7 Comments

1. 

   Lawrence

   September 14, 2014 at 1:17 pm

   Mooie vrouw, fascinerende achtergrond. Bedankt voor het artikel!

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2. 

   Stanley

   September 15, 2014 at 9:45 am

   According to her book, she called Japan her fatherland and China her motherland as she born to Japanese parents but raised in China.

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3. 

   Rena Inoue

   July 20, 2020 at 7:57 pm

   Li Xianglan wasn’t a dwarf pretending to be Chinese! It’s a misconception that Li Xianglan was purely Nihonjin Japanese. Her mother & father Fumio both loved China and he had 2 Chinese Blood Brothers, General Li Jichun (李際春) and Mayor Pan Yugui (潘毓桂). By Chinese custom for those who became sworn blood brothers, they also became Yoshiko’s “Godfathers” and gave her two Chinese names, Li Xianglan (Li Hsiang-lan) and Pan Shuhua (潘淑華). (“Shu” in Shuhua and “Yoshi” in Yoshiko are same Chinese character).the Yamaguchi family moves into a large 3-story house inside the Li family compound (after Japanese secret police arrest her father for colluding with Chinese rebels in Mukden after an attack) In return, the family cared for the second wife of Li who had bound-feet. Yoshiko has a great affection for this hobbling lady “whose spoken Mandarin sounded like singing” and she “learns Mandarin from her from morning till night”. Yoshiko would also help Madame Li to massage her sore feet. Old General Li treats Yoshiko as though she were his own daughter. With her father Fumio’s blessing and in an elaborate formal ceremony, the Li family adopts Yoshiko and gives her the Chinese name 李香蘭 Lǐ Xiāng Lán 李香蘭 Yoshiko later used the name, Li Xianglan [a perfect stage name because if her real name was used (like if it was *Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga)and assumed the latter name, Pan Shuhua while she was staying with the Pan family in Beijing for 4 years while going to a Chinese Girl high school following her recuperation from tuberculosis), Yoshiko’s father and General Li decide that she will move south, to another powerful family friend Pan, located in central Beijing (Peking) in order to continue her Chinese education there. In order to strengthen her breathing after TB, the doctor recommended voice lessons. Her father initially insisted on traditional Japanese music, but Yoshiko preferred Western music and thus received her initial classical vocal education from an Italian dramatic soprano (Madame Podresov, married into White Russian nobility) introduced by BFF, Lyuba (a Russian-Jewish girl, She later received schooling in Beijing, accommodated by the Pan family. She was a coloratura soprano. So all her childhood & teen years she lived with 2 powerful Chinese Godparents so she was actually more Chinese then Japanese.
   Later after becoming famous, she finally went to Japan, in 1941 for a publicity tour, dressed in a cheongsam and while speaking Japanese with a Mandarin accent, the customs officer asked her upon seeing she had a Japanese passport and a Japanese name: “Don’t you know that we Japanese are the superior people? Aren’t you ashamed to be wearing third-rate Chink clothes and speaking their language as you do? 1st time she was called traitor!

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4. 

