The Singer of Many Names and Lives

Not only does this story involve a singer about whom an opera was written — Keita Asari's Ri Koran, dealing with Japan's genocidal occupation of Chinese Manchuria in the 1930s — but it is a remembrance of a remarkable person, great historical events ... and even a kind of catharsis, at least for some.

It's about Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a.k.a. Yoshiko Otaka, a.k.a. Li Xiang Lan, a.k.a. Shirley Yamaguchi, a.k.a. Ri Koran.

She died last week at age 94, and obituaries tell a story that sounds like improbable fiction:

A young Chinese actress starring in Japanese movies while Japan occupied and devastated China, she was captured and condemned to death after the war in Shanghai, saved by her Japanese birth certificate, which was smuggled inside the head of a doll.

She subsequently returned to Japan, and worked as a television host and journalist covering Vietnam and the Middle East. Elected to the upper house of the Japanese Diet in the 1970s, she served for 18 years. After retiring from politics, she became president of the Asian Women's Fund.

Ta'i chi master Chungliang Al Huang wrote to Japanese friends about her:

Today in The New York Times obituary, I read the passing of Yoshiko Yamaguchi. I knew her as Li Xiang Lan as a child in China when she was a well known movie actress and singer of popular songs.

Later I knew her in Hollywood as Shirley Yamaguchi, later the wife of American-Japanese sculptor Isamu Naguchi, who designed stage sets for modern dance icon Martha Graham and for Joseph Campbell’s dancer wife, Jean Erdman.

The obituary tells of her dual citizenship of both being Japanese and Chinese, and her conflict and pain to be the propaganda for the Japanese then, and later accused by the Chinese as traitor to be deported back to Japan.

She often claimed China to be her “Birth-Home-Manchurian” country, and Japan to be her ancestral country. She tried very hard in her later life, as celebrity, to work on bettering relationship between Japan and China.

I think of you, my Japanese friends, when I read her obituary and remember my early childhood when Japan and China were enemies, and how destiny has brought us together now to be kindred friends, transcending nationality and historic painful events.