By David Clemson
YOSHIKO YAMAGUCHI
Film star
12-2-1920 – 7-9-2014
Yoshiko ''Shirley'' Yamaguchi, who has died aged 94, was a Manchurian-born Japanese film star whose facility for reinvention encapsulated all the ambiguities of 20th-century Japan.
Yoshiko Yamaguchi was born at Fushun, Manchuria, to Japanese parents.
Her first public incarnation was as the ''Chinese'' actor Li Xianglan (or Ri Koran, in the Japanese version), whose yielding innocence in a succession of Japanese Chinese-language propaganda films of the late 1930s and early 1940s was designed to celebrate Japan's ''noble'' role in China and reconcile the populace to their Japanese oppressors.
The films, mostly erotic musical melodramas featuring a romance between a Chinese damsel and a handsome Japanese man, included the controversial China Nights (1940), in which Yamaguchi plays an orphan taken in by a Japanese naval officer with whom she, inevitably, falls in love. The servile behaviour of her character went down badly with those at whom it was directed. After Japan's surrender, its songs were banned by the Chinese government.
In one memorable scene, Yamaguchi's character is brutally beaten by her lover, but instead of showing anger she interprets his sadism as an expression of love. ''Forgive me!'' she cries. ''It didn't hurt at all to be hit by you. I was happy, happy! I'll be better, just watch. Please don't give up on me. Forgive me. Forgive me!'' She would later apologise for making the film.
Nonetheless, Yamaguchi's incarnation as a ''Chinese'' actor was so convincing that she won a huge following in China, where her song Yue Lai Xiang is still performed.
After the war, still assumed to be Chinese, she was arrested by the Chinese and charged with collaborating with the enemy, a capital offence. Interned in a Shanghai detention camp for nine months, she was released only after a friend produced family records proving her Japanese parentage.
Yamaguchi moved to Japan where, continuing her career under her own name, she appeared in Seijun Suzuki's Escape at Dawn and starred as a singer pursued by the tabloids in Akira Kurosawa's Scandal (both 1950). Then she married a Japanese-American and moved to Hollywood, where, reinvented as Shirley Yamaguchi (after Shirley Temple), she appeared in King Vidor's Japanese War Bride (1952) and in Sam Fuller's 1955 film noir House of Bamboo.
In 1956 she performed in Shangri-La, a short-lived Broadway musical based on a novel by James Hilton. Returning to Japan, she reinvented herself as a talk-show host in the 1960s before launching a political career as a member of the Japanese parliament.
In 2008, author Ian Buruma wrote The China Lover, a novel based on her extraordinary life in which she is presented as a metaphor for Japan's shifting identity, from militaristic dictatorship to America-obsessed post-war ruin to modern democratic nation seeking reconciliation with its neighbours.
Yoshiko Yamaguchi was born at Fushun, Manchuria, to Japanese parents at a time when the Japanese were heavily involved in a program of infiltration spearheaded by the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway Co. Her father had been educated in Peking and taught Mandarin to Japanese employees of the railway.
In 1931, when Yoshiko was 11, the region was seized by Japan. When she was 13 she was adopted by a Chinese friend of her father's and renamed Xianglan (''fragrant orchid''). She made her debut as a Chinese singer before starting her film career.
In the 1960s she worked as a reporter and television presenter, covering the Vietnam War and obtaining interviews with anti-imperialist icons such as Yasser Arafat, Kim Il-sung, Colonel Gaddafi and Idi Amin.
Later she went into politics and in 1974 was elected to the Japanese parliament as a member of the ruling, right-of-centre Liberal Democratic Party, serving until 1992.
In her bestselling 1987 autobiography, Half My Life as Ri Koran, Yoshiko Yamaguchi claimed that during her early film career she had had no idea that she was contributing to the Japanese propaganda effort.
She was a generous contributor to a private ''atonement'' fund for Asian ''comfort women'' used as prostitutes by Japanese soldiers during the war.
Telegraph, London