Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Wartime East Asia: Transnational Stardom and Its Predicaments

by Professor Chia-ning Chang, University of California, Davis

It is at once intriguing and sobering to observe that the extraordinary wartime

career of the Japanese singer and actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko (1920–2014), popularly known by her Chinese stage name, Li Xianglan, or Ri Kōran in Japanese,(note 1 below) has

generated as much heartfelt admiration as enduring controversies in East Asia

during and long after the war years. Her contemporary Chinese and Japanese

audiences could surely recall the exotic mystique she radiated in her stylish qipao

as she performed signature songs such as “When Will You Return?” (He’ri jun

zai lai), “The Suzhou Serenade” (Soshū yakyoku), and “The Evening Primrose”

(Yelaixiang).2 For many, her popular post-1939 films, her spectacular stage performances in Tokyo and Shanghai, and her multilingual song recordings—indeed,

perhaps even a mere mention of her name—might evoke deep-seated memories

about a particularly turbulent era in recent history. Postwar Japanese fi lmgoers,

especially those expatriated from China, might variously be moved with nostalgia for the continent by the idyllic scenes of Suzhou’s famous landmarks, willow-lined waterways, and old stone bridges in China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940), an effect accentuated no doubt by Hattori Ryōichi’s elegiac music score.3 Chinese audiences, on the other hand, might be more likely to recall from the same film bitter memories of unprecedented national humiliation and extraordinary personal

suffering under the boots of Japanese militarism. Meanwhile, former Japanese “pioneer” farmers, for instance, might associate images of the brightest star from Japan-occupied Manchuria with northeastern China’s panoramic topography—with the

black-earth-covered banks of the Songhua River or the relentlessly terraced coal-mining hillsides surrounding towns such as Fushun where Yamaguchi spent her childhood years. Other Japanese from former Manchukuo—soldiers, railroad employees, government bureaucrats, and their families—might fondly remember from films such as Winter Jasmine (Geishunka, 1942) the modern city-scapes

of Fengtian, Harbin, or Xinjing,4 whether seen with their own eyes or through

Japanese war time newsreels. For old-time urbanites from the Greater Yangtze

delta, the name “Li Xianglan” could very well rejuvenate reminiscences of the

xvii

xviii

Introduction

bygone days with the modern beat of jazz and rumba, the dance halls, and the

glitzy theaters associated with old Shanghai chic— or, for others, colonial-era

superciliousness or shameful Western decadence. And surely, not a few residents of the metropolis, past and present, could recall familiar reverberations

of her most cherished wartime song, “The Evening Primrose,” performed ever so

hauntingly on the er’hu.

Assorted wartime advertisements and interviews, along with postwar reports

and gossip columns in the print media, did their share in embellishing, mystifying, and ultimately commodifying Yamaguchi’s admittedly colorful life story, so

much so that her name has attained quasi-legendary status in the popular imagination. It is certainly true that, along with such singing talents as Zhou Xuan, Bai

Guang, Yao Li, Zhang Lu, and Wu Yingyin, Li Xianglan was one of the most celebrated female vocalists in China in the waning years of the war; many of her

devotees would insist that her popularity continued well into the 1960s and 1970s,

if not even later. Her enduring celebrity across East Asia can be seen in her rehabilitated postwar career as a vocalist and actress in the 1950s, her public appearances as a TV personality from 1969 to 1974, her place in the media spotlight

until as late as the 1990s, and, significantly, her extended career in Japanese politics from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. The redistribution of her signature

numbers by Japan’s Columbia Music Entertainment and Victor Entertainment

even after the turn of the twentieth century and the availability of her recordings

in many major urban areas in China and Japan today also testify to her continuing appeal.5 The Hong Kong fi lm critic Wong Ain-ling once described the actress

as a part of her own childhood recollections,6 a sentiment likely to be shared by

many born within a decade or so after 1945. Meanwhile, the younger generation in

Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and even mainland China would likely remember Li Xianglan from a beloved song affectionately dedicated to her memory in

1990 by the popular [Cantonese] Hong Kong singer-songwriter Jacky Cheung (or Cheung

Hok-yau).7 From another part of the world, Ian Buruma’s 2008 fictional work The

China Lover, inspired by Yamaguchi’s career, represents a more recent interest

emerging in the United States.

Yet barely obscured behind the splendor of her transnational stardom and

her many accomplishments lurk more disquieting historical memories about

her role within the tempestuous war time zeitgeist. Rightly or wrongly, many still

recall her career as having been shadowed by nebulous associations to international intrigues and allegations of complicity with Japan’s megalomaniac expansionist ideology. Others continue to be bewildered by wanton speculations about

her ethnic origin, by her associations with shady war time figures such as Yamaga

Tōru, Kawashima Yoshiko, and Yoshioka Yasunao, and by her rumored but un-

Introduction

xix

proven intelligence involvements for the Japanese authorities, notably the Kwantung Army, Japan’s dreaded garrison force in Manchuria. Some might still recall

her house arrest on alleged treason charges by the Kuomintang after Japan’s surrender, as well as bogus but well-advertised reports about her execution in Shanghai shortly afterward. More than a decade after the turn of this century, when her contemporary celebrities such as Bai Guang, Chen Yunchang, and Wang Danfengin China and Kogure Michiyo, Awaya Noriko, and Watanabe Hamako in Japan have all largely faded from public memory, Li/Yamaguchi still seems to retain a

peculiar allure to audiences in China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.

This enduring fascination with Yamaguchi long after 1945 surely has to do

with the public’s continuing curiosity about her dramatic life story, with whatever unresolved biographical mysteries still remain, and with the political cloud

that has lingered over her career. From the late 1930s and into the 1950s, the contesting dynamics between her ethno-nationalist sentiments as a Japanese woman

and, for lack of a better term, her encompassing East Asian transnationality has

also provided a lasting leitmotif to feed the inquisitiveness of a large international

market. The result has been a dazzling display of special television programs,

musicals, documentary reports, interviews, fictional and nonfictional accounts,

and, inevitably, a volume of Japanese manga, all devoted to giving a glimpse of

her extraordinary life.8 Such a colorful collage of public and media attention has

both revealed and perpetuated a tendency to reconstruct her vicissitudes as those

befitting a tragic heroine, an orphaned child straddled across the great divides of

her fatherland and motherland, a woman whose life and career had been thrown

into the storms and waves of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The self-doubts, internal trauma, unutterable anguish, and personal struggles during the early years

of her life can therefore only be properly appreciated by contextualizing her experiences within the broad canvas of war time political and cultural history.

Signifiers and Identities

Any reference to the most celebrated actress associated with the Manchurian

Film Association (Manshū Eiga Kyōkai or Man’ei) and broadly with Japan’s post1939 “national policy films” (kokusaku eiga) must first contend with the question

of how best to name her. For most Chinese audiences on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, she is best known as Li Xianglan, the stage name she adopted as

early as 1938 at the age of eighteen. Following the local dialect, Cantonese speakers in Guangdong Province and Hong Kong, along with a large contingent of

the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, would more likely recognize her as Lei

xx

Introduction

Heung-lan, not only from her war time films, but also from her popular songs,

the Shaw Brothers’ movies she had made from the mid- to late 1950s, and most

assuredly from the aforementioned contribution from Jacky Cheung.

On the other hand, her Chinese stage name in whatever dialectal rendition

conjures up practically nothing to her Japanese audience, who can recognize her

only by the Japanese rendering of her Chinese name, Ri Kōran, which in turn

registers close to nothing to most Chinese ears. Meanwhile, even if her more

well-informed Chinese fans knew her birth name, rendered Shankou Shuzi in

Mandarin and Sanhau Suk’dzi in Cantonese, they would not have realized that

the Japanese name Yamaguchi Yoshiko in fact refers to one and the same person.9 To be sure, this particular kind of linguistic disassociation and the resultant

cognitive confusion among the Chinese and the Japanese have long been unfortunate sources of frustrating miscommunication. Yamaguchi’s case takes on a peculiarly ironic significance in view of her exceptional popularity and reputation

across the two countries in their modern history. The reciprocal unintelligibility—

perhaps “unrecognizability” is a better word—of the most common and essential

signifiers for her among her two primary East Asian audiences is itself an unintended, if nevertheless fitting, metaphor for the extraordinary predicament embedded in her transnational celebrity.

To complicate matters, there are other naming options. Her given name at

birth in Beiyantai in the suburbs of old Fengtian (present-day Shenyang) was, as

noted, Yamaguchi Yoshiko. She was given the name Li Xianglan at the age of thirteen when she became the adopted daughter of General Li Jichun, then President

of Fengtian’s Shenyang Bank. Her other given Chinese name as a young schoolgirl in Beijing was Pan Shuhua, before she transformed herself into a Manchurian

song singer on the radio and later a dazzling star on the silver screen.
Shirley Yamaguchi was her stage name in the 1950s during her brief Hollywood and Broadway

careers, when she reinvented herself, with the collusion of the local media, as

“the Judy Garland of Japan.” Her official name during her extended tenure (1974–

1992) as Japan’s Upper House Diet member was Ōtaka Yoshiko, following her

1958 marriage to Ōtaka Hiroshi, a career diplomat. Having served as an honorary

advisor to Japan’s Chaplin Society since 2006 and in a host of other official positions, she was variously referred to in the postwar Japanese media, depending on

the occasion, as Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Ōtaka Yoshiko, or Ri Kōran. The name she

herself used as the coauthor of her autobiography, Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei

(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1987) was, to be sure, her Japanese birth name, even though

the name of the autobiographical subject itself is identified by her Chinese stage

name rendered in Japanese reading.10

Such a confounding montage of names and the diverse identities they signify

extend beyond mere circumstantial correlations to personal history, national

Introduction

xxi

boundaries, and dialectal variations. Rather, they are symbolic of the many simultaneously contradictory and complementary forces that together shaped her

professional career, public image, and private life. Shelley Stephenson’s otherwise

apt observation that Yamaguchi’s persona “represented a blurring of [all her prewar names], a traveling through the various identities even as she traveled through

Asia in her mission for the Japanese”11 inadvertently underplays the role of agency

in the crafting of Yamaguchi’s various wartime postures. It is worth remembering

that the essential screenplay of her war time career—including the deliberate

“blurring” of her names—was largely conceived, written, and executed by foreign

agencies largely beyond her control. During the war years, she was, to be sure, an

intricate mosaic of personas and denominations, and any internal cohesiveness

that might have existed among the disparate parts to form the foundation for an

authentic selfhood was achieved not by any amalgamation of her contesting

identities, but by the perseverance of her own character. While the political exploitation of her names might prove to have been expedient for the advancement

of Japan’s colonial agenda and her own professional career, Yamaguchi throughout

the war years remained largely separate entities to different parties.

First, to her war time fans in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Shanghai, Beijing, and the

overseas Chinese communities, she was a multi-talented entertainer and a sweet-voiced soprano who enthralled her audiences with her beauty, screen presence,

and mesmerizing songs, many of which are still cherished today. To mainstream

Japanese film studios such as Tōhō and the political strategists of colonialism in

Tokyo, Xinjing, and later in occupied China, her fluid mobility within East Asia,

thanks in large measure to her bilingual and physical attributes, held exceptional

promise to advance the rhetoric of Sino-Japanese solidarity and the political

myth of Greater East Asia Co-prosperity.12
To the General Staff of the Kwantung

Army and Japan’s formidable network of intelligence operatives running the

propaganda machines in China, she came to represent a meticulously handcrafted

cultural construct programmed to help materialize the subordination, or at least

the acquiescence, of those living under Japanese military or defacto control. Others

saw her exotic Manchurian upbringing as a powerful promotional tool to help

romanticize China’s vast northeastern territories for Japan’s struggling masses

and to further encourage its “pioneering” initiatives into that area. Still others saw

her as a charismatic spokeswoman for both validating and glamorizing the tenuous notion of free-willed, pro-Japanese constituencies within China and the rest

of Asia, supposedly aspiring voluntarily for Japanese domination.

The results of such strategic maneuverings turned out to be at best mixed.

Man’ei and its other major collaborators in Japan such as Tōhō and Shōchiku

scrupulously colluded to conceal her true identity from the prying eyes of the

public as they attempted, implicitly or explicitly, to reinvent her public image in

xxii

Introduction

synchrony with Japan’s continental goals. It was true that the “Singing Ambassadress from Manchuria” created for the advancement of “Sino-Japanese friendship” did succeed in further galvanizing popular Japanese interest in the continent; no other event provided better evidence for such a feat than the extraordinary success of her Nichigeki performances in February 1941.
On the other hand, as we shall see, the Chinese audiences of Li Xianglan’s wartime films, beginning with Song of the White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, 1939) and more so with China Nights,

were far from being easily persuaded by their political puffery about Japan’s imperial enterprise and its alleged benevolence toward a beleaguered China. As for

Yamaguchi herself—while unable or unwilling to express open insubordination

against her Japanese political handlers during the war years, she unequivocally

reveals in her postwar reminiscences the deep anguish she felt over her assigned

role as an instrument of Japanese propaganda. On a number of occasions, she

explicitly expressed her sense of guilt and remorse and, indeed, her fervent desire,

albeit unfulfilled before 1945, to reveal her true national identity to the Chinese

public. Her defiance began to take on a more radical tone as the war approached

its waning phases, as we shall see later.

Meanwhile, for many war time Chinese moviegoers, the question of whether

Li Xianglan was in fact Japanese, a rumored product of mixed Chinese-Japanese

parentage, an enigmatic “pan-Asian” of some kind, or even a vaguely suspicious

“Japanese spy,” was subordinate to private yearnings for the sweet fantasies her

performances inspired. Even though her well-publicized Chinese identity was

not above suspicion within certain circles in Japan and China toward the end of

the war, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that at least some of her Chinese

admirers simply wanted to believe that she was Chinese and, as advertized, the

glamorous star Manchuria and Beijing had jointly nurtured.13 This was especially

true after 1943, when Li’s songs gained more popularity and her performance in

Glory to Eternity (Wanshi liufeng; Japanese title Bansei ryūhō) marked her new

celebrity status within China’s filmmaking heartland. Produced by the prominent

filmmaker Zhang Shankun and released in Shanghai in May 1943 in centennial

celebration of Commissioner Lin Zexu’s historic anti-opium crusades, Glory to

Eternity also gave Li the opportunity to stage two additional songs, which immediately turned into popular hits in China.14 After years of unremitting warfare

and colossal human sacrifices and physical devastation, Chinese national sentiments eagerly embraced Li’s cinematic role as a feisty patriot and anti-opium

songstress. After suffering from unspeakable national humiliation for so long,

it was, to be sure, a much-awaited moment for the celebration of national pride.15

Equally important, the film about the horrors and humiliation mid-nineteenth

century European imperialism had inflicted on China easily invited allegorical

readings of the country’s current national tragedy under the yoke of another bru-

Introduction

xxiii

tal imperialist power. Whether the foreign devils came from Victorian England

a century earlier, carrying shiploads of opium and gunpowder, or currently from

imperial Japan, carrying samurai swords and machine guns, was naturally a question one must leave to the spectators’ power of association at the time. Ultimately,

however, such a distinction was probably not all that critical in the realm of the

public imagination or national political consciousness, as one set of horrific images reconstructed on screen came inescapably to be superimposed on the other,

unfolding in their ghastly forms from recent historical memory and reaching

into practically every dimension of everyday life.

Apart from whatever explicit or implicit political messages Glory to Eternity

might have conveyed, however, the performance of a distinguished Chinese cast

and the fi lm’s theme songs fed strong public cravings for entertainment. Not unlike war time European audiences gathering around their favorite radio programs in London, attending ballet performances in Paris, or listening to symphonic orchestras in Berlin, the Chinese audiences in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong were equally coveting diversions that could allow them momentary self abandonment and fleeting emotional relief.16 At a time when even an international metropolis like Shanghai had only a small handful of Western films left for

public viewing after the end of 1937, Li Xianglan’s films and stage performances

offered some of the few other precious outlets for a sizable and demanding audience.17 To be sure, the war directly motivated this escapist impulse. Life’s incessant hardships experienced outside the cinema also made such hypnotizing

pleasures seem irresistible. Perhaps most compelling was the films’ capacity to

vicariously satisfy a longing for a return to some semblance of life’s normalcy

before the Japanese invasion. For better or worse, Li Xianglan’s performances

were extraordinarily well suited to bestowing such moments of tenuous bliss.