   Rena Inoue

   July 20, 2020 at 8:23 pm

   Xinglan had already had her 1933 ‘coming out’ concert at the Yamato Hotel, been chosen by the Fengtian Radio Station as the only girl capable of singing and communicating in several languages, and was rapidly learning the art of singing while accompanied by live bands on the radio. The name by which she became known all across Manchuria was Li Xianglan [a perfect stage name because if her real name was used (like if it was *Stefani Germanotta] she would not have become known at all [just like *Lady Gaga became known by all].
   Xianglan was indeed a very special person to have accomplished all this by the age of 14.
   On the subject of changing one’s name when entering ‘show business’ (or the Showa Business as one wit has called it): is there any need to mention here all the Hollywood actors with names such as Issur Danielovitch, who found the name of Kirk Douglas to be much easier on the ears of his intended audience? I don’t see anyone throwing rocks at Mr. Danielovitch (or anyone else who has done the same thing) for the crime of masquerading as someone else. Shall we mention all the famous Hollywood actors of one race (such as Anthony Quinn) who successfully passed as other races (and managed to keep their real race a secret for many years)? And while we are in this territory, what about the propaganda films of Hollywood that have had both overt and covert political and social agendas? Let’s not be hypocrites.
   Yoshiko recalls her May 1934 train-trip from Mukden to Beijing; her father bought her a ticket at the Mukden Station and says “You’ll be living as a Chinese person from now on, so get used to it.” Of course, she thought he would be travelling with her, but due to some business foul-up of some kind, she found herself travelling all alone! She recounts the harrowing night-journey by train from Fengtian to Beijing, a distance of 470 miles: a lone 14yr old girl in the ‘hard-seats’ (the common-folk section), pretending to be Chinese due to the anti-Japanese sentiment, in the midst of pouring rain, lightning, howling wind, and worries about being robbed or attacked by bandits or guerrillas. Yoshiko tells about a harrowing slow crossing over a long railroad bridge barely higher than the flooded river below. Oh, and she was hiding a large bundle of money in her clothes for her father which she was afraid would be confiscated along the way – she was totally terrified!
   No Japanese would take such a long trip through bandit territory unless they were military men, and here was this little sparrow of a girl, at one point hiding in the train’s bathroom from the Conductor. The ‘hard seat’ section of the train was filled with Chinese farmer people, chickens, other animals, and the stench of urine was thick in the air. Talk about having to grow up fast and think on your feet!
   The Pan family adopts Xianglan in 1934 and names her Pan Shuhua (the name she uses while attending high school). To give some idea of the size of the Pan compound, there are several large house residences surrounding a central courtyard/garden area, and Yoshiko mentions how easy it was to lose one’s way and get lost. There are about 100 people either working for or part of the family, including wives, relatives, servants, concubines, plus 2 armed guards with fixed bayonets at the gate entrance. Xianglan, at first she leads a lonely life and is forced to totally immerse herself in Mandarin. She is befriended by two of her adoptive sisters, and they all attend school and take various lessons together. She attends the Beijing Yijiao Girls School 北京 一角 中学 (a Chinese mission school mainly attended by rich ‘pillars of society’ girls). This school must have been located inside the Inner City
   Mr. Pan, born Chinese, is another ‘cross-cultural’ person, having attended Japan’s Waseda University, and he is by no means the only example of such people who due to circumstance, traveled easily between and understood both cultures. In the case of Pan Yugui, he was skillful enough to rise to very powerful positions in Northeastern China while working (some would say collaborating) with the Japanese (and was able to avoid execution after the war because of various ‘good-works’ he accomplished for Chinese people as well).She writes travelogue-style descriptions of the famous Imperial City and Forbidden City, spending many a pleasant time visiting there, sometimes while riding horses (she and her adoptive sisters were taking equestrian lessons). Most of the time she was practicing her Mandarin, She must have fantasized about being a royal Chinese princess during such horse-rides because she seems to know and love each structure of note inside the Forbidden City.While living with the Pan family, Yoshiko recounts some interesting every-day experiences. She frequently awoke to “performances by the pipe ensemble of the pigeons of Picai Hutong.” As the sun would rise [no, the phrase she uses is “as the eastern sky began to light up”] in the morning, a large formation of pigeons would soar into the sky; little pipes made of bamboo were tied to the birds feet and would whistle when the birds swooped and soared, providing a natural ‘alarm clock’ as the day dawned for the Hutong residents. Only the ancient Chinese could’ve thought of harnessing pigeons in flight to provide a “pipe ensemble” which made such a delightful sound!

   The bathing situation of the Pan family was less than ideal: although they had modern western fixtures such as bathtubs, there was no running water, so washing had to be done the old-fashioned way, which involved basins of warm-water. For full baths, the whole family would spend a whole pleasurable day at a large public bathhouse, followed by a luxurious meal at a fine restaurant, complete with music provided by an er’hu (Chinese violin) player.

   Along with Pan Shuhua’s duties as Mr. Pan’s helper/secretary, she had other chores to perform, one of which was preparing opium for Mr. Pan and his guests. This involved heating a portion of thick brownish syrup in a small ivory bowl, congealing it on a long needle, and then reheating it to create a nice ‘smoke’ which was then inhaled from a long opium pipe. When Yoshiko grew older and “looked back on her Beijing years”, she was “surprised that such important people like Pan had turned into habitual abusers of opium.”

   I’m sure she made use of such experiences when it came time to make her famous “Eternity” film whose plotline revolves around the pernicious effects of opium, and indeed, one of her most famous songs is called the “Quitting Opium Song.”

   While with the Pan family, Yoshiko conveys an interesting exchange with her adoptive mother concerning her ‘Japanese habits’.

   One day Madame Pan takes her aside and gives her some advice: “First, stop smiling so much when there is nothing to smile about! (the Japanese custom is for a woman to smile constantly in order to be polite and ‘charming’). The Chinese call this “selling one’s smile” and it is looked upon with contempt. Second, stop bowing so much! “it’s all right to nod your head slightly, but stop making such deep bows as the Japanese do. We regard that as servile behavior.” Yoshiko takes this advice to heart, and says that her later experiences in Europe and the United States confirmed people’s mannerisms were similar to those of China.
   The interesting thing about the above is that it shows how Madame Pan takes genuine care of her adopted daughter, and it gives us an insight into a very human situation.

