

Military Chorus: Japan sends troops to protect the continent From the greedy ambitions of the West. ...

Narrator: 1930. Koran is still 10 years old. The tide of depression engulfs Japan.

Army officer: The situation in Japan is at a dead end. There is no solution to the problems of population growth or food shortages. We must make a breakthrough by taking possession of Manchuria and Mongolia. Prepare our military strategies ... Go by night to the Manchurian Railway and bomb the rails near Liu Tiao Hu. Make it look like the works of the Chinese Army in Mukden and attack their barracks.

{Sound of an explosion. Pillar of fire}

-- From "Ri Koran"

Yamaguchi was born in Manchuria to Japanese parents in 1920. While the army schemed to establish dominion over the region, and later over the rest of China, she was being raised to believe in the slogans.

Under her father's guidance, she grew up in China as a bicultural child, speaking fluent Mandarin and living much of her youth with Chinese families. Though she saw occasional incidents of brutality against Chinese by Japanese soldiers, she says she shared the ignorance of the ordinary Japanese about the army's major misdeeds, thanks to the carefully controlled press.

Often, even as a young girl, she sensed that the dream of establishing the Asian paradise "was not going well," she says. But she couldn't help but maintain her faith in the dream, since she had been brought up to think of China as her "home country," and Japan as her "ancestral country."

She looked neither particularly Japanese nor particularly Chinese, and the mother of one of her Chinese friends taught her to bow and laugh like a Chinese girl. So it was easy to pass herself off as Chinese -- and at the tender age of 13, she took her first fateful step in that direction, two years after the birth of Manchukuo, the puppet state established by the Japanese Army in 1931.

A Manchukuo radio station was looking for a Chinese girl who could sing in Chinese, read music and speak some Japanese. Little Yoshiko Yamaguchi could do all of those things, and a real Chinese girl wasn't forthcoming; so Yamaguchi got the job. Conveniently, she even had a Chinese name, Li Hsianglan (in Japanese phonetics, Ri Koran), bestowed on her by one of the families with whom she had lived.

So in 1933, "a singer named Ri Koran had her premiere, singing a song called 'New Song of Manchuria,' " she writes in her autobiography, published four years ago. "The reality was, she was a Japanese -- me ... I was just like Manchukuo. I was a Chinese manufactured by Japanese hands."

As her star grew brighter, the irony grew deeper. In Manchukuo propaganda leaflets, she was advertised as the representative girl of the new Asia -- a Chinese who embraced the Harmony of the Five Peoples and could speak Mandarin, Manchurian and Japanese. The fact that this sparkling emblem of pan-Asian unity was a Japanese masquerading as Chinese underscored how hollow the vision really was. But few people knew the truth, and the illusion was well maintained.

At 18, she began working for the Manchurian Cinema Co., starring in films touting Japan's love for Asia. She became an overnight screen and singing sensation, popular in China, Korea and Taiwan, but especially in Japan. When she performed in Tokyo at the Nichigeki (Japan Theater) in early 1941, the crowd lined up to see her show circled the theater 7 1/2 times.

Night in China, oh, night in China,

Lights of the harbor, violet nights

The junk travels upstream, ship of dreams,

Ah, the unforgettable sound of strings,

Night in China, night of dreams.

-- From the song "Night in China"

Some of her films, however, outraged the Chinese. One of her most controversial roles was in the film "Night in China" (featuring the song above), in which she played a young Chinese woman who is rescued by a Japanese sailor after her home is destroyed and family killed in an Imperial Army attack. Taken to his house, she defiantly refuses his offer of food and shelter. Eventually the sailor, exasperated by her truculence, slaps her in the face and demands that she recognize he is motivated by goodwill. She swoons and falls madly in love with him.

"It was first-class propaganda. You've got weak, hungry China falling in love with strong, virile Japan," says Carol Gluck, a Columbia University historian.