Helplessly torn between her attachment to Japan and her affections for

China—her “fatherland” and “motherland” in her own words—Yamaguchi was

never given the political luxury to reveal her true sentiments to her international

audiences throughout the war years. Whatever degree of freedom she could exercise with the public media was tempered by her own manipulation of a politically

compromising language even on less-guarded occasions. Ironically, her assumed

Chinese identity afforded her a degree of authority while making less than laudatory remarks about Japanese fi lmmaking in China. In an October 1944 interview,

for example, she expressed dissatisfaction with many of her film scripts, including

the one for China Nights, but acknowledged that there was little she could do

other than to comply with the wishes of her Japanese directors. This was followed,

remarkably, by a bold confession that she was “really ashamed” about the kind of

“continental films” she had made. Accordingly, the Japanese directors’ familiarity

with China’s manners and customs did not go beyond meager understanding of

xxiv

Introduction

the country’s national character and sentiments. At one point in the same interview, she even promised that she would “definitely not make any more of

such continental films” before expressing her apology to “us the Chinese people”

(my emphasis).18

This was not the first time that she had stated comparable sentiments. In a

Beijing press conference in the aftermath of the screening of Glory to Eternity in

1943, she was asked whether she had abandoned her national pride by appearing

in such fi lms as Song of the White Orchid and China Nights. Acknowledging that

she had taken such misguided actions “out of ignorance,” she expressed regret,

asked for forgiveness, and promised not to “make the same mistake again.”19 In

expressing such sentiments in public in unambiguous terms then, and again the

following year in 1944, she probably went as far as she could without getting herself into serious trouble with the Japanese authorities. That no reported warnings, reprimands, or more serious actions against her materialized in the days

and months ahead suggests that her unparalleled pan-Asian acclaim at the time

might have given her a measure of precarious protection. It would have been

spectacularly counterproductive for Japanese propaganda if the much-touted

star of Greater East Asia and the Japanese Empire itself should become embroiled

in an ugly disagreement over such important policy matters. Her formal dissociation from Man’ei very soon after she had made her statement in 1944 might

also have given her some degree of insulation from personal attacks and political

repercussions.20 One can only imagine the consequences that would have awaited

her had she chosen to venture one step farther, take on a more politically uncompromising tone, or proceed to repeat her defiant comments to the Chinese or

Japanese media. Yamaguchi was a much more seasoned and politically weathered twenty-four-year-old in 1944 than the impressionable Manchurian girl who

in her early teens sang Manchurian songs on the radio and at the age of eighteen started making puerile Man’ei comedies such as The Honeymoon Express

(Miyue kuaiche; Japanese rendering, Mitsugetsu kaisha). As her autobiography

suggests, she must also have been aware of the imminent danger to the life of her

close mentor Kawakita Nagamasa whose particular camaraderie with Shanghai’s

Chinese filmmaking community had already seriously tested the patience of

the Japanese military and Man’ei’s top personnel.21 All things considered, it is

not difficult to imagine her considerable resolve and personal courage despite the deceiving informality with which her 1944 interview was being conducted. Granted, of course, she was not telling the whole truth when it came to her own nationality.

Yet open defiance was scarcely an option since she had been put on the pedestal as the star of Greater East Asia. Indeed, throughout her Man’ei career and

her years working with Japanese studios, she was continuously held in precarious

Introduction

xxv

limbo, largely spiritually imprisoned and culturally isolated, while dutifully following her orders as a puppet within a puppet state. Even though in her life as an

entertainer, she was allowed little more than a mannequin-like existence, there

were apparently times when she was not beyond suspicion from her own Japanese puppet handlers. Her autobiography reveals not only that she was under

surveillance by at least one Soviet spy while making My Nightingale (Watashi no

uguisu, 1943) in the Manchurian city of Harbin, but that she was also the target

of intelligence agents from Japan’s Kwantung Army itself.22 Her extraordinary

popularity won her free interaction with neither the Chinese nor the Japanese

fans who genuinely adored her. Hers, instead, was a regimented life characterized by considerable personal loneliness and cultural maladjustment in Japan.23

Perhaps even more hurtful to her sense of self was her victimization from blatant discrimination in her own native country, where she was seen as a Chinese

woman, the lasting effects of which are suggested by her repeated evocations of

such traumatic experiences in her postwar reminiscences.24

The irony of Yamaguchi as a casualty of racial bigotry in Japan was profoundly

tragicomic, as she had incessantly been packaged by her meticulous Man’ei and

Tōhō/Shōchiku publicists as the brightest transnational star celebrating the

laudable goal of “Japanese-Manchurian friendship.” Yet despite all such maneuverings, the political realities dominating her career ultimately made it impossible for her to anchor her art and considerable talents within the nurturing embrace of a single authentic national culture. Whether performing on the Nichigeki stage in February 1941 or at Shanghai’s Grand Theater in May 1945, every movement she made was meticulously choreographed and programmed at every turn.

On the one hand, while at the top of her form in the early 1940s, she was surely as

celebrated and popular a performer as China’s Chen Yunchang and Japan’s Hara

Setsuko.25 On the other, however, Yamaguchi herself must have realized, perhaps

more than anybody else, that neither her good Chinese nor Japanese friends had

the same formidable—and literally unutterable—burden to carry.26

Man’ei and Yamaguchi’s Earlier Career Yamaguchi appeared in some twenty wartime films, including those made outside Northeast China, with locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Tokyo, Kaifeng in Henan Province, Taiwan, and Korea.27 She was the brightest Japanese star

to blossom transnationally after 1938, first in Manchuria, followed shortly afterward in Japan, and subsequently in Beijing and Shanghai. Her rapid rise to fame was to a considerable degree attributable to Man’ei’s patronage under the administration of its second director, Amakasu Masahiko. Until her formal dissociation

xxvi

Introduction

from the company in November 1944, her exclusive affi liation with Man’ei was,

for better or for worse, one of the defining features of her war time career.28

Partly inspired by the powerful state-run fi lmmaking apparatus in Nazi

Germany, the Soviet Union, and Italy, Man’ei was created in Xinjing in August

1937 with the backing of the Kwantung Army and Manchukuo’s police forces.29

The fact that the contribution of its capital investment of five-million yen was

evenly split between Manchukuo and the South Manchurian Railway (Minami

Manshū Tetsudō, or Mantetsu)30 suggests that the missions of the new film association were deemed as necessary for the perpetration of Japan’s imperial enterprise as those of its other more visible instruments of sociopolitical control. In

time, Man’ei became an intriguing amalgamation of local fi lm crews and trainees, Chinese directors and assistant directors, scriptwriters and actors, Korean

and Taiwanese employees, along with top-echelon Japanese filmmakers, technicians, and administrators from diverse professional and political backgrounds.31

Yamaguchi herself expressed considerable bemusement that a Japa nese ultranationalist like Shigeki Kyūhei, President of Man’ei’s Tokyo office, should work

together with such a refined left-wing intellectual type as the important film critic

Iwasaki Akira.32

In addition, a sizeable number of Man’ei employees—a hundred and ninetytwo, or over ten percent of its total workforce as of November 1944, to be exact—

were described euphemistically as “irregulars” ( futeishoku), having affi liations

only with the Tokyo branch office. Their functions remain a mystery, though

speculations that they might have been agents associated with Amakasu’s intelligence apparatus did arise.33 Even within the ranks of Xinjing’s Manchukuo establishment, the relationship between the police agencies and Man’ei’s personnel was

apparently not beyond mutual suspicion. Recent research has shown that, in

1942, over twenty Man’ei employees—including film directors, scriptwriters, and

actors—were routinely tailed by agents from Manchuria’s Higher Police with instances of arrests, detentions, and even one death while in imprisonment.34 As we

have seen, even Yamaguchi herself was a one-time target of Japanese intelligence

agents in Harbin. Naturally, such an extraordinary assortment of strange bedfellows

made Manchukuo’s most conspicuous “national policy” organ an ideologically

ambiguous, structurally clumsy, hierarchically racially divided, but nonetheless

fascinating product of wartime Japan’s cultural and political imagination.

Within Manchukuo’s administrative structure, the supervising agency for

Man’ei was the General Affairs Office of the Council for Manchukuo State Affairs (Manshūkoku Kokumuin), but behind-the-scenes control was clearly in the

hands of the Kwantung Army. Its Chief of General Staff Major-General Itagaki

Seishirō presided over the Deliberative Committee (Shingi-i’inkai) whose members included two other officials from the Kwantung Army’s General Staff and

Introduction

xxvii

prominent leaders from the military and the Higher Police. Other prominent

individuals involved in the Man’ei establishment included Kamikichi Seiichi,

Kishi Nobusuke, and Furumi Tadayuki, all high-ranking members within various

echelons of the Manchukuo administration.35 Headed after November 1939 by

Amakasu, a former military police captain and Kishi Nobusuke’s protégé popularly known for his alleged—though more recently disputed—murder of the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and his wife Itō Noe in the aftermath of the 1932 Great Kantō

Earthquake,36 Man’ei was specifically charged to create Chinese-language “national policy films” through “cooperation” with local filmmakers, actors, and staff.

The Man’ei charter described its mission as follows:

The Manchurian Motion Picture Association is a national company of Manchukuo. It is founded on ethical principles for the mutual advancement of

Japan and Manchukuo; in discharging our duties in the true spirit of East

Asian peace, to bear the great responsibility of the spiritual building of Manchukuo in times of peace. To inform the people of Japan and the various regions of China of the true circumstances of Manchukuo and gain their full

understanding, and furthermore, to present material of a high cultural standard from Manchukuo. In times of emergency, these responsibilities will be

enlarged. That is, we will become one with Japan, and use fi lm in the ideological and propaganda wars both inside and outside the country.37

From 1938 to 1945, the company alone and in collaboration with other major

Japanese studios produced some of the most well-known fi lms in war time China,

with Li Xianglan as its most visible and charismatic spokeswoman.38 With one

hundred employees at its establishment in September 1937, nine hundred in December 1940, and close to twice that number in November 1944, Man’ei produced

108 “entertainment” and 189 “education” fi lms, 307 rolls of newsreels, as well as

other productions in the Chinese language and children’s programs. Despite its

powerful national backing and all the modern resources at its disposal—its 1939

studio, for example, was said to be equipped with cutting-edge technology of the

time—only sixteen percent of Man’ei’s total output could strictly be described as

reflecting Japan’s “national policy.”39 It is also worth remembering that after

Japan’s surrender and the transition of Man’ei into Dongbei Film Company

(Dongbei Dianying Gongsi) in October 1945, some seventy-five Japa nese Man’ei

personnel—including directors, fi lm editors, administrators, and cameramen—

decided to remain in China and served pivotal roles in the subsequent reconstruction of the postwar Chinese cinema until the early 1950s.40

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Yamaguchi was compelled to conceal

her Japanese identity by allowing herself to be reinvented as a Manchurian-born

xxviii

Introduction

Chinese woman with the purpose of legitimizing Japan’s colonizing enterprise

and promoting its imperialist mission. A fluid combination of political imperatives and marketing needs convinced Man’ei and other studio executives that

repackaging Yamaguchi Yoshiko as Li Xianglan was in the best interests of all

parties concerned. Apart from publicity initiatives in both China and Japan, this

was also accomplished through disseminating bogus proclamations, such as the

one describing her as “the beloved daughter of the mayor of Fengtian.”41 In all

likelihood, it is impossible to offer a precise quantitative analysis on how successfully the secret was kept at the time, but it is reasonable to speculate, based on

Yamaguchi’s own reckonings and other evidence, that an overwhelming majority

of her Japanese and Chinese fans believed that she was Chinese.42 That said, her

true identity as the oldest daughter of a Kyushu couple from Fengtian’s neighboring town of Fushun, or minimally as a Japanese girl born in China, was far from

being a watertight secret. Indeed, Yamaguchi herself confessed that some of her

fellow Man’ei colleagues had long suspected that she was either Japanese, or to

follow the more popu lar belief, a product of mixed Chinese and Japa nese parentage. In 1944, even some of her close Chinese coactors from Glory to Eternity

were beginning to entertain varying degrees of skepticism over her Chinese

identity, just as Yamaguchi herself suspected they would.43 Reports on her background from the Shanghai fi lm media in 1943–1944 sometimes served only to

complicate and further mystify her national origin. In at least one publication

in November 1944, Li Xianglan’s original name was identified as “Yamaguchi

Yoshiko” with a “temporary” address in Tokyo and an inexplicably unidentified

“native place.”44

Questions likewise had been raised in the Japanese media much earlier. Yamaguchi herself reported in her autobiography that the nationally circulated

Tokyo paper Asahi Shimbum threatened to expose her Japanese nationality following her performance at the city’s Nichigeki Theater as early as February 1941; this

development, if indeed true, was indicative that her careful disguise was at least

suspect in certain circles of the main Japanese media at that time. In a rare interview with Tokyo’s Miyako Shimbun (the present-day Tokyo Shimbun) soon after

the same Nichigeki appearance, Yamaguchi in effect acknowledged that she was

trueborn Japanese, even though the potentially explosive story was not followed

up by other more influential and nationally circulated papers.45 So long as the

vague suspicions about Yamaguchi’s true ethnic origin did not erupt into a national scandal or an international firestorm, the enhanced murkiness of Yamaguchi’s identity served only to accentuate her personal mystique and her legend

as a transnational star.46

The fateful decision to cover up her true nationality throughout the war years

almost caused her to lose her life and brought her lasting notoriety as a “traitor” to

Introduction

xxix

the Chinese people, a fiercely-hated hanjian, based on the assumption that she

had all along been gloriously Chinese by birth. Under house arrest in Shanghai

after Japan’s surrender, she very narrowly managed to escape treason charges and

possible execution by the Kuomintang through a dramatic eleventh-hour revelation of her true nationality by producing a well-concealed copy of her Japanese

family register.47

Postwar Career

After her repatriation to Japan, Yamaguchi proceeded to rehabilitate her career by

appearing as a singer and stage actor.48 Soon afterwards, she returned to the movie

screen and starred in a number of high-profi le fi lms, including Taniguchi Senkichi’s Escape at Dawn (Akatsuki no dassō, 1950),49 Yoshimura Kōzaburō’s The

Shining Day of My Life (Waga shōgai no kagayakeru hi, 1948), and Kurosawa

Akira’s Scandal (Shūbun, 1950), appearing alongside such male leads as Ikebe Ryō,

Mori Masayuki, Mifune Toshirō, and Shimura Takashi, respectively. Meanwhile, just the fact of having “Li Xianglan” in the main cast of Japanese fi lms and

other productions meant that they would enjoy a popu lar reception in many

parts of Southeast Asia—so much so that a noted fi lm historian has observed

that the emerging Japanese movie boom in Hong Kong and the rest of Asia in the

1950s could be taken as an extension of Li Xianglan’s popularity from the 1930s

and 1940s.50

From 1951 to 1955, Yamaguchi proceeded to reinvent herself as an international celebrity of a different sort, driven this time by a new sense of adventure

in the United States. With rising professional aspirations, her own considerable

talents, and assistance from Kawakita Nagamasa’s overseas connections, she appeared as “Shirley Yamaguchi” in a number of Hollywood fi lms and Broadway

musicals, starring opposite Don Taylor, William Holden, Robert Stack, Robert

Ryan, and Cameron Mitchell.51 Inspired by Elia Kazan’s Actors Studio and Édith

Piaf’s performances in New York, she developed an ambition to make a name for

herself, this time in the greatest venues of the world. Friendships with Charlie

Chaplin, Yul Brynner, James Dean, and others variously enlivened her experiences in the foreign land, while her association with alleged Japanese left-wing

artists such as Ishigaki Eitarō might have partly explained suspicions against her

as a Communist sympathizer and her place on the U.S. State Department’s persona non grata list in 1953. Earlier in 1951, at the age of 31, she had married the

distinguished Japanese-American sculptor and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi; the union lasted for only five years before the couple divorced in 1956.52 From

1954 to 1958, she was recruited by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers to star in a series

xxx

Introduction

of commercially successful fi lms, including The Plum in the Golden Vase53 (Jin

Ping Mei, 1955), Mysterious Beauty (Shenmi meiren, 1957), and A Night of Romantic Love (Yiye fengliu, 1957). In the process, she also managed to jumpstart her

remarkable singing career, thanks in no small measure to the lasting popularity

of some of the theme songs from her Hong Kong films, such as “Three Years”

(San’nian).54 At the same time, it is worth noting that even as late as 1957, her

national identity still remained—or was intentionally allowed to remain—a tantalizing mystery in a city as savvy and cosmopolitan as Hong Kong.55

Many important private and professional developments followed. Her second

marriage in 1958 to Ōtaka Hiroshi, then a young diplomat and later Japan’s

Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Myanmar, effectively brought an end to her career

on the silver screen. From 1969 to 1974, she staged a successful comeback by hosting a popular show for Tokyo’s Fuji Television called “You at Three o’Clock”