   This is yet another example of how Yoshiko came to prefer Chinese over Japanese social mores; the Japanese were constricting, filled with various duties which had to be honored, whereas the Chinese were more free and easy. Take the example of simply laughing at something one finds funny: the Japanese girl will ‘politely’ cover her mouth, whereas the Chinese will more often laugh out loud as western people do.

   However, this did cause some problems when Yoshiko would return home to visit her parents and her Japanese mother Aiko would bemoan how “the big city life had corrupted” her Japanese etiquette. It’s here we get some insight into how difficult a task it was for Yoshiko to actually ‘become Chinese’, because it meant ‘losing her Japanese character’, and of course the reverse was true also. This would not have been any great problem if both her “parents” (ie, Japan and China) had not been at war with one another.

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5. 

   Rena Inoue

   July 21, 2020 at 6:09 pm

   In the 1950s, she established her acting career as Shirley Yamaguchi in Hollywood and on Broadway (in the short-lived musical “Shangri-La”) in the US. She married Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 1951. Yamaguchi was Japanese, but as someone who had grown up in China, she felt torn between two identities/ nations and later wrote she felt attracted to Noguchi as someone else who was torn between two identities. They divorced in 1956. Weibo critics don’t seem to know that She revived the Li Hsiang-lan name and appeared in several Chinese language films made in Hong Kong. Some of her 1950s Chinese films were destroyed in a studio fire and have not been seen since their initial releases. Her Mandarin hit songs from this period include “Three Years” (三年), “Plum Blossom” (梅花), “Childhood Times” (小時候), “Only You” (只有你), and “Heart Song” (心曲 – a cover of “Eternally”).

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6. 

   Grace Wong-Pak

   July 23, 2020 at 7:44 pm

   Actually Li Xianglan thought of China as her Mother since she was born and , 3rd generation in 遼陽;Liáoyáng, Manchuria and raised in Shenyang (沈阳).
   She learned Mandarin as a small child from her father who taught Mandarin & Chinese culture to Japanese workers. She then went to a Chinese school.

   She was adopted by 2 powerful Chinese families who she lived with her childhood with General Li Jichun (李際春) who named her Li Xianglan. After the age of 13 she lived with Pan Yugui (潘毓桂) who named her Pan Shuhua (潘淑華). (“Shu”(淑) in Shuhua (淑華) and “Yoshi”(淑) in Yoshiko ( 淑子) are written with the same Chinese character) (the name she uses while attending Beijing Yijiao Girls Prep High School (北京 一角 中学) (college level classes) in Peking ( 北京)! Madame Pan also taught her how to be more Chinese so her classmates wouldn’t bully her for being Japanese. Anti-Japanese was so high that her father ordered her to come back but she refused. Also wanted her to learn traditional Japanese music but also refused. preferred to learn modern jazz/ Mandopop music. So she was more Chinese then Japanese horrifying her Japanese mother as acting unladylike. She felt like a foreigner in Japan after WW2 cuz she never before lived in Japan. Maybe why later in life, she became an outspoken journalist supporting women refugees worldwide like the Palestinians. Yasir Arafat gave her the Palestinian name “Jamila Yamaguchi”and was in Cambodia & Vietnam wearing a Áo dài during the Vietnam war as anti-war. She also interviewed Fusako Shinenobu the leader of the Red Army. (while in Hollywood late 50’s, was refused entry back to the US for having Communist friends). She returned to Japan and after retiring from the world of film in 1958, she appeared as a hostess and anchorwoman on TV talk shows. As a result of her marriage to the Japanese diplomat Hiroshi Ōtaka, she lived for a while in Burma (modern Myanmar) And also ran for office in Japan’s Diet supporting peace between her mother (China) and Japan (father) & supporting redress & apology to the Asian comfort women used by Japanese soldiers WW2 and was vice president to the Asian Woman’s Fund. Visited Beijing China as LDP’s North Korean delegate, 1975 and visited China & Manchuria on environmental issues, 1979.

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7. 

   Grace Pak

   August 2, 2020 at 12:51 am

   Has China decided to ‘rehabilitate’ the legacy of Li Xiang Lan?
   The Communist Party of China and Ministry of Defense of the People’s Republic of China websites both published her life story in five parts.

   The China International Women’s Film Festival in June 2016 at Shenyang Railway Station prominently featured a documentary film on her life by the Taiwanese film-director Chen Meijuin.

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