Yamaguchi herself professes profound embarrassment. "How stupid I was at that time," she says. She says that when she made the films, she thought of them as harmless entertainment, but when she viewed them a few years ago as part of the research for her autobiography, "I couldn't sleep for three days."

One of her worst memories of the period, she says, is of when she first traveled to Japan in 1938, and she saw starkly the low esteem in which many ordinary Japanese held her beloved China.

Stepping off the boat, she confronted an immigration officer who examined her Japanese passport, then sneered at her Chinese attire. "You're wearing these Chink clothes," he said. "How can a Japanese, someone from a first-class nation, wear the clothes of a fourth-class nation? Don't you feel ashamed?"

In the 1940s, with the war in full swing, Yamaguchi starred in more and more films but became increasingly guilt-ridden about hiding her identity, she says. Following the release of a huge hit movie in 1943 about the 19th-century Opium War, she was asked to hold a major press conference, and she told the Chinese official in charge -- a friend of her father's, who knew she was Japanese -- that she finally wanted to reveal all.

"I said, 'Please introduce me as Yoshiko Yamaguchi, born in China, who loves China,' " she recalls. "I had reached the point where I wanted to quit being Ri Koran." But her father's friend admonished her not to disclose anything, because her new film included a stirring song about the evils of opium that was helping to lift Chinese morale. For China's sake, he begged, the ruse of Ri Koran should continue. Yamaguchi agreed, but she nearly blew her cover anyway.

"The questions {from the reporters} were quite ordinary at first, and I was thinking how relieved I was," Yamaguchi says. "Then there was one sharp voice, and I knew the moment had come.

"This reporter said, 'You are Chinese -- right? So how could you appear in movies that offended China? Don't you have any pride as a Chinese?' "

Recounting the story, Yamaguchi struggles to maintain her composure. Tears well up. "Even now, it hurts me," she says quietly.

"I had no logic in my head. My mind was completely blank. But something came out. I said, 'I am very sorry. I was young and foolish, and I will never do it again. Please forgive me.' " The reporters, she recalls, burst into applause.

So it was only at the war's end, when she was facing treason charges, that Yamaguchi finally shed all pretenses and openly declared her Japanese citizenship. Chinese prosecutors tried to establish that she was Chinese after all, and therefore deserving of the death penalty. But in a dramatic bid to save their daughter's life, Yamaguchi's parents -- themselves under arrest in Beijing -- smuggled her birth certificate to her by stuffing it in a favorite childhood doll and dispatching a Russian friend to deliver the doll.

Yamaguchi was freed by a Chinese judge who delivered a stern lecture about the evil impact of what she had done, plus a warning that she should get out of China quickly lest she be lynched.

Koran: Try me, if I have sinned, Oh, Land that nurtured me. The two brightly shining nations, I continued to believe in.

Crowd: This hatred, This sorrow, We will not forget It will not disappear.

Judge: Let us forgive this young girl. If we return hatred with hatred, Fighting will continue eternally ... Reciprocate enmity with virtue. Reciprocate enmity with virtue. -- From "Ri Koran"

In the play, at least, Yamaguchi's tale ends on a comforting note for the Japanese. China is depicted as forgiving Japan, and there is no suggestion that Japan might bear some collective guilt for what its military did in the name of Emperor Hirohito.

But Yamaguchi, for one, feels the need to apologize -- for her own actions, even if they weren't exactly tantamount to torture or murder. And she has a plan for conveying her regrets.

Early next year, "Ri Koran" will be staged in several Chinese cities, and Yamaguchi wants to accompany the theater troupe on its tour. "After the performance," she says, "I would like to pardon myself before the Chinese audience and the Chinese people."

The theatrical group's director, Keita Asari, is unenthusiastic about her idea, saying the play is a work of art rather than a political statement.

But Yamaguchi, who told a Chinese judge 45 years ago that she was sorry, now wants to make a more public declaration. "Until that time," she says, "the war in my mind will not be over."

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