(Sanji no anata), for which she famously travelled to Saigon and Cambodia in

1970 as a reporter in the midst of the Vietnam War. In 1971, she was in the Middle

East reporting on the local conflict, and her 1973 interviews with the former

Japanese Red Army activist Shigenobu Fusako and Chairman Yasser Arafat of

the Palestine Liberation Organization generated quite a stir in Japan, as well as

considerable admiration in some circles.56 She went on to serve, with earlier support from none other than Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, as a three-term representative in the Upper House of the Japanese Diet.57 While affi liated with the

country’s conservative Liberal-Democratic Party, she was noted for her nonpartisan tendencies and her generally progressive stance on international issues

in her various capacities as Vice Chair of her party’s Diplomatic Investigation

Society, Executive Director of the Asia-Africa Study Group, Executive Director

of the Diet Members’ Alliance against Apartheid, and Executive Director the

Japan-Palestinian Friendship Alliance.58

After her tenure in the Diet ended in 1992, she became involved with the

Asian Women’s Fund (Josei no Tame no Ajia Heiwa Kokumin Kikin, or Ajia

Josei Kikin for short), which was founded in July 1995 to assist aging former “comfort women” in Asia through fund-raising campaigns.59 Meanwhile, she continued to speak out, with characteristic sternness of purpose in multiple interviews

and public forums, on the follies of Japanese imperialism and Japan’s role in Asia

during the war years.60 In a newspaper article published as late as August 2005, for

example, she expressed empathy with the Chinese people for their anti-Japanese

sentiments on the occasion of former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō’s visit

to Yasukuni Shrine. She proceeded to dismiss the claim about the inevitability of

Japan’s modern wars since 1894–1895—events sometimes legitimized in terms of

their purported goal of the liberation of Asia—as a rationalization after the fact.61

Introduction

xxxi

In a February 2007 interview, she described Japan’s sense of national superiority

over the Chinese as “awfully frightening” while attributing Japan’s continental

aggression to its desire to secure food and natural resources from there.62 While

publicly expressing shame, guilt, and remorse as she contemplated her wartime

role as a theatrical instrument in the ser vice of Manchukuo, it is also undeniable

that Yamaguchi had, at the same time, been a convenient pawn and an accomplice in the ser vice of Japan’s imperialist ideology. Regardless of the degree of her

self-awareness and misgivings over her political role, her involvement in Japan’s

war time enterprise was both significant and undeniable.63 The circumstances

that compelled her to come to terms with her role as an international star and her

engagement with Japan’s imperialist enterprise, as well as her implicit acts of

resistance against the realities of her political predicament, were then the substance of her wartime story with Man’ei and other Japanese film studios.

Re-imaginings of Manchuria: Construction

of a New Political Aesthetic

The most far-reaching political development following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 was the proclamation in the following February of the

puppet state of Manchukuo in anticipation of more ambitious continental adventures to come. Through such direct and indirect instruments of state control

as the powerful Kwantung Army and the South Manchuria Railway, Japan managed with considerable political success to consolidate its expanding sphere of

influence in China’s northeast. At the same time, to perpetuate Japan’s social and

economic domination of the area as a part of its growing territorial ambitions,

Japanese empire-building initiatives created a large colonial community through

waves of massive immigration. Popu lar imagination in Japan often juxtaposed

the vast expanse of Manchuria’s hinterland, its agricultural richness, and its

other abundant physical resources against the idealistic if also nebulously defi ned

image of a “new haven” (shintenchi), a land eagerly awaiting Japa nese patronage

and exploration. From 1932 to 1945, some three hundred thousand Japa nese

peasants arrived to seek new opportunities and a new way of life in what many

considered a promised land.64 In addition to those agrarian settlers, other Japanese came from diverse social backgrounds: government bureaucrats, professional

soldiers, employees of Mantetsu and other Japanese companies, speculators, continental adventurers, technicians, and entrepreneurs, as well as teachers and intellectuals from a broad spectrum of ideological persuasions. Yamaguchi’s father

Fumio, for example, a native of Saga Prefecture, was a Chinese language instructor

xxxii

Introduction

for the Japanese Mantetsu staff before suspicions of his association with the Chinese resistance led to his separation from the company and the family’s subsequent move from Fushun to Fengtian and later to Beijing.

Beyond the formal political, economic, and social infrastructure of Japan’s

colonial occupation, Manchukuo’s history cannot be fully appreciated without

considering the intricate interlayerings of ideological posturing, cultural manipulation, and aesthetic re-imagination of the land by a diverse assortment of human

and political agencies. Some of such endeavors manifested themselves in early

Shōwa literary production on the colonial experience by expatriate writers and

those at the home front, as well as in a fairly active critical discourse on Mongolia

and Manchuria in the context of contemporary history and the Pacific War. Not

only was Manchuria intended to serve as a future launching pad for Japan’s southward encroachment into the Chinese heartland; in time it also came to be imbued

with a symbolic significance as a paradigmatic representation of Japan’s future

mission and destiny on the Asian continent.

The tendency of envisioning China’s expansive northeastern territories as

a cultural landscape and social space away from the constraints and weariness

of everyday life experienced in Japan’s homeland—as a setting alien yet romantic, mystical yet somehow imbued with redemptive powers—found its way into

Japa nese literary imagination in the late 1930s. In Sakaguchi Ango’s ambitious

autobiographical novel Snowstorm (Fubuki monogatari, 1938), for example, the

juxtaposition of Manchuria against Japan as two distinct and yet interconnected

topographies is accomplished with studied nonchalance by the novel’s reference

to the opening of a new sea route from Niigata to Manchukuo in the 1930s. The

journey began from Japanese harbor towns such as Tsuruga, Maizuru, and Niigata

on the Japan Sea coast to northern Korean ports before the traveler took the final

leg of the trip by train to the Manchukuo capital, making it the shortest route

from Japan’s Hokuriku region. Bidding farewell to her former lover and metaphorically Japan itself, the heroine Furukawa Sumie confesses her restlessness in

her native home of Niigata, while vague yearnings to venture into “the northern

wilderness” of China has turned the Manchukuo capital of Xinjing into something of the heroine’s spiritual sanctuary.65 Fantasies surrounding an abstraction

of Manchuria, if not its physical or aesthetic realities, sometimes manifested

themselves in intellectual discourse of the territory as a romantic setting for an

alternative worldview to be exploited, manipulated, and consumed in the interest

of the expanding Japanese empire. Manchuria was not far from his mind when

the influential early Shōwa cultural critic Yasuda Yojūrō spoke of a national imperative to actualize the yet unaccomplished dream of modern civilization. This, he

suggested, was to be done through synthesizing what he defined as the outstanding attributes of the spirit of Meiji with a new form of creativity. The erection of a

Introduction

xxxiii

“new Japanese bridge,” using his most well-known and visually tantalizing wartime

metaphor, was indispensable for Japan’s new national literature (kokumin bungaku)

to reach world-class status.66 Even though for Yasuda the creation of Manchukuo

constituted “an expression of a new bold ideal of civilization and its world view,”67

Manchuria’s indigenous cultural and aesthetic symbols could not be allowed to

prevail once Japan had firmly established its military and political dominance

over the territory. Alan Tansman describes how, for Yasuda, “The clearing of that

actual space in the expanding empire was fi rst prepared for by the clearing of

imaginative space. The ‘real bridges’ of Manchuria, the region’s actual culture,

needed to be replaced by ‘bridges of the imagination’—Japanese bridges.”68

Meanwhile, the memories and lessons brought forth by Yasuda’s travels

in China from May to June 1938, reaching as far as Mongolia, consisted not of

images about the horrid realities of war and destruction, the sufferings and resistance of a foreign people, or the physical exploitation of the land by Japanese agrarian settlers; rather, they were framed in terms of “the significance of war in world

history” and “the universality [sekai-teki] of the Japanese spirit.” It was the unfolding of a “magnificent era” for a “romantic Japan” (roman-teki Nippon). “Now that

Japan is experiencing for the first time a new romantic century,” he wrote, “it will

leap forward by clearing away all thoughts of pessimism. Even if it should use

conquest and invasion as its means, they only accentuate the righteousness and

beauty of the act.”69

Translated into the arena of realpolitik, the visual reimagining and aesthetic

structuring of a new Japanese colonial romanticism became in effect Man’ei’s

primary mission in Manchukuo’s capital from 1939 to the end of the Pacific War.

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Amakasu’s company was to become one

of the most important cultural agencies to help fashion and perpetuate Yasuda’s

visionary “Japanese bridges” (Nihon no hashi), or what the fi lm critic Tsumura

Hideo was later to prescribe as the imperative “philosophy” of war fi lms.70 Nonetheless, not all the fi lms Man’ei made with its collaborating studios, including a

number of elaborate productions, saw the light of day through public screenings

in either war time China or Japan. For example, the ambitious 1944 musical My

Nightingale (Watashi no uguisu, directed by Shimazu Yasujirō) starring Yamaguchi and based on Osaragi Jirō’s story of the vicissitudes of exiled Russian aristocrats and opera singers in Harbin after the Bolshevik Revolution, was not released in Manchuria or in Japan.71 At fi rst glance, the fi lm’s political subtext

celebrating mutual cooperation and racial harmony between the Japanese and

Russian residents in Manchuria might well serve useful propaganda purposes.

The fi lm critic Satō Tadao offers a plausible political explanation for its lukewarm

official reception by pointing to Man’ei’s censorship worries about a film in which

most of the songs performed were sung in Russian, an enemy’s language.72 Yet

xxxiv

Introduction

the fact that a state-sponsored studio like Man’ei had even bothered to make the

film at all suggests that Japan’s national policy goals had become so thoroughly

corrupted by the waning phases of the war that a new creative spirit was allowed

to creep into Man’ei’s fi lmmaking undertakings to fill their increasingly hollow

rhetoric. Though My Nightingale was never publicly screened during the war

years, it was, through a twist of luck, a Man’ei feature fi lm now being preserved

in Japan after its discovery in 1984 under the title The Songstress of Fate (Unmei

no utahime).73

Propaganda and Resistance in China Nights (1940)

In 1933, at the young age of thirteen, Yamaguchi was recruited to sing “New Manchurian Songs” on Fengtian radio and continued the same work as she pursued

her studies in the following years in Beijing. Though distraught over fervent antiJapanese agitations carried on by the local student body, and torn as she was between mixed allegiance to both China and Japan, the specter of international

politics did not play a dominant part in her life until after 1939. Meanwhile, her

near-native affinity for Chinese language, customs, and culture, coupled with her

professional voice training, set the stage for this talented and attractive Japanese

girl to blossom into budding stardom with Man’ei in 1938 and then rise to spectacular international acclaim. From her film debut in The Honeymoon Express, she

quickly consolidated her reputation by playing leading roles in a series of productions commonly identified as “national policy” films. Her so-called “continental

trilogy” (tairiku sanbusaku)—Song of the White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, 1939),

China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940) and Pledge in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940)—

were soon followed by Suzhou Nights (Soshū no yoru, 1941), Winter Jasmine (Geishunka, 1942), and Glory to Eternity (1943). The shared story line for many of

those films—with the notable exception of the last two—consists of a melodramatic love affair between a young Chinese woman and a Japanese male, the latter

role famously played by such celebrated nimaime matinee idols as Hasegawa

Kazuo and Sano Shūji.74 The film that most prominently brought her early popularity and most significantly marked her transformation from a wide-eyed novice

into a dazzling transnational phenomenon was without doubt China Nights.75

Despite a saccharine romance at its core, further sugarcoated with alluring

songs and melodies over nostalgic shots of Suzhou’s idyllic scenery,76 the Japanese

makers of China Nights scarcely bothered to camouflage the sharply demarcated

power hierarchy and apparent ethnic differences in occupied Shanghai. With the

main exceptions of Zhang Guilan (played by Yamaguchi) and her former housemaid, virtually all the other Chinese appearing in China Nights are presented as

Introduction

xxxv

little more than trivial specimens floating in a sea of humanity, or else as superficial political caricatures with no individual personality traits or other defining

human dimensions to speak of. Yet once they allow themselves the audacity to

display anti-Japanese behavior, their facial expressions quickly darken with menacing maliciousness.77 In marked contrast, virtually all the Japanese characters,

both genders included, are unequivocal paragons of goodness; they are variously

portrayed as compassionate, charitable, good-natured, open-minded, selflessly

brave, and well-mannered to a fault. Even the cane-yielding Japanese ruffian about

to be physically violent with defenseless Guilan at the beginning of the fi lm

promptly receives a good moral thrashing from the high-minded Hase Tetsuo, a

young Japanese merchant seaman played by the dashing Hasegawa Kazuo:

Hey! You better calm down! You, too, are Japanese, aren’t you? Just look at

how all the Chinese around here are looking at you! If you hit the woman,

not knowing what is going on, they’ll certainly lose their good impressions of

the Japanese. . . . Won’t you restrain yourself? Look, you certainly know what

kind of times these are, don’t you? The Chinese will judge the Japanese by

what they see from us in Shanghai. I think we’ve got an urgent obligation to

exercise greater prudence in how we behave.

Even though Hase is convinced that Guilan—referred to throughout the film

as “Keiran” according to Japanese rendering, thereby pointedly marginalizing her

Chinese identity—is imbued with a spirit of resistance against the Japanese (kōnichishugi),78 Hase gallantly pronounces before his friends that, “as Japa nese,” he is

determined to take on the responsibility to combat her misguided beliefs. Far

from developing any belligerent arrogance against or undue hostility toward the

vulnerable girl, he demonstrates extraordinary patience and understanding by

declaring that “there must be reasons and circumstances” behind such seemingly

unfathomable anti-Japanese sentiments. Any acts of discourtesy or violence emanating from the Japanese, if they are allowed to manifest themselves at all, are

directed only toward the supposedly deserving Chinese, whether it is the case of

Hase famously slapping the unappreciative Guilan across the face, or the exhibition of his disgust at the apparently disagreeable snacks peddled by a Chinese

street vendor. Toshiko (played by Hattori Tomiko), the young Japanese woman

expected to be the suitable match for Hase, is an angelic exemplar of understanding

and forgiveness even when Hase and her rival, Guilan, end up married.79 Hase’s

two close Japanese sailor buddies are clearly less refined in speech and attire but

still noble in spirit and reasonably courageous in action when engaging sinisterlooking Chinese operatives.80 Presumably, this barefaced we-versus-them stereotyping was not a particularly effective strategy if China Nights’ embedded agenda

xxxvi

Introduction

was to promote Sino-Japanese friendship and to win over intransigent hearts and

anti-Japanese minds on the continent. It is worth noting that Guilan ends up being

the one and only person the Japa nese succeed in converting to a pro-Japanese

position, if only as a corollary of her marriage to Hase. China Nights, then, becomes

as much a clumsy attempt at fabricating international goodwill through an implausibly staged transnational romance as a self-indulgent glorification of Japan’s

colonizing venture in China.81

Not untypical of Japanese propaganda fi lms of the time, China Nights’ narrative meanders between embroidered melodrama and absurdist theater. Soon

after her rescue by Hase and his saintly Japanese cohorts from a vagabond’s life

on the streets, the previously Mandarin-speaking Shanghai maiden Guilan all of

a sudden proceeds to talk in absolutely impeccable Japanese.82 If her astonishing

linguistic talents could be summoned to explain this stunning feat, nothing could

elucidate her uncle’s singularly puzzling linguistic peculiarities. The Chinese resistance leader is perfectly effortless in interrogating Hase with flowing, non-accented

Japa nese, but can verbalize only virtually indecipherable Chinese words when

speaking alone with Guilan. Likewise, Guilan’s former housemaid, quintessentially

Chinese in manners and attire, can barely manage to speak her supposed mother

tongue as she inquires about the tragic fate of her old master and mistress.83

Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the main characters against Shanghai’s

war-torn cityscape in a number of scenes produces images so outlandishly jarring that, for the local Shanghai audience, good-humored bemusement was perhaps the only possible reaction. With his perfectly tailored seaman’s uniform,

immaculately pressed double-breasted jacket, fashionable fedora, and stylishly

pomaded wavy hair, the supremely self-possessed Hase on occasions conjures up

the image of a peacock surveying his newly colonized turf in an exotic territory.

Supposedly portraying the exemplary gentleman from the benevolent empire of

Japan and not a blown-up caricature, the hero succeeds in cutting a most peculiarly incongruous figure against the average Shanghai citizens under a harsh

foreign occupation.84 Perhaps that was exactly imperial Japan’s self-image in less

guarded moments during its moment of military ascendency vis-à-vis its conquered peoples in East Asia, but the barely camouflaged manifestation of national superiority translates into very bad propaganda and makes a mockery of

its war time rhetoric of pan-Asian harmony and co-prosperity. Meanwhile, in her

profound grief over her dead father and still-missing mother, both victims of the

war’s brutality, poor Guilan is seen in the best of forms as she totters around her

severely war-devastated neighborhood in her fashionable high heels and an expensive overcoat over her elegant qipao. Even though the audience would have

realized by that juncture that China Nights is configured as a contemporary Japa-

xxxvii

nese fairy tale with a Chinese setting, still the degree of willing suspension of

disbelief required of it approaches perverse proportions.

Perhaps the most revealing assessment of Japan’s war time role in China, regardless of how purposefully or inadvertently the various fi lm strategists at Tōhō

might have envisioned it, is delivered by Hase immediately after he famously

slaps Guilan and sends her falling to the ground. What he has to say is a most

remarkable statement:

Keiran, at last, I hit you. I lost [my battle]. This is my punishment [batsu] for

having believed too much in my own power. I was a laughable narcissist [boku

wa kokkei-na unuboreya datta]. Please forgive me. Now leave and go wherever

you please.

This is a stunning reversal of the role played so far by Hase, the noble-minded

Japanese romantic with an unwavering will to present the best face of Japan before

the subjugated Chinese, the man who has keenly taken upon himself the formidable task of transforming Guilan’s intransigent anti-Japanese prejudices. Now we

find his pitiable transmutation into a despairing anti-hero, incapacitated by serious

internal doubts and consumed by an ego-deflating realization about the limitations of his ability. The once-dominating colonizing male now assumes a humble

posture of defeat, the romantic now in an embarrassing retreat. It is at this point

that Guilan, supposedly in deep traumatic shock mixed with romantic awakening,

comes to recognize the hero’s true affections and rushes to Hase’s side in appreciative tears, holding onto his leg and pleading with him to let her stay. She reinforces

her unmistakable posture of subservience by crying out how happy she is after

having been slapped by her abuser, and by repeatedly begging for his forgiveness.

This particular sequence, arguably one of the most unforgettable images from

wartime Japanese fi lms about China, is often highlighted as the colonizer’s ultimate triumph at winning the heart of the colonized, the hero finally getting the

girl. Tanikawa Takeshi, for example, has described Yamaguchi’s role as a “visual

symbol embodying the rhetoric that Japanese continental advances (tairiku shinshutsu) would channel happiness to the people of China.”85 Comparing the first

phase of China Nights to The Taming of the Shrew, Peter B. High likewise describes

director Fushimizu Osamu’s film as one that “works the rich metaphorical possibilities afforded by the commonplace image of China as a disreputable ‘woman’

in need of redemption.”86

Against conventional wisdom, controversies have arisen over whether China

Nights, sometimes compared to a Hollywood-style musical spiced with sweet romance and action scenes, can indeed be stigmatized as a blatant “national policy”

xxxviii

Introduction

fi lm. To be sure, Kimura Chiio, the scriptwriter for Song of the White Orchid

screened just a year before, had stated in the fi lm journal Kinema Junpō as early

as July 1940 that China Nights’ quasi-propaganda style was employed merely as a

means to circumvent Japanese censorship.87 More recently, in 2003, the historian

Furukawa Takahisa has challenged the same orthodoxy by suggesting that the

fi lm should more properly be categorized as a typical “entertainment fi lm.” Additionally, it has been noted that the international romance at its core and China

Nights’ “shallow” entertainment value had in fact been repeatedly disparaged

by various parties in Japan, including the Home Ministry itself, as well as such

notable film critics as Tsumura Hideo.88

While the wisdom of Furukawa’s binary categorization of “entertainment”

versus “national policy” fi lms has in turn been questioned by other scholars of

Japanese war time cinema,89 the critical discourse over a more precise interpretation of China Nights deserves attention from other often neglected analytical perspectives. First, the exact dynamic leading to Guilan’s dramatic change of heart

has benefitted from several intriguing diagnostic angles. It can be argued that it

is precisely Hase’s open admission of personal vulnerability and failure, rather

than his violent action toward her, that succeeds in converting the adamant

Guilan, leads to her dissolving in uncontrollable tears, and results in her total

submission to her conqueror’s self-effacing charms.90 Others, however, contend

that Hase’s humble confession might not have been what it innocently purported

to be—that is, a moment of serious self-reflection that delivers a rare glimpse into

his internal thoughts—but rather is a clever strategic move on the part of Japanese imperialist propaganda. The trick is to take a premeditated step backward,

as the argument goes, only to aim at more effectively accomplishing the greater

goal of converting the hearts of the still-recalcitrant locals.91

There were enough dramatic representations of male-to-female violence as a

formulaic spark igniting their ensuing romance in prewar Japanese popular entertainment that Yamaguchi herself was apparently convinced that the human dynamic in China Nights was following the same time-honored recipe, even though

the abused party was Chinese and not Japanese.92 In her postwar reminiscences,

she clearly understood the cultural and political effects of this par ticular episode

on her Chinese audiences, as shown in the following quotation:

The physical pain is not the only reason why I remember this scene shot some

forty years ago. This episode remains unforgettable to this day because it later

became a matter of contention during my hanjian trial. Additionally, the

scene indicated how differently the Japanese and the Chinese customarily

looked at such interactions. In prewar Japan, a man striking a woman could

also be seen as expressing his love for her. On stage as well as in fi lms, the

Introduction

xxxix

abused woman, impressed by the perpetrator’s strong masculinity and grateful for his sentiments, would frequently come to cherish renewed feelings of

love for the man. Yet this representation was something peculiar to Japanese

sensibilities. . . . In Chinese eyes, the idea of a woman falling for a man after

he had abused her constituted humiliation twice over. Moreover, the Chinese

audience saw this scene in the context of what was then happening in SinoJapanese relations between the victim and the aggressor. Far from being

moved by the expression of love in the way the Japanese were, the Chinese

were goaded into greater hatred for the Japanese by their action which further

inflamed the resistance. Hence the effect of the fi lm was exactly the opposite

of its intended propagandist goal.93

That such representations of Sino-Japanese romance failed to fi nish what

they set out to accomplish in China was not lost on a number of Japanese critics

of the time. The fi lm commentator Hazumi Tsuneo, for example, suggested that

Japanese films about China should henceforth “respect Chinese culture, customs,

and language” and went so far as to propose that Li Xianglan publicly revert to

her original Japanese name and appear as a Chinese-speaking Japanese actress.

Instead of concentrating attention on international romance, he proposed that

future fi lms sing praises of Sino-Japanese cooperation and expose the damages

inflicted on China by the presence of the British and U.S. concessions.94

The idea that Hase’s confession represents a shrewd Machiavellian ploy on

his part is theoretically provocative but contextually difficult to sustain. Neither

the tenor of the narrative with its emphasis on the unmitigated nobility of Japan’s

action on the continent nor Hase’s character traits as revealed until that critical

juncture sufficiently prepare the audience for such a drastic change in his personality. Furthermore, never again in the film does Hase exhibit the same unscrupulous cunning in his dealings with Guilan, or indeed with any other character or characters, including the hated members of the Chinese resistance. Even

granting that Yamaguchi’s “national policy” films as a whole are not particularly

known for their adherence to structural integrity or narrative verisimilitude, it

still seems remarkably incongruous for such an undeviatingly compassionate

and principled specimen of the Japanese Empire to then and only then manifest

his true self as a calculating and insidious schemer.

What makes the incorporation of Hase’s intimate confession so interpretatively tantalizing in this unabashed propaganda film is its very redundancy within

the overall narrative structure. One could hardly imagine what possible political

purpose such a soul-searching admission of personal failure might serve the imperialist agenda of the Japanese Empire. Even if that entire episode had been eliminated, the fi lm would scarcely have deviated from its essential plotline, nor would

xl

Introduction

its removal have changed the fundamental trajectory of its ideological gospel.

Indeed, the expulsion of the entire sequence would have given greater affi rmative

recognition and structural consistency to Hase’s romantic heroism by erasing any

debilitating doubts over his strength of character and sternness of purpose. There

is, in other words, no par ticu lar dramaturgic exigency or ideological imperative

to underscore Hase’s internal despair and to create a cloud of skepticism over his

sense of nationalist resolve—unless the intent lies elsewhere.

It is here that the interpolation of Hase’s internal monologue in China Nights

may benefit from a new analytical interrogation by focusing on the work of its

screenwriter Oguni Hideo (1904–1996). I propose that one possible strategy is

to see Hase’s statement as a carefully camouflaged critique of Japan’s narcissistic

wartime role in East Asia, as well as of its inflated political rhetoric and pathetic

sense of self-importance. The dangerous exercise was cleverly insulated from the

censors and political repercussions through a dramatic disguise in the style of a

confession from none other than the cinematic emblem of Japanese wartime righteousness. Oguni’s earlier background and his future career, to the extent that we

know them, do in some ways oblige us to ponder what actually might have transpired in this intriguing episode.

As a young man, Oguni participated in the bold New Village Movement

(atarashiki mura), an ambitious socialist-inspired communal living project promoted and organized by the leading White Birch school (Shirakaba-ha) novelist

Mushanokōji Saneatsu beginning in 1918.95 There is no evidence to ascertain

whether the young man’s action was inspired by Tolstoy’s humanistic tenets or a

sanguine belief in the fullest possible actualization of the human potential, both

marked tendencies shared by many White Birch writers.96 Moreover, Oguni’s involvement in the utopian project in rural Kyushu by itself was insufficient to

demonstrate what his political orientation was around 1940; nor can his earlier

activity suggest what his par ticular reception of Japan’s imperialist ideology was

at the time. What we do know is that war time filmmakers, including Yamamoto

Satsuo, Imai Tadashi, and Kamei Fumio, were routinely compelled to assist Japan’s

national efforts or, as Yamamoto himself wrote, face the specter of imprisonment

and torture.97 While reported instances of such harsh punishment of wartime

film artists were exceedingly rare, one needs only to be reminded of the arrest and

imprisonment of the fi lm critic Iwasaki Akira in 1940, the detention of Kamei

Fumio in 1941, and the subsequent loss of the latter’s director’s license to realize

that Yamamoto’s fears were not merely delusional.

Even though one might never truly learn about Oguni’s wartime experiences

or his precise reception of Japanese aggression in China, his distinguished postwar contributions do offer us tantalizing clues. Many of his celebrated postwar

screenplays, written over several decades in collaboration with Kurosawa Akira,

Introduction

xli

Hashimoto Shinobu, and Kikushima Ryūzō, often strongly suggest the lasting

impact of Russian-inspired humanism and more so of the team’s extraordinary

imaginative powers and narrative sophistication.98 All circumstantial factors considered, it is perhaps not too farfetched to imagine Oguni’s internal conflict while

working as a wartime scriptwriter, whether his anxiety might have been the result

of overt political pressure or self-imposed torment during a period of particularly

stringent censorship control.99 The dilemma he likely faced, between exercising

his creative autonomy and his fears about possible political repercussions, could

well have been a compelling dynamic that helped deliver the script for China

Nights. Oguni’s contemporary Kimura Chiio’s observation that China Nights might

only be simulated propaganda appears to corroborate this imagined scenario.

Yamamoto Satsuo’s postwar autobiography reminds us how freedom of expression for the filmmaker after the outbreak of the Pacific War meant just whatever

little freedom he could exercise in hoodwinking the Japanese military (“seizei ika

ni sukoshi demo gun no me o gomakasu ka”).100 Perhaps Oguni, too, was practicing

this delicate art as his only possible form of wartime resistance. Under his pen,

Hase Tetsuo remains the quintessential courier for the expanding Japanese Empire,

though not always in the way Japan’s imperialist ideology intended him to be.

Yamaguchi’s other wartime films suggest a mosaic of reactions to the demands

Japan’s imperialist ideology made on the fi lm industry. In Song of the White

Orchid, for example, the Chinese heroine played by Yamaguchi joins a group of

anti-Japanese Communist forces before she finally succumbs to her former love,

Matsumura Yasukichi, a Japanese Mantetsu engineer played by Hasegawa Kazuo.

Upon seeing her in military uniform, the Japanese hero cannot help asking in

utter astonishment, “How dare you present such a sight as this? You, a woman

with such a deep appreciation for us Japanese!”101 Satō Tadao has given a catchy

name for films of this sort, calling them “rashamen” movies, a derogatory term

originally employed to refer to Japanese women who allowed themselves to be

degraded by becoming mistresses to Westerners.102 “It seems to be a kind of universal archetype,” Satō writes. “When the conqueror wishes to enlist the cooperation of the conquered, he creates a love story with the male as conqueror and

the female as the conquered.”103 It has been pointed out by fi lm scholars such as

Freda Freiberg that the ideological motivation behind this genre of interracial

and transnational romance was to sugarcoat the brutality of Japanese aggression

in China with a love story and a self-fulfi lling national fantasy.104 In the same

vein, the fi lm scholar Yiman Wang argues that “[t]he political agenda of expansionism and assimilationism was packaged in the form of depoliticized, sentimentalized romance which, combined with Li’s musical interludes, won her panEast Asia appeal.”105 Speaking on Song of the White Orchid, Satō Tadao offers the

following view on the Japanese perspective on China:

xlii

Introduction

Japan was represented by the role played by Hasegawa, and China by that of

Li Xianglan. If China had trusted and depended on Japan in the same way,

Japan would surely reward her with love. That was the fi lm’s message expressed through a romance. To the Chinese, that was simply an idiotic and

deceitful idea taken by Japan unilaterally to subject China to humiliation.

For the Japanese living within Japan with no knowledge about the reality of

Japanese invasion of China, it was a sweet fantasy that indulged their naïve

self-conceit. Japanese movie fans were intoxicated by this fantasy. That was

why the fi lm became a hit. They saw Li Xianglan as a pitiable, pure-hearted

Chinese maiden who truly fell for a Japanese male. Since Japan was the object

of such adoration by the Chinese, a logic was thus formed that Japan was not

an aggressor in China but merely its mentor.106

Such self-complacent representations of Sino-Japanese wartime relationship

characteristically manifest but backfire on themselves in the continental trilogy

(1939–1940). During the screening in Beijing and other northern Chinese cities

of Pledge in the Desert, a roundtable was organized among Chinese men of letters

to discuss its reception. Greeting it with a round of criticisms, one Chinese reviewer looked upon the transnational romance as “highly artificial” when seen

from the context of the players’ student-teacher relationship. Accordingly, ordinary Chinese viewers were likely to form a very negative impression of the Japanese as “terrible egoists” and “utterly unfeeling men.” Moreover, Japa nese fi lmmakers of China Nights and Pledge in the Desert were said to have done “no research

whatsoever” on Chinese sentiments and customs; dwellings in both Beijing and in

the rural areas are presented with the same undistinguishable style, while the

Japanese actor playing a Communist Eighth Route Army soldier appears even to

have his hair permed.107

Propaganda Repackaged: Winter Jasmine (1942)

Produced in the transitional period between the continental trilogy and Glory

to Eternity (1943), Winter Jasmine (Geishunka, 1942) appears at first sight to be a

marked generic departure from the trite melodramatic concoctions delivered in

Yamaguchi’s earlier films.108 Set in the northeastern cities of Fengtian and Harbin, the story describes a series of bumbling but endearing adventures of a Japanese company employee named Murakawa Takeo as he attempts to adapt to the

new cultural environment in the Manchurian wonderland that he now calls home.

Yamaguchi appears as Bai Li, a most conveniently bilingual Chinese maiden

who works in the same company headed by Murakawa’s uncle.

Introduction

xliii

Despite his fine reputation as “the best graduate” from a university in Tokyo,

Murakawa at first sight does not seem to exemplify either the masculine or nationalistic ideals of a belligerent state epitomized by the earlier roles of Hasegawa

Kazuo or Sano Shūji. Apparently, this new expatriate to Manchuria cares only

about petty, mundane affairs that have little to do with the all-important advancement of the empire’s interests: how much his monthly pay would be, whether it

would allow him the occasional luxury of sake and tobacco, and where he can

find adequate accommodation in town. In addition, the male lead played by the

Shōchiku-Ōfuna actor Konoe Toshiaki hardly reminds one of the handsome

heartthrobs who had earlier appeared in Yamaguchi’s films as her love interest.

Instead, Murakawa is a stocky, bespectacled, lackluster, and socially awkward

white-collar worker who is also physically clumsy in demeanor; he is perhaps the

most embarrassingly bad ice skater amongst his company’s colleagues. Yet his undeviating goal is total immersion in Manchurian life, even to the point of declining an offer of comfortable lodging from the director’s daughter, Yae (played by

Kogure Michiyo), in favor of a rental unit from a local Chinese family.

The Japanese company director is an enthusiast of Chinese calligraphy and a

good friend and former classmate of Bai Li’s father, a former student in Japan. One

time, comparing unnamed Manchurian paintings from unidentified artists of “a

thousand years ago,” which he sees in a local museum, with the late Momoyama

and early Edo works of Hon’ami Kōetsu and Tawaraya Sōtatsu “five hundred years

ago,”109 the director is so struck by their close similarities in design and color

execution that he proclaims to Mr. Bai that all those artworks must have originated from the same source. He proceeds to declare that from a broad historical

perspective, Manchurian and Japanese art represent one common “East Asian”

(Tōyō) aesthetic, thereby audaciously entangling two disparate artistic traditions

into a common heritage. Slavishly but not surprisingly, Mr. Bai agrees with the

former’s views by characterizing the observations of his Japanese friend and his

daughter’s boss as “insightful.”

In contrast to Yamaguchi’s earlier fi lms with more explicitly-articulated nationalist themes and undertones, the high-minded Japanese male and vulnerable

Chinese maiden archetype undergoes a transformation here with a soft-power

projection of sorts. In one scene, however, the director Sasaki Kō foregoes whatever inhibitions he might have had earlier by having a Japanese company executive proclaim, quite surprisingly to the face of the newly-arrived Murakawa, that

“the ultimate fate of Japan rests with the consolidation of power in the north”—

apparently a reference to Manchuria—rather than with “the southward advance”

(“nanshin suru tame ni wa kita o katamerubeki”). Bai Li and Yae are brought forth

as cultural or perhaps even national symbols, both trying, in varying ways, to

attract the attention of Murakawa, the awkward, unattractive, but nonetheless

xliv

Introduction

colonial male to be reckoned with. Both women are on the company’s ice-skating

team, and the fact that they are rivals of sorts is accentuated by the insinuation

among some company colleagues that Bai Li should replace Yae on the team because the former is a better skater.

To be sure, there are instances in the film where the grand ideal of JapaneseManchurian amity takes clear precedence over the private wishes of a Japanese

woman represented by Yae. Yet unlike some of the more transparent “national

policy” films, Winter Jasmine does not concern itself directly with the redemption

of intransigent anti-Japanese sentiments, with the rhetoric of co-prosperity for

“Greater East Asia,” or with the exploits of white imperialists in Asia before the altruistic intervention of the Japanese. Neither does it deliver scenes of open military

conflict to demonstrate the superiority of Japan’s military discipline or the nobility

of its fighting men. Even the overt political reference to the relative importance of

strengthening Japanese control in Manchuria—an artlessly abrupt intrusion into

the narrative—speaks only of a tactical priority rather than singing praises of

Japan’s continental enterprise itself. What it does attempt to accomplish is to underscore the interracial harmony, transnational goodwill, and genuine accommodation of the Japanese colonizers in their interactions with Manchuria’s colonized

people. The company director’s warm embrace of Manchurian aesthetics and Murakawa’s single-minded attempt to immerse himself in Manchurian society and

culture clearly illustrate the point. There is no fundamental subversion or rethinking of the power relationship between the colonizing and colonized hierarchies

relative to what had been presented in the continental trilogy, but the old relationship is repackaged according to a new style of paternalistic imagination.

Winter Jasmine properly belongs to a genre sometimes referred to as tairiku

mono or “continental fi lms,” productions that were typically set in colonized

Manchuria or in areas under Japanese control in China. Satō Tadao points out

that despite the appearance of certain “anti-Japanese elements” in such films, they

are merely “duped” (mayowasareru) by the Kuomintang or Communist propaganda to the point of misapprehending Japan’s real intentions about the new order

in East Asia.110 In the case of Winter Jasmine, however, even such benign “antiJapanese elements” have been rendered immaterial as the very notion has been

preempted by the alleged aesthetic bond between Manchurian and Japanese art.

The underlying message is clear: spiritual brothers whose forefathers drank from

the same cultural wellspring cannot and must not be enemies.

Li Xianglan’s Gu’niang as Paradigm of Foreignness

As representations of Japan’s wartime self-image, political postures, and professed transnational goals, the continental trilogy and its successors throughout

Introduction

xlv

the war years were not just meant for the enlightenment of colonized peoples in

East Asia; no less importantly, they were crafted for Japan’s domestic consumption

as well. Rapid expansion of the Asian war theater after 1937 and the accompanying need to re-enunciate and refurbish the legitimacy of alleged Sino-Japanese

solidarity and the pan-Asianist agenda of Japan’s war efforts made it imperative

that a strategy of massive public outreach be developed both abroad and at home.

On Japanese soil, one cultural product emerging from this cinematic onslaught

was the increasing public receptiveness to Chinese or “continentally flavored”

melodies, spurred earlier on by such songs as “China Nights,” “When Will You

Return?” and “The Suzhou Serenade” performed by Yamaguchi and Watanabe

Hamako. For instance, thanks to Watanabe’s earlier recording, “When Will You

Return?” swept over Japan in 1939 while “The Suzhou Serenade” reached the

height of its popularity during and shortly after Yamaguchi’s per formance in

Tokyo’s Nichigeki Theater in early 1941.111

At the same time, it is important to note that Yamaguchi’s cinematic roles

did not merely represent young, vulnerable Chinese women subserviently awaiting Japanese salvation before irresistibly falling for the single-minded and morally upright Japanese colonial male; her maidenly portraits did not simply fill the

role of the docile sheep in Satō Tadao’s rashamen analogy. In time, her screen

persona in effect took on a more autonomous aura and compelling presence not

only to her viewers but also to her romantic male counterpart. This was accomplished partly by vigorously marketing Li Xianglan in Japan as “a beauty of exotic

charm” through the publicity channels of Man’ei, Tōhō, and Shōchiku. In this

connection, Isolde Standish draws our attention to what she calls “a discourse of

inter-Asian Orientalism” by underscoring the fact that Yamaguchi’s body was

“invested with a sexualized image of what the colonies represented to the Japanese at the time of their attempt at continental expansion.”112 The fi lm critic Shimizu Akira explains that “Li Xianglan, through her attractive Chinese style, her

captivating singing voice and her fluency in Japa nese, embodied an idealized

image of China that appealed to Japanese people.”113

Along with the carefully repackaged image of Li Xianglan as an enticingly

exotic Manchurian gu’niang,114 the promotion of her unique femininity and sex

appeal became an altogether necessary part of the overall strategy. There is a

particularly revealing episode in her autobiography in which she describes how,

during the filming of Song of the White Orchid, her coactor Hasegawa Kazuo

endeavored to tutor her in the delicate acting of seduction:

The special lecture Hasegawa gave me on acting had to do with the art of

iroke. . . . 115 As might be expected of a former onnagata,116 the way his eyes,

body, and hands moved and gestured to produce the desired effect was far

more feminine than what I could accomplish. Watching him perform was

xlvi

Introduction

sufficient to bring a flush to my face. “Your eyes must only be half-open and

your head tilts just a little to the side. Look at a person out of the corner of

your eyes and then slowly move your line of vision downwards.” I must say

that such instructions didn’t do me much good, as I was both amused and

embarrassed.117

Here the lesson offered by the authoritative onnagata on the Japanese art of iroke

was not merely distasteful when measured against Yamaguchi’s well-cultivated

Chinese sensibilities; it typically exemplifies the cultural hegemony of the foreign

over indigenous norms in the practice of colonizing ideology, invariably privileging the perpetrators in their moment of ascendancy. To be sure, this pattern of

cultural manipulation was consistent with the formal structuring of power. In

reality, however, there was often a degree of boundary-crossing fluidity between

the involved parties; strictly-defined hierarchies of power often failed to contain

or determine spontaneous movements of taste and sensibility produced by the

prevailing human dynamic.

Popular Japanese imagination in the late 1930s and early 1940s was quick to

identify Li Xianglan’s exceptional appeal within the cultural parameters surrounding her assumed continental ethnicity. The subservience and vulnerabilities of

her roles aside, she epitomized an alluring foreign body too physically attractive

to be summarily shunned and too internally value-vested to be easily dismissed.

Because her affections for the dominating Japanese male had come to be seen as a

prerequisite for the latter’s full self-actualization—this was undoubtedly the lesson

the audience would draw from Hase’s experience in China Nights—the deceivingly

submissive Chinese maiden in time became an indispensable self-affirming trophy

to be actively sought after rather than rejected with imperial disdain. In a connected discussion, Ikeda Shinobu has argued that Japan’s male-dominated imperialism saw the otherness in Li dressed in Chinese attire—in his words “Shinafuku

no onna”—as a juxtaposition of dual objects of desire, of China on the one hand

and the female object on the other;118 the two had become inseparable. But now the

trajectory of power and control was no longer flowing in just one direction but

traversing with indeterminate volatility between the male and the female.

This new cultural imagination of the foreign female body epitomized by Li

Xianglan soon turned the Chinese maiden into a powerful object of desire without whom the colonizing male’s ever-present need for dominance and, indeed,

his manhood itself, could scarcely be physically acted upon, sentimentally ratified, and psychologically fulfilled, and thereby be fully imagined. It is from this

perspective that Li’s Chinese gu’niang, then, represents a fascinating departure—

and arguably a new paradigm shift—from the more traditional formulations

of colonized bodies from East Asia in modern Japa nese cultural and literary

Introduction

xlvii

imagination. A contrast with other examples of how the foreign body had been

conceived and articulated in prewar Japan helps to illustrate the point.

For example, Peter Duus underscores Japanese presentations in travel accounts

and guidebooks of the Koreans whom they had colonized as a quasi-subhuman

race, even beastly in their habits. Diet member and Hiroshima newspaper editor

Arakawa Gorō had this to say about the Koreans he saw in the aftermath of the

Russo-Japanese War:

If you look closely [at the Koreans], they appear to be a bit vacant, their mouths

open and their eyes dull. . . . In the lines of their mouths and faces you can

discern a certain looseness, and when it comes to sanitation or sickness they

are loose in the extreme. Indeed, to put it in the worst terms, one could even

say that they are closer to beasts than to human beings.119

From the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese cultural imagination

was not particularly known for its encompassing accommodation of elements

deemed either too foreign or heterogeneous to the nation’s increasingly collectivized cultural or social values. Continued discrimination and social prejudices

against the Asian other— Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese included—have been

well-documented in contemporary reports, reminiscences, and a variety of other

writings. Even the metaphorically diseased body of the untouchable caste, most

notably personified in Meiji literary imagination by the eta village teacher Ushimatsu in Shimazaki Tōson’s “naturalist” novel Broken Commandment (Hakai,

1906), for example, was pitilessly denied communal embrace within the realm of

a newly imperialized Japan. Ostracized by his ethno-racial compatriots in late

Meiji society, Ushimatsu ends up as an exile in a foreign land—in this instance

the United States—thereby effectively reduced to a colonized object conveniently

amputated from his supposedly sanitized homeland.120

Just as the more immediate pre-1937 representations of China by as diverse

a group of writers and playwrights as Kuroshima Denji, Hirabayashi Taiko,

Maedakō Hiroichirō, Murayama Tomoyoshi, and Yokomitsu Riichi cannot be

easily packaged into any neatly defined category, the very complex subject of Japanese literary writing on China in the immediate post-1937 period likewise defies

easy generalizations. Depictions of war weariness and ghastly acts of barbarism

by the Japa nese military in Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s story “Soldiers Alive” (Ikiteiru

heitai, 1938) contrast with Hayashi Fusao’s agitated proclamation in his “The

Shanghai Front” (Shanhai sensen, 1937) that “pacifists of any kind have no choice

but to rise and fight with weapons in hand. The Japanese expatriates are fighting!

And fight they will!”121 Yet among the dispatches from many literary figures sent

to the Chinese front by their publishers, journals, or the government, it is not

xlviii

Introduction

difficult to detect an ominous pattern of cultural and aesthetic marginalization

when it came to their portraits of China. In many instances, this was carried

through an undertone ranging from condescending indifference and offhanded

dismissal to outright contempt. Often, a nativist chauvinism affected travelers’ reports on China’s cultural conditions and social customs whose immediate foreignness and incomprehensibility to Japanese sensibilities served only to accentuate

the latter’s impatience and displeasure toward them.

Tendencies of this kind revealingly appear in the travelogues of the cultural

and literary critic Kobayashi Hideo, who first visited China from February to

April 1938 as a special correspondent for the literary journal Bungei Shunjū and

then as a private traveler from October to December in the same year. With typical aloofness and emotional disengagement characteristic of a befuddled sightseer from a hegemonic power traversing an unfamiliar and subjugated land, Kobayashi commented on a diversity of scenes and people ranging from the monks

and the West Lake in Hangzhou and the gardens and temples of Suzhou to humble sugarcane juice vendors and dirty children on war-torn streets.122 Predictably

or curiously, depending on one’s perspective, he showed no par ticu lar eagerness

to explore the horrendous conditions of war-ravaged Nanjing after its recent fall

into Japanese hands, saying that he didn’t think there was anything he wanted to

see.123 Not even the extraordinary scale of human suffering following Japanese

atrocities was enough to motivate the interest or curiosity of this Japanese traveler who had just a few months earlier written a most striking essay “On War”

(Sensō ni tsuite, November 1937), ruminating, among other things, about the

relative significance of war and literature.124

As a whole, Kobayashi’s travelogues produce no truly engaging Chinese portraits; the author himself confessed, apparently with few misgivings, to his difficulty in identifying and thereby authenticating what to him was the elusive Chinese

character. Apparently, as most of his wartime writings on China reveal, the Chinese

living their days under Japanese occupation—men, women, and children—were all

too distant, too alien, and too blurred as cultural or aesthetic objects to deserve

his genuine empathy or even close attention.

On the other hand, among the Russians he saw along Harbin’s main business

thoroughfare, the faces of the beggar, the barmaid, and the hotel bellhop all reminded him of familiar figures he had read about in Russian literature. He might

have been able to encounter Prince Myshkin’s face on the streets of Manchuria,

he wrote, but finding “Ah Q’s face in the streets of Beijing” posed a more difficult

challenge.125 When attempting to come to terms with this “unanticipated” and

apparently somewhat irksome cognitive hurdle, Kobayashi ended up putting the

blame squarely on China’s inadequacy, or more precisely, on what he considered

Introduction

xlix

China’s “total absence of a modern literature to bestow new expressions on its

ethnic character.”126 Even Lu Xun’s contributions in this regard were dismissed

offhandedly as “apparently circumscribed,” as they did not quite qualify for what

Kobayashi had in mind.127 Kobayashi’s Manchurian impressions might have produced intimate echoes with his engagements with Dostoevsky or Chekhov, but

many established Chinese men of letters who could have enlightened him about

a thing or two on the subject were apparently beyond Kobayashi’s immediate referential range or concern.128 It is, then, hardly surprising that Kobayashi’s encounter with the faces of “tens of thousands” of Chinese war refugees inspired little

more than a retrogressive rumination that he could hardly understand those

nameless individuals, equipped as he was with nothing more than fragments from

The Book of Songs (Shijing) as his frame of reference to the country.129 In another

most telling episode, Kobayashi surveyed from his second-floor room the more

intimate habits of some Chinese he saw in Nanjing. Characteristically, he failed

to identify, contextualize, or make sense of the broader cultural or human significance beyond the perplexing immediacy of his experience:

Even the way they wiped themselves [after defecation] was the reverse of ours.

Such a custom was bound to produce a certain psychological inclination but

it was not clear just what kind of inclination.130

Kobayashi’s striking dissociation of sensibility from that country in 1938

ominously furnished the pertinent cultural context to situate Hase Tetsuo’s China

experiences in China Nights in 1940 on the silver screen. On the other hand, Japanese popu lar imagination of Li Xianglan, widely assumed to be an emblem of

quintessential Chineseness no less than the citizens of Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou,

or Harbin, represented a dramatic departure from images of blandness, filth,

chaos, vulgarity, and inscrutability that Kobayashi had recorded just a few years

earlier in occupied China. Instead, the remarkable phenomenon of Li Xianglan

was internally conceptualized, aesthetically embellished, culturally sterilized, and

politically repackaged in Japan for the benefit of the empire’s own domestic consumption no less than its utilitarian functions in Japan’s colonized territories.

The invention and subsequent idealization and commodification of this particular

foreign body, simultaneously extolled for its romantic appeal, feminine charms,

and political subservience, was largely a product of political and aesthetic mediation through the prism of myth formation. In the process, self-revered reassurances

being made of the validity of Japan’s national role and the legitimacy of its expansionist ideology also served to massage and romanticize the country’s own

national ego.

l

Introduction

Hand in hand with these tendencies came, as we have seen, Japan’s active

mythologizing of Manchuria as a land of rich and unexplored opportunities, an

exciting shintenchi to realize dreams crushed by the harsh realities of life in Japan

itself. The film critic Shimizu Akira has pointed out that “To the Japanese youths

at the time, the idea of advancing into the Asian continent held a mesmeric allure

similar to the prospect of living in Europe or the United States for the young

people today.” “Li Xianglan was the queen in their dreams with visions of a colorful rainbow connecting Japan and the continent,” he continued. “The fact that

she was Japanese was nothing short of a historical irony.”131 Li Xianglan, like the

idea but not the reality of Manchuria, was symbolically transformed into a cultural

site where fantasies were concocted and perpetuated through an ideologically

driven cultural imagination. Commenting on “Japanese colonies as a mythic place

for the Japanese imagination, and Japanese power, to roam,” Alan Tansman quotes

Yasuda Yojūrō’s ruminations on Manchuria and Mongolia:

Japan is now at the threshold of an unprecedented and magnificent era. . . .

Our young people, in Manchuria and Mongolia, are forging a new spirit, a

new reality, a new logic, a new sensibility through a form never before formed,

and they are living that magnificent conception in daily life, amidst chaos and

confusion. We already feel in our hearts the stirrings of a new resolution and

system, and a new myth.132

When political expediencies driving Japan’s imperialist enterprise helped

channel the mythologizing energies from this new cultural imagination into the

realm of visual media, the conditions were ripe for the emergence of Yamaguchi’s

wartime films, from the continental trilogy to Winter Jasmine. The mythos was

expressed, for example, through Suzhou Nights in a scene in a Shanghai orphanage where the selfless act of a young Japanese doctor saves the life of a drowning

child. Should the recipients of Japan’s goodwill remain stubbornly resistant to its

benevolence and generosity, then other strategies and other myths were formulated to underscore the patriarchic munificence—and the sternness of purpose—

of the colonizing master. And here is where, in China Nights, the physical violence

toward an unappreciative colonized subject becomes a necessary part of the overall meta-narrative. Others such as Winter Jasmine offered themselves to buttress

the empty political rhetoric of “cooperation and harmony among the five races”

(gozoku kyōwa)133 and the representation of colonized Manchuria as “a land of

happiness under benevolent rule” (ōdō rakudo). Japan’s war time propaganda

films examined in this essay, crude public instruments in the service of equally

crude political slogans, come to us as cautionary tales about a recklessly bellicose

nation and its more frantic supporters whose egos, at once jingoistic and combative

Introduction

li

but also fragile and delusional, eagerly coveted the physical subservience, cuddling

reassurance, and indulging affirmations from what only simulated characters

like Guilan in China Nights or Mr. Bai in Winter Jasmine could deliver. In the end,

the war time cinematic roles of Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Li Xianglan were central

to the unfolding of this black political farce, absurdist theater, and ultimately, sad

human drama.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Notes

1. This essay refers to the singer/actress by her birth name, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, while her Chinese stage name, “Li Xianglan,” is used when context clearly

warrants it over the former signifier.

2. Liu Xue’an (1905–1985) has generally been credited as the composer of

“When Will You Return?” while Hattori Ryōichi (1907–1993) wrote the music for

“The Suzhou Serenade.” For details, see chapter 7 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography (coauthored with Fujiwara Sakuya), Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha,

1987), and my annotation in note 14 in that chapter in the translation. Many consider

“The Evening Primose” (Yelaixiang), composed and with lyrics by Li Jinguang and

performed as early as 1944 in Shanghai, as Yamaguchi’s most renowned number

during and after the war years. Besides the song’s various interpretations by an array

of vocalists in China, Taiwan, and Japan after 1945, there have been other renditions

over the years in Korean and Cantonese. The two versions in Japanese, with lyrics by

Saeki Takao and Fujiura Kō, respectively, unfortunately do not do justice to the original Chinese, a view shared by Yamaguchi herself, as she told me in my interview

with her on September 6, 2008. For Yamaguchi’s famous performance “Rhapsody of

the Evening Primrose” in May 1945 at Shanghai’s Grand Theater, see chapter 13.

3. Still considered in China to be a controversial fi lm, China Nights was instrumental in establishing Yamaguchi as a transnational star. For an anthropological

study on postwar Japanese nostalgia for the continent and Manchuria, see Mariko

Asano Tamanoi, Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

4. Fengtian (Hōten in Japanese) was the largest city in Manchukuo during the

Japanese occupation; it is the present-day city of Shenyang. Xinjing (Shinkyō in Japanese) was Manchukuo’s capital and is now the city of Changchun.

5. The same, however, cannot apply to some of her still “sensitive” war time

fi lms. For a list of her CDs on sale in Japan in as late as 2003, see Yamaguchi Yoshiko,

Ri Kōran o ikite: Watashi no rirekisho (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2007), pp. 219–

220. The attention the media has given her will be discussed later in this essay.

293

294

Notes to Pages xviii–xx

6. Acknowledgement (April 1, 1992), in Li Xianglan/Yoshiko Yamaguchi Special, the 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival.

7. Mention of Li Xianglan in Hong Kong often invites a reference to Cheung’s

popu lar number. One of my Shanghai acquaintances, who is in her thirties, also remembers Li from the same song. Not unfittingly, it comes with original music by a

Japanese composer, the singer-songwriter Tamaki Kōji.

8. The proliferation of television programs and musicals on Yamaguchi’s life

can be viewed as part of a remarkable revival of transnational interest, starting in

the late 1980s, in the singer and actress in both China and Japan. The China-Japan

coproduction Sayonara Ri Kōran (Bie’le Li Xianglan in Chinese, with Sawaguchi

Yoshiko in the leading role) was made in 1989. The famed Japa nese theater company

Shiki under Asari Keita’s artistic direction staged well-received per formances of Yamaguchi’s life throughout major cities in Japan from 1991 to 2006, with overseas

per formances in China (1992) and Singapore (1997). Its popularity in China can be

seen from Yiman Wang’s finding that “[it] was staged fifteen times in Beijing, Changchun, Shenyang, and Dalian to a Chinese audience of twenty thousand.” See Wang’s

“Between the National and the Transnational,” IIAS Newsletter 38, no. 9 (2005): 7.

An hour-long television program, “Ri Kōran and Yamaguchi Yoshiko” (Ri Kōran

soshite Yamaguchi Yoshiko) was aired on Japan Television (Nihon Terebi) on October 15, 2000, dramatizing the actress’ life and her struggles, with additional commentaries by Fujiwara Sakuya and others. I also wish to call attention to the well-known

two-part TV movie Ri Kōran aired on TV Tokyo in February 2007, with Ueto Aya in

the leading role. Other Japa nese television dramas in which the character Yamaguchi Yoshiko appears include “Ruten no ōhi: Saigo no kōtei” (Terebi Asahi, 2003)

based on the story of Madame Hiro, the Japa nese wife of Pujie and the younger

brother of Puyi, and “Dansō no reijin: Kawashima Yoshiko no shōgai” (Terebi

Asahi, 2008), based on the life story of the former Qing imperial princess and later

Kwantung Army spy and collaborationist Kawashima Yoshiko. The Japa nese fi lm

director Koreeda Hirokazu is reportedly making a feature fi lm called Night Fragrant Flower about Yamaguchi’s life. See http://www.haf.org.hk /haf/pdf/project07

/project14.pdf. The manga production was provided by Fujita Atsuko, Ri Kōran (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1996). In China, a degree of public curiosity on Li Xianglan

seems to persist to this day. One late example is a special BTV (Television Beijing)

program entitled “The Two-faced Woman Li Xianglan: A Story that Needs to be

Told” (“Shuangmian yiren Li Xianglan: Bu-neng bu-shuo de gushi” dated September

16, 2013).

9. Unless, of course, when the name is written out in Chinese characters.

10. Since its first publication, Yamaguchi’s autobiography became a longtime

bestseller, with “more than 100,000 copies sold” as of 1991. No sales figures are available

from the early 1990s to this date. See Fujiwara Sakuya, “Ri Kōran: Ruten no hansei,” in

Ri Kōran: Futatsu no sokoku ni yureta seishun, Mainichi gurafu bessatsu, ed. Tanaka

Kaoru, Shimizu Kiyoshi, et al. (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, June 1991), p. 101.

Notes to Pages xxi–xxiii

295

11. Shelley Stephenson, “ ‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere’: Shanghai, Li

Xianglan, and the ‘Great East Asia Film Sphere,’ ” in Cinema and Urban Culture in

Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1999), p. 232.

12. Stephenson, in “ ‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere,’ ” pp. 237–241, discusses the “universal identification” of her physical looks across diverse regions in

East Asia and her wide-ranging linguistic competence. Besides Mandarin Chinese and

Japanese, the two languages that mattered most during her war time career, her linguistic range reportedly included English, Russian, and even Shanghainese and Cantonese, presumably with varying degrees of proficiency. Her autobiography reveals

her familiarity with Russian from the time she was a young girl growing up in Fengtian, and Shanghai was virtually her home from the end of 1944 to her repatriation to

Japan in April 1946.

13. The strong sentiments expressed by the Chinese executive of the Beijing

Press Club who advised against the disclosure of her nationality to the Chinese media after the screening of Glory to Eternity (1943) very likely echoed those of Li Xianglan’s many Chinese admirers. For details on this incident, see chapter 12 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography.

14. In the film, Li plays a candy peddler in a British-operated opium den and

later a spirited decrier of the drug. The two songs she sang in the fi lm with much

fanfare, one for peddling candy and the other for warning against the poisonous

effects of opium, immediately gained considerable popularity, despite criticism that

they were too “Western-favored” for the fi lm. See Lu Ping, “Li Xianglan de gechang

shiye he lian’ai,” Shanghai yingtan 11, no. 12 (October 1944), collected in Zhongguo

zaoqi dianying huakan, vol. 8 (Beijing, Quanguo Tushuguan Wenxian Suowei Fuzhi

Zhongxin, undated publication), p. 545. For Yamaguchi’s own perspective on the fi lm,

see chapter 12. For an interesting study of the fi lm, see Yoshioka Aiko, “Ekkyōsuru

joyū Ri Kōran: Kasō to passhingu no naratibū,” in Wakakuwa Midori (ed.), “Kafuchōsei

sekai shisutemu ni okeru senji no josei no sabetsu no kōzōteki kenkyū” in Kenkyū

seika hōkokusho (March 2007): 103–111.

15. See a related discussion in Stephenson, “ ‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere,’ ” p. 237.

16. The same, of course, can be said of her Japa nese audience during the early

1940s. One case in point was the dramatic tumult caused by a very large number of

her unruly fans during her Nichigeki per for mances in Tokyo in February 1941. For

details, see chapter 8. Ian Buruma, in his The China Lover: A Novel (New York:

Penguin, 2008) explains her popularity in Japan as follows: “Listening to Ri Koran’s

song allowed people to forget, if only for a short while, about wars, economic

slumps, and soldiers slogging through the mud of a blood-soaked land” (p. 4). In a

different part of the world, whether the European audiences happened to live under

Nazi occupation or the terror of Allied or Luftwaffe bombings, popu lar entertainment still flourished during the war years. For the popularity of ballet per formances

296

Notes to Pages xxiii–xxiv

in war time Paris, for example, see Claire Paolacci, “Serge Lifar and the Paris Opera during World War II,” trans. Charles S. Heppleston, in Journal of the Oxford

University History Society (2004): 1–9. In Britain, Tommy Handley’s comedy program on BBC, It’s That Man Again (ITMA), attracted a huge national audience

during the war years after 1939. See Alan Bennett, Untold Stories (New York: Picador, 2007), pp. 416–417. For the apparent popularity of Eu ropean and Hollywood

movies that were allowed to be shown in Hong Kong during the Japa nese occupation, see Yau Shuk Ting’s well-researched and informative Honkon Nihon eiga

kōryūshi—Ajia eiga nettowāku no rūtsu o saguru (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai,

2007), p. 38.

17. According to one report, from the fall of Shanghai into Japanese hands in

November 1937 until August 1945, only three Western fi lms were screened there

(with Esther Williams, Tyrone Power, and Jane Russell, respectively, in the leading

roles). Those fi lms were apparently shown over and over again to the point where the

reporter became tired of them. See Chen Cunren, Kangzhan shidai shenghuoshi (Guilin: Guangsi Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2007), p. 259.

18. Interview with Li Xianglan in Lu Ping, “Li Xianglan de gechang shiye he

lian’ai,” p. 545. It is revealing that here Yamaguchi was performing a delicate balancing act by self-consciously taking on a Chinese identity, while continuing to comply

with the wishes of her Japanese political handlers by concealing her own Japanese

nationality. For a discussion of Yamaguchi’s self-representations, also see Stephenson,

“ ‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere,’ ” p. 235.

19. For details about this press conference, see chapter 12 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography.

20. According to chapter 12 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography, Man’ei’s Director Amakasu committed suicide on August 20, 1945, nine months after Yamaguchi

had discontinued her Man’ei contract, thereby putting the time of her dissociation

from the studio to be November 1944. Her interview with Lu Ping was published in

October 1944.

21. Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–1981), fi lm producer, foreign film importer to

Japan through Tōwa Trading Company he founded in 1928, and a prominent figure

in international film circles with a particularly distinguished reputation in Asia and

Europe. In wartime China, he served as Executive Director (Zhuanwu Dongshi) of

China Film Company (Zhonghua Dianying) and was especially remembered for his

professional collaboration and personal friendship with the Chinese fi lm producer

and director Zhang Shankun (1907–1957). In occupied Shanghai, the two men worked

closely to avert, as much as possible and with some success, the interference of the

Japanese military in Shanghai’s fi lmmaking industry. He was also instrumental in

protecting Yamaguchi from repercussions arising from her treason charges and

house arrest in the war’s aftermath. In the postwar era, Tokyo’s Kawakita Memorial

Film Library and the Kawakita Prize have been established in his honor. In April 2010,

his former Kamakura residence was turned into the Kamakura City Kawakita Film

Memorial Hall (Kamakura-shi Kawakita Eiga Ki’nenkan). On Kawakita’s involve-

Notes to Pages xxv–xxvi

297

ment with Chinese fi lmmakers after 1939 and rumors of Japanese attempts at his assassination, see chapter 12 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography.

22. See chapter 11 of her autobiography. Japanese intelligence agents from Harbin apparently also tailed many among the film staff, including the director Shimazu

Yasujirō and the fi lm critic and producer Iwasaki Akira.

23. She likened her experience making fi lms in Tokyo to being imprisoned,

while she felt most free in Shanghai, “like the free-flowing Huangpu River.” See Lu

Ping, “Li Xianglan de gechang shiye he lian’ai,” p. 545.

24. For example, in her autobiography and in her newspaper article “Kizutsuketa kokoro iyasu doryoku o,” Chūnichi Shimbun, August 14, 2005.

25. Incidentally, both Yamaguchi and Hara were born in the year 1920. For an

interesting comparison of their careers, see Yomota Inuhiko, Ri Kōran to Hara Setsuko (Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2011), and Yamaguchi Takeshi, Aishū no Manshū

eiga: Manshūkoku ni saita katsudōya-tachi no sekai (Tokyo: Santen Shobō), pp. 50–51.

26. The dramatic life history and personal struggles of Yamaguchi have understandably made her a tempting candidate for some intriguing international comparisons. Yomota Inuhiko has compared her enticing voice as a frontline entertainer to

that of Marlene Dietrich, her courage in having lived through a tumultuous postwar

Tokyo to the experiences of Maria Braun of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 Die Ehe

der Maria Braun fame, and her ever-sparkling energies as she aged to those of Leni

Riefenstahl. See his article in Chinese “Zhanlingdi de nu’er: Li Xanglan xiaolun” in

Li Xianglan/Yoshiko Yamaguchi Special, p. 15.

27. They included films made by Man’ei, the ones produced by such Japanese

studios as Tōhō and Shōchiku, and joint ventures between them. Her fi lms also included other joint productions between Japanese studios and China Film Company

(Zhonghua Dianying), the Taiwan Governor’s Office, and independent films made by

the Korean Army Press Division. She continued to play leading female roles in more

than twenty postwar fi lms with studios that included Tōhō (with fi lms such as

Shanhai no onna and Sengoku burai, 1952), Shōchiku (Shūbun, 1950), Shin-Tōhō

(Akatsuki no dassō, 1950), the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, as well as U.S. studios

such as Twentieth Century Fox.

28. Later in her war time career, during 1943–1945, she also received significant

support from other major figures prominent within the Sino-Japanese fi lm industry

such as Kawakita Nagamasa and Zhang Shankun.

29. The most comprehensive study of Man’ei and its history remains Hu Chang

and Gu Quan, Manying: Guoce dianying mianmian’guan (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju,

1990), published as a volume in the series Dongbei lunxian shisi’nian shi congshu. A Japanese translation with additional useful annotations is provided by Yokochi Takeshi and

Aida Fusako, trans., Man’ei: Kokusaku eiga no shosō (Tokyo: Pandora, 1999); there, a

detailed description of the agency’s founding can be found on pp. 22–36. Additional

reference works include Satō Tadao, Kinema to hōsei (Tokyo: Riburopōto, 1985), “Manshū

Eiga Kyōkai” in Sensō to Nihon eiga, Kōza Nihon eiga 4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986),

and Yamaguchi Takeshi, Maboroshi no kinemā Man’ei (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1989).

298

Notes to Pages xxvi–xxvii

30. According to Taidong Ribao, dated December 4, 1936, quoted in Yokochi

and Aida, Man’ei, p. 31.

31. See Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, pp. 198–204. In November 1944, among

1,858 Man’ei employees, the distribution was 57.9% Japanese, 38.3% Chinese, 2.8%

Korean, and 1% Taiwanese.

32. See Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Ri Kōran, p. 185. For a semi-autobiographical account of Iwasaki’s prewar career, see his fascinating Nihon eiga shishi (Tokyo: Asahi

Shimbunsha, 1977).

33. See Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, p. 279.

34. According to recently disclosed sources from the Xinjing Higher Police, an

investigative unit called Bungei Teisatsu-bu was created within the capital police establishment in 1942 to scrutinize activities of Manchurian artists, with Man’ei as one

of its major targets. See Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, p. 280.

35. For the organization and structure of Man’ei, see Yamaguchi Takeshi,

“Kanojo wa hontō ni Man’ei no joyū datta no ka?” in Ri Kōran: Futatsu no sokoku ni

yureta seishun, pp. 140–141. For detailed lists of participants involved in the deliberations on and the founding of Man’ei, see Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, pp. 22–30.

36. For details on the alleged murders by Amakasu and the controversy surrounding his role, see chapter 6 and my notes.

37. Quoted in Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, p. 37. The translation is by Isolde

Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film (New York:

Continuum, 2006), pp. 121–122. Based on its mission statements, Hu Chang and Gu

Quan conclude that Man’ei was “a political instrument of Japanese imperialism to promote colonialism through the enslavement of [the film industry] and the Chinese people.” Trans. by Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, p. 38. Man’ei was the only film studio allowed

to operate in Manchuria. In a piece published in March 1943, Amakasu also indicated that Man’ei films were largely aimed at “the uncultured masses. . . . We must

treat and educate them like children, and explain things gradually in plain language to

them.” Quoted in Ueno Toshiya, “The Other and the Machine,” in The Japan/America

Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts, ed. Abé Mark Nornes

and Fukushima Yukio (Langhorne, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 85.

38. Out of all the films Yamaguchi made during the war, five were exclusive

Man’ei productions.

39. See Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, p. 198, and Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National

Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 84.

40. The stories of such former Man’ei employees and their postwar contributions were partially recorded in the television program “Chūgoku eiga o sasaeta Nihonjin: Man’ei eiga-jin himerareta sengo” (NHK ETV Tokushū, broadcasted on June

10, 2006). See also Yokochi and Aida, Man’ei, pp. 254–259. Among the notable contributors of such efforts was Kishi Fumiko, the fi lm editor of The Bridge (Qiao, 1949),

the first feature-length film produced in postwar China, along with the film version

of the classic revolutionary opera White-Haired Girl (Baimao-nu, 1950) and others. She

remained in China until April 1953.

Notes to Pages xxviii–xxix

299

41. Quoted by Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Kōran: Watashi no

hansei, p. 134. The Man’ei advertisement went on to say, “So what we have is truly a

representative kū’nyan [Japanese rendering of the Chinese expression gu’niang, a

maiden] from an Asia on the rise (kōa), a woman who speaks the three languages of

Japanese, Manchurian, and Chinese with remarkable dexterity. While her musical talents have long been recognized along with her beauty, as it so happens, her singing

broadcasted on Fengtian radio stations instantly produced impassioned acclaim like a

whirlwind across the land of Manchuria. Promptly invited to join the Manchurian

Film Association, she soon made her glorious debut as an actress. Bursting upon the

scene like a comet across the sky, it is truly beyond imagination to fathom the degree to

which her striking brilliance has enhanced the developing state of Manchurian films!”

42. The noted Japanese fi lm critic Satō Tadao, born in 1930, reminisced that

during his own early teen years he “had no doubt that she [Yamaguchi] was Chinese.” See “Li Xianglan and Yoshiko Yamaguchi,” Li Xianglan/Yoshiko Yamaguchi

Special, p. 5. Yamaguchi in her autobiography also recorded the surprise some Japanese experienced upon learning her Japanese nationality after the war.

43. For details, see chapter 12 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography. Accordingly, the

actress and Yamaguchi’s coactor in Glory to Eternity, Chen Yunchang, suspected that

Yamaguchi might be Japanese based on the latter’s cinematic roles in the past. Another actor who might have known the secret was Wang Yin, who played a reformed

opium addict and later her love interest in the fi lm.

44. See Stephenson, “ ‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere,’ ” p. 235.

45. Yamaguchi’s autobiography suggests that the action of the Asahi Shimbun might have been motivated by spite due to damages done to the company’s vehicles amidst the chaos associated with her Nichigeki per formances on February 11,

1941. For details, see chapter 8. Before its interview with Yamaguchi, Tokyo’s Miyako

Shimbun had reported on her Japanese identity—albeit misidentifying her Japanese

name and her birth place—in a small “human interest” column, though the piece

apparently did not arouse much attention. Shimizu Akira in his Shanhai sokai eiga

shishi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995) suggests that other newspapers simply “obediently

ignored the news” [italics mine], as also noted by Shelley Stephenson, “A Star by Any

Other Name: The (After) Lives of Li Xianglan,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19

(2002): 6. Indeed, according to the Yamaguchi autobiography, the Fukuoka Nichinichi Shimbun had also reported her identity as a China-born Japanese a year before.

For details, see chapter 9.

46. This point has been made by Yomota Inuhiko in Ri Kōran to Hara Setsuko,

p. 134.

47. The dramatic story is narrated in chapter 14 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography.

48. She attempted to jumpstart her postwar career by appearing in such early

postwar musicals as My Old Kentucky Home, in Hijikata Yoshi’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection in 1947, and in the Popular Art Troupe’s adaptation of Shimazaki

Tōson’s Broken Commandment (Hakai). For details, see the Addendum to her autobiography entitled “The Post–Li Xianglan Years.”

300

Notes to Pages xxix–xxx

49. Based on Tamura Taijirō’s novel Shunpuden. The film historian Yau Shuk

Ting has paid special attention to this Shin-Tōhō film, not only because it was the first

Japanese production to attempt to break into the Southeast Asian market, but also on

account of its pro-Chinese and antiwar elements. She also notes that, along with

Imai Tadashi’s Until We Meet Again (Mata au hi made, 1950) and Sekigawa Hideo’s

Listen to the Voice of the Sea God (Kike wadatsumi no koe, 1950), Escape at Dawn has

been regarded as one of the first antiwar Japanese fi lms in the postwar period. See

Yau, Honkon Nihon eiga kōryūshi, p. 143. In this connection, one must not forget the

Tōhō fi lm War and Peace (Sensō to heiwa) codirected by Yamamoto Satsuo and

Kamei Fumio in 1947.

50. See Yau, Honkon Nihon eiga kōryūshi, pp. 140–141. She reports that merely

publicizing the fact that Li starred in such fi lms as Shooting Star (Nagareboshi, 1949)

and Homecoming (Kikoku, 1949) was enough to cause a stir in Taiwan, and that the

theme songs she sang immediately swept over Taipei.

51. Among her fi lms made in the United States were Japanese War Bride (1952),

a King Vidor production set in rural Salinas, California, with Don Taylor playing the

lead role, as well as House of Bamboo (1955), directed by Samuel Fuller, with Robert

Ryan, Robert Stack, and Cameron Mitchell. A study of Japanese identity reconstruction as revealed in such Hollywood productions can be found in Yoshioka Aiko,

“Kyōkaisenjō no aidentiti joyū Shirley Yamaguchi/Yamaguchi Yoshiko: Taisha o

meguru gensetsu to shutai no kōsa,” Hikaku bungaku kenkyū 73 (August 2006): 79–

84. An advertisement for House of Bamboo proclaimed that the story is about “how

the U.S. MPCI and the Japanese Security Police used a Kimono girl to smash the

Tokyo Underworld!” She also appeared in such Broadway musicals as Marco Polo

and befriended such figures as Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, and

James Dean. For details, see the Addendum to her autobiography.

52. Her experiences in the United States are recorded in some detail in her

autobiography’s Addendum.

53. Following the translation of David Tod Roy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

54. The theme song from A Night of Romantic Love, composed by the very talented Yao Min (1917–1967).

55. The publicity material dated January 1957 from the Shaw Brothers described Yamaguchi “as mysterious as the fog. Is her real name Yamaguchi Yoshiko or

Li Xianglan [Lei Heung-lan]? Is she Japanese or Chinese?” See Yau, Honkon Nihon eiga

kōryūshi, p. 144.

56. Her interview with Shigenobu was rewarded in 1973 with the Grand Prize

for Individual Accomplishment on Television.

57. Tanaka reportedly revealed that he had been a Yamaguchi fan since he was

a young man. See Yamaguchi’s interview with Iwami Takao, “Yaritakatta no wa seiji

to jānarizumu no aida mitai-na shigoto deshita,” in Ri Kōran: Futatsu no sokoku ni

yureta seishun, p. 147.

Notes to Pages xxx–xxxi

301

58. Given Yamaguchi’s generally liberal-leaning views and her consistent critique of Japanese imperialism in China after World War II, it came as something of a

surprise that she should have chosen to run on a Liberal Democratic ticket for the

Japanese Upper House. Naturally, the liberals were more disappointed than conservatives by her decision, as illustrated by the comments from Iwasaki Akira, the producer of her former Man’ei fi lms My Nightingale (Watashi no uguisu) and Winter

Jasmine (Geishunka) in the early 1940s. To his sentiment that “it would be nice if you

could run on a socialist if not a communist ticket,” Yamaguchi reportedly responded,

“Oh, sir, you mean there is a difference between the Liberal Democratic Party and

the Socialist Party?” See Yomota Inuhiko, Ri Kōran to Hara Setsuko, p. 300. Her political roles in the Diet also included Political Affairs Secretary of the Agency for the

Environment, Director of the Japan-Algeria Association, President of the JapanMyanmar Association, Chair of the Committee for Okinawa Growth, and Chair of

the Special Committee for Policies toward the Elderly. See Fujiwara Sakuya, “Ri Kōran:

Ruten no hansei,” in Ri Kōran: Futatsu no sokoku ni yureta seishun, p. 112.

59. Among her collaborators in this effort were such prominent intellectual

figures as Tsurumi Shunsuke and Wada Haruki. See Asian Women’s Fund News, December 20, 2001, for her interview “Nijūisseiki no ima wakai hitobito ni tsutaetai koto”

with Ōnuma Yasuaki. See also Tamura Shizue, Ri Kōran no koibito: Kinema to sensō

(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2007), pp. 19–20.

60. For example, see her interviews with Tanaka Hiroshi, Utsumi Aiko, and

Ōnuma Yasuaki, Sekai (September 2003): 171–175 and with Tanikawa Takeshi and Kawasaki Kenko on February 8, 2007, Interijiensu 8 (2007): 74–93.

61. Yamaguchi Yoshiko, “Kizutsuketa kokoro iyasu doryoku o.” She writes,

“One must not refurbish history for the sake of his own self-satisfaction while closing

his eyes to the acts of his own country as a victimizer.” Had Japan truly looked upon

China as an equal, she argues, the Japanese would not have created the puppet state

of Manchukuo or discriminated against the Chinese.

62. Tanikawa and Kawasaki’s interview with Yamaguchi, Interijiensu, pp.

78–79. See also Tanikawa Takeshi, “Ri Kōran shinwa no saiseisan to jizokusei,” in

Ekkyōsuru popurā karuchā, ed. Tanikwa Takeshi, Wong Heung-wah, and Wu Yongmei (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2009), p. 27.

63. Based on his and Kawasaki Kenko’s interview with Yamaguchi in Interijiensu 8 (2007), Tanikawa Takeshi contends that Yamaguchi at the time had “absolutely no self-awareness” (mattaku mujikaku da) about the propagandistic nature of

her role as a Man’ei star at the beginning of her career. He also wonders whether that

lack of self-awareness applied only to the time when she was being scouted by Man’ei.

See Tanikawa, Wong, and Wu, Ekkyōsuru popurā karuchā, p. 29 and pp. 26–31.

64. See Okabe Makio, Manshūkoku (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2007),

pp. 9–14. The mechanism of transplanting agrarian “pioneers” (kaitakumin) from destitute Japanese villages to this “new continental haven” was in many instances the result of harsh takeover of existing local farmland and the exploitation of indigenous

302

Notes to Pages xxxii–xxxiv

farm labor. The subject is discussed by Okabe on pp. 221–236. Kawamura Minato’s

informative Ikyō no shōwa bungaku: “Manshū” to kindai Nihon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1990), pp. 28–60, also depicts this phenomenon from a literary angle by engaging a body of so-called kaitaku bungaku based on Japan’s pioneering experience in

Manchuria.

65. See a discussion of the novel in Kawamura Minato, Ikyō no shōwa bungaku,

pp. 100–105. For an informative discussion of the conditions of literary production in

Manchuria, see Ozaki Hotsuki, Kindai bungaku no shōkon: Kyūshokuminchi bungaku

ron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), pp. 211–294.

66. See Yasuda Yojūrō, “Meiji no seishin,” collected in Taikan shijin no goichininsha (1941), and quoted in Oketani Hideaki, Yasuda Yojūrō (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1997), pp. 102–103. In Yasuda’s view, major figures in modern Japanese

literary culture including Yosano Tekkan, Masaoka Shiki, Takayama Chogyū, Mori

Ōgai, and Natsume Sōseki were all deficient in achieving that feat. Along with Kamei

Katsuichirō, Yasuda Yojūrō was one of the leaders of early Shōwa’s Japan Romantic

School (Nihon Rōman-ha). His characteristically impassioned rhetorical style including his use of diction particularly appealed to young contemporary readers.

67. Quoted in Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2009), p. 100.

68. See Tansman, Aesthetics, p. 100.

69. Quoted in Izu Toshihiko, “Nihon rōman-ha to sensō joshō: Yasuda Yojūrō

o chūshin ni” in “Nihon rōman-ha to wa nani ka,” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshō

(January 1979): 76–77.

70. Tsumura wrote in his Eigasen (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1944): “. . . every

war film must have some sort of ‘philosophy’ (ideology). . . . [W]e must clarify, through

fi lm, the way of thinking of the Japanese people who are pressing on in their crusade

for the construction of a Greater East Asia” (quoted in Ueno Toshiya, “The Other and

the Machine,” p. 73).

71. According to Yamaguchi’s autobiography, the reason for its negative reception by the Japa nese authorities was apparently based on the Kwantung Army’s

assessment that the fi lm “had neither enlightenment nor entertainment value for the

people of Manchuria” and that “it did not follow the directions of Japan’s national

policy.” From Tōhō’s perspective, the high probability for the fi lm to fail censorship

criteria also dampened its interest to push for its public release. For details, see

chapter 11 of her autobiography.

72. See Satō Tadao, “Shin’nichi-ha Chūgokujin josei o shinjite-ita Nihonjin” in

Ri Kōran: Futatsu no sokoku ni yureta seishun, p. 137. As far as the music goes, Satō

thinks that it was the best fi lm Yamaguchi has made. On details about the cast, the

fi lming, and the cultural context for the production of My Nightingale, see chapter 11

of Yamaguchi’s autobiography.

73. For details, see “Ri Kōran no eiga ga hōmu-shiata de yomigaeru,” in Ri

Kōran: Futatsu no sokoku ni yureta seishun, p. 66. The discovered version was an eightyminute fi lm, whereas the original was a two-hour production. For the discoveries of

Notes to Pages xxxiv–xxxv

303

Man’ei fi lms in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the whereabouts of

other Man’ei fi lms, see Yamaguchi Takeshi, Aishū no Manshū eiga, pp. 17–45. Another notable Man’ei production that was never publicly screened was the semidocumentary The Yellow River (Huang’he, 1942), directed by Zhou Xiaobo and

fi lmed on location in the war zone of Liuyuankou in the suburbs of Kaifeng, Henan

Province, with the assistance of the Japanese army and forces from Wang Jingwei’s

collaborationist government. For a discussion of the fi lm, see Yokochi and Aida,

Man’ei, pp. 106–108. For details about the shooting and the reasons for its fateful outcome, see chapter 11 of Yamaguchi’s autobiography.

74. The genre began with Song of the White Orchid, which Yamaguchi and

Fujiwara Sakuya describe as “a melodramatic representation of Japan’s dream of

continental expansion in the form of a sweet romance” (Ri Kōran, Watashi no hansei, p. 136).

75. The Japa nese title of the popu lar Tōhō fi lm was renamed Shanhai no yoru

when it was shown within China. The abridged 2003 video version released in

Japan by Kinema Kurabu, some thirty minutes shorter than the original, was

clumsily called Soshū yakyoku— Shina no yoru yori, not to be confused with Soshū

no yoru (1941) in which Yamaguchi starred with Sano Shūji. That is the version I

saw and on which I base my discussion here. True, Shanghai provided the urban

backdrop to the dramatic romantic encounter, but the ensuing rural scenes were

largely fi lmed on location in Suzhou, a city about 120 kilometers away, with its old

waterways, willow trees, bridges, and riverboats. Yamaguchi’s autobiography reports that even though the fi lm was screened in Shanghai’s Japa nese quarters of

Hongkuo, the more prestigious theaters in other parts of the city never showed the

fi lm. Accordingly, none of the works comprising the continental trilogy was in fact

screened at Jian’si District’s Roxy Theater (Dahua), the only Shanghai cinema exclusively screening Japa nese fi lms. Satō Tadao, on the other hand, reports that

“China Nights was a big hit in Japan, and it was also the most popu lar Japa nese fi lm

to run at Shanghai’s Dahua theater [sic] during the Japa nese occupation. The fi lm

was shown three times a day for 13 days, and around 23,151 people came to see it

during that time, an average of 1,780 people per day.” See his “Li Xianglan and Yoshiko

Yamaguchi,” p. 6.

76. The two most famous entries are “Shina no yoru,” the theme song, and

“Soshū yakyoku,” both sung by Yamaguchi in the fi lm.

77. This is underscored by a close-up shot of an evil-looking agent among a

group of mysterious operatives, later revealed to be members of the Chinese resistance who are threatening the trapped Hase. The guerillas ambushing Hase’s riverboat, brave fighters at least from the Chinese perspective, are shot largely from a long

distance camera, thereby effectively neutralizing any meaningful suggestions of individual personality and personal heroism.

78. Tellingly, there was no attempt to authenticate her name according to its

proper Chinese pronunciation. Perhaps the thought itself never even occurred to China

Nights’ Japanese fi lmmakers.

304

Notes to Pages xxxv–xxxviii

79. Yomota Inuhiko suggests that the Japanese rival has no choice but to leave

the competition to allow the high principle of a Sino-Japanese union to prevail. See

his Ri Kōran to Hara Setsuko, p. 126.

80. One of them, played without much distinction by Fujiwara Kamatari, has

been identified as Hase’s “brother” (“shatei,” see Yomota Inuhiko, Ri Kōran to Hara

Setsuko, p. 120), although it is also possible to interpret him as a sort of junior member among Hase’s close associates.

81. Needless to say, much has changed in postwar Japan’s cinematic depiction

of the Chinese other. Far from single-mindedly caricaturing the Chinese with imperial disdain, the portraits of Chinese soldiers and officers in, say, Taniguchi Senkichi’s

postwar Akatsuki no dassō (1950, screenplay by Taniguchi and Kurosawa Akira and

starring Yamaguchi and Ikebe Ryō) represent a most dramatic turnabout. Those

Chinese taking care of Private First Class Mikami appear completely professional,

compassionate, and ready to enlighten. In stark contrast, most of the Japanese soldiers in Mikami’s unit are painted in a negative light.

82. Although the character played by Fujiwara Kamatari earlier notices that Guilan

is secretly trying to listen in to the conversations of the Japanese, there is no further

development in the narrative—at least based on the film version I saw—that suggests

that Guilan in fact knows any Japanese or has had any prior training in the language.

83. Those peculiarly comical effects were the result of Japanese actors Shiomi

Hiroshi and Komine Chiyoko playing the roles of Guilan’s uncle and her housemaid,

respectively.

84. On the eight-year history of the Japa nese occupation of Shanghai from

late 1937 to August 1945, see Chen Cunren’s intimate memoirs Kangzhan shidai

shenghuoshi.

85. Tanikawa Takeshi, “Ri Kōran shinwa no saiseisan to jizokusei,” p. 14.

86. Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen

Years’ War 1931–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 278–279.

87. Kimura Chiio, “Nihon eiga shō,” Kinema Junpō (July 1, 1940): 24. See

ja.wikipedia.org’s entry on Shina no yoru.

88. See Harald Salomon, “National Policy Films (kokusaku eiga) and Their

Audiences: New Development in Research on Wartime Japanese Cinema,” Japonica

Humboldtiana 8 (2004): 168. See also Naomi Ginoza, “Dissonance to Affi nity: An

Ideological Analysis of Japanese Cinema in the 1930s” (Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA,

2007), pp. 48–49. Both studies discuss Furukawa’s argument as contained in his

Senjika no Nihon eiga: Hitobito wa kokusaku eiga o mita ka (Tokyo: Yoshikawa

Kōbunkan, 2003).

89. See, for example, Naomi Ginoza, “Dissonace to Affi nity,” pp. 48–49.

90. A view attributed to Tokyo University fi lm historian Karima Fumitoshi,

according to Yau Shuk Ting in a communication to me, dated March 14, 2013.

91. I wish to thank Sheldon Garon for making this suggestion to me in December 2012.

92. See chapter 7 of Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei, p. 155.

Notes to Pages xxxix–xli

305

93. Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei, pp. 155–156.

94. See Zadankai, “Nihon no tairiku eiga o Chūgoku bunkajin wa dō miru” and

Hazumi Tsuneo, “Dai Tōa eiga kensetsu no yume to genjitsu,” in Eiga hyōron (February 1942): 78 and 49, as discussed by Yau, Honkon Nihon eiga kōryūshi, pp. 98–99.

95. See Satō Tadao, ed. Nihon no eigajin: Nihon eiga no sōzōsha-tachi (Tokyo:

Nichigai Asoshie’tsu, 2007), p. 134. Conceived as a self-sustaining rural utopia and a

physical extension of the goodness in the human spirit, the new village movement was

first organized in Miyazaki Prefecture in southern Kyushu in 1918 before it was finally

relocated to Saitama Prefecture after World War II. Denouncing wars between nations and struggles between classes, the communal rural organization was infused

with an idealist spirit with aspirations toward individual self-actualization. Among its

foreign admirers were the Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and through him, such prominent leaders as Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. See Christopher T. Keaveney, Beyond

Brushtalk: Sino-Japanese Literary Exchange in the Interwar Period (Hong Kong: Hong

Kong University Press, 2008), pp. 87–94. On the other hand, many Japanese commentators and thinkers including Katō Kazuo, Yamakawa Hitoshi, Ōsugi Sakae, Sakai

Toshihiko, and Kawakami Hajime were critical of Mushanokōji’s efforts and his unrealistic idealism. See, for example, Ōtsuyama Kunio, “Atarashiki-mura no hankyō,”

Bungaku (October 1974). For details on the subject, see Kindai sakka kenkyū jiten

kankōkai (ed.), Kindai sakka kenkyū jiten (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1985), pp. 394–398.

96. One of the most useful discussions on the philosophy of the White Birch

School writers remains Honda Shūgo’s classic Shirakaba-ha no bungaku (Tokyo:

Shinchō Bunko, 1972). See particularly the chapters entitled “Shirakaba-ha no bungaku” and “Shirakaba to jindōshugi,” pp. 37–154.

97. That was Yamamoto Satsuo’s opinion as stated in his postwar autobiography Watakushi no eiga jinsei (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1984), p. 84, even

though Peter B. High comments that Yamamoto’s statement “tells us more about the

shame and embarrassment he experienced postwar at having collaborated with the

war time regime” (The Imperial Screen, p. 377). For a discussion of Yamamoto’s two

“national policy” fi lms Tsubasa no gaika (1942, with Kurosawa Akira as the scriptwriter) and Neppū (1943), see High, The Imperial Screen, pp. 377–381 and pp. 414–416,

respectively, as well as pp. 439–442 on Imai Tadashi’s national policy fi lm Bōrō no

kesshitai (1943). On Kamei’s wartime documentary Tatakau heitai (1939), see Abé

Mark Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Donald Richie, A Hundred Years

of Japanese Film (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005), pp. 103–104.

98. Oguni was particularly known for his screenplays written in collaboration

with the famed Kurosawa team from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s. They include

some of the most distinguished Japanese fi lms ever made: Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), Yōjimbō (1961), High and Low (Tenkoku to jigoku, 1962),

Red Beard (Akahige, 1965), and Ran (1985). Notably, the Writers Guild of America, West

(WGAW) has named the four as honorees of its 2013 Jean Renoir Award for Screenwriting Achievement.

306

Notes to Pages xli–xlv

99. See Salomon, “National Policy Films (kokusaku eiga) and Their Audiences,”

p. 168. For a report on the at-once chilling and tragicomic realities of intelligence

surveillance on literary production and other publications in Japan in 1940–1941, see

Takami Jun’s Shōwa bungaku seisuishi (Tokyo: Bunshun Bunko, 1987), pp. 524–528.

100. See Yamamoto Satsuo, Watakushi no eiga jinsei, pp. 83–84.

101. High, The Imperial Screen, p. 271.

102. High, The Imperial Screen, pp. 271–272. Used during the Bakumatsu and

the early Meiji period, the term originated from a reference to sheep (rashamen) purportedly kept by Western sailors as sex objects during their long journeys at sea.

103. Quoted in High, The Imperial Screen, pp. 271–272.

104. See her “China Nights [Japan, 1940]: The Sustaining Romance of Japan at

War,” in World War II, Film, and History, ed. John W. Chambers and David Culbert

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 36–37.

105. See Wang, “Between the National and the Transnational,” p. 7.

106. Satō Tadao, Kinema to hōsei (Tokyo: Riburopōto, 1985), quoted in Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei, p. 140.

107. See Yau, Honkon Nihon eiga kōryūshi, pp. 141–142, n. 105.

108. Produced by Iwasaki Akira and directed by Sasaki Kō; the latter had worked

as an assistant director for Ozu Yasujirō. The postwar version made available in DVD

format as part of the “Man’ei-sakuhin: Eiga-hen” series and released through

Kamutekku Company comes with some Chinese subtitles. When the dialogue is in

Chinese, Japanese subtitles appear intermittently as a ser vice to Japanese viewers.

Yamaguchi sings the theme song “Geishunka” (composed by Koga Masao with lyrics

by Saijō Yaso), while Kirishima Noboru performs “Wakare-dori” with lyrics by Satō

Hachirō.

109. His historical chronology was inaccurate. Speaking presumably from his

vantage point in the early 1940s, the careers of the Japanese painters dated about

three to three-and-a-half centuries earlier, not “five hundred years ago.”

110. See Satō Tadao, “Shin’nichi-ha Chūgokujin josei o shinjite-ita Nihonjin,”

p. 135. Satō includes in this genre fi lms such as Shimazu Yasujirō’s Midori no daichi

(1942) and Naruse Mikio’s Shanhai no tsuki (1941).

111. When Will You Return was subsequently banned in Japan for its allegedly

uninhibited celebration of love at a time of national emergency.

112. Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema, p. 124.

113. Quoted in Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema, p. 124.

114. A “maiden” in Chinese and rendered kū’nyan in Japanese, the expression

unfortunately came to take on overt sexual overtones in war time Japan. The word

still exists in contemporary Japa nese vocabulary and is usually represented in

katakana—as it appears in Iwanami Shoten’s standard Kōjien—but mercifully with

more tempered sexual associations.

115. Meaning something like “sexual aura,” or “erotic air.” Miriam Silberberg

has offered an incisive and provocative examination of how ero, a reference to the

Western notion of “eroticism,” had influenced Japanese popu lar culture in the early

Notes to Pages xlv–xlix

307

1930s. See her Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 108–121.

116. A Kabuki actor who specializes in female roles.

117. Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei, pp.

137–138.

118. Ikeda’s view, in “ ‘Shina-fuku no onna’ to iu yūwaku—Teikokushugi to modanizumu,” Rekishi kenkyū 765 (August 2002): 1–14, is briefly discussed in Yoshioka Aiko,

“Ekkyōsuru joyū Ri Kōran,” p. 107.

119. Peter Duus, Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea 1895–

1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 398. In having to reconcile with

their outward physical similarities, the Japanese attitude toward the Koreans was, according to Duus, “more akin to nineteenth-century English attitudes toward the Irish

than toward the Indians.”

120. For a discussion of this subject, see Michael K. Bourdaghs, The Dawn that

Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

121. See Takeuchi Minoru, Nipponjin ni totte no Chūgokuzō (Tokyo: Dōjidai

Raiburarii, 1992), pp. 152–157. Ishikawa’ story was published in Chūō Kōron, February

1937, and Hayashi’s in Chūō Kōron, 600th temporary ed., 1937. See also a translation of

Ishikawa’s work by Zeljko Cipris as Soldiers Alive (Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press, 2003).

122. Out of his brief China trips to Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Manchuria

came such essays as “Kōshū,” “Kōshū yori Nankin,” “Soshū,” “Shina yori kaerite,” and

“Manshū no inshō” written between May 1938 and June 1939.

123. See Zeljko Cipris, “Responsibility of Intellectuals: Kobayashi Hideo on

Japan at War,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, available at http://www.japanfocus

.org/-Zeljko-Cipris/1625.

124. Published in the journal Kaizō, “Sensō ni tsuite” privileged winning wars

over literary pursuits if the latter served no useful function in the ser vice of the former. See Zeljko Cipris, “Responsibility of Intellectuals.”

125. Quoted from Kobayashi Hideo’s “Manshū no inshō” in James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 208.

126. His own words are “Shina no minzokusei o atarashii hyōgen ni sakatta kindai bungaku to iu mono o Shina ga maru de motte inakatta koto ga donna ni omoigakenai shōgai to natte arawarete-iru ka ni bokura wa kizuku no da.” The revealing use of

the collective pronoun bokura (“we”) at the end of the sentence implies that his sentiments, at least in Kobayashi’s mind, were not particularly unique to himself.

127. One cannot help wondering what serious engagements Kobayashi actually

had with Lu Xun’s works before his trips to China.

128. Lao She, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and Tian Han come more immediately to mind,

even if one could not reasonably expect Kobayashi’s engagements with Duanmu Hongliang, Xiao Hong, and Xiao Jun, all his contemporaries from Northeast China.

308

Notes to Pages xlix–8

129. “Manshū no inshō,” quoted in Takeuchi Minoru, Nipponjin ni totte no

Chūgokuzō, p. 165, and in Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics, p. 208. For four different but all

interesting discussions of Kobayashi’s travel sketches of China and Manchuria, see

Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics, pp. 196–210, Takeuchi Minoru, Nipponjin ni totte no

Chūgokuzō, pp. 165– 66, Zeljko Cipris, “Responsibility of Intellectuals,” and Kamei

Hideo, Kobayashi Hideo ron (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1983), pp. 277–282. On an otherwise more somber occasion, Kobayashi himself realized that the real issue had to do

with the general ignorance about China on the part of the modern Japanese in favor

of Western learning. See his comments on China in a Bungakukai roundtable with

Kishida Kunio, Shimaki Kensaku, Hayashi Fusao, Kawakami Tetsutarō, et al., held

in January 1938 and quoted in Kobayashi Hideo Hikkei, Bessatsu Kokubungaku 18 (1983):

185. Naturally, not all Japanese war time writings on China shared Kobayashi’s supercilious proclivities as manifested in his China essays. Even Hino Ashihei’s depictions

of Chinese peasants and the effects of their war-ravaged environment on Japanese combatants in his 1938 bestseller Wheat and Soldiers (Mugi to heitai) exhibit a capacity

for humble reflection on Japanese military presence in China, black humor, and a degree of narrative poignancy. See, for example, Takeuchi Minoru, Nipponjin ni totte

no Chūgokuzō, pp. 159–163.

130. Kobayashi Hideo, in Kobayashi Hideo shū, Gendai bungaku taikei, XXXXII

(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1965), p. 449, quoted in Zeljko Cipris, “Responsibility of

Intellectuals.”

131. Shimizu Akira, Joyū-hen, Nihon eiga haiyū zenshū (Tokyo: Kinema Jumpōsha,

1980), quoted in Ri Kōran: Watashi no hansei, p. 140.

132. Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, p. 102.

133. The five races were, according to this schema, Han, Manchurian, Mongolian, Japanese, and Korean.