Yoshiko Yamaguchi, 94, Actress in Propaganda Films, Dies

Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a singer and actress who starred in Japanese propaganda films during Japan’s brutal military occupation of China in the 1930s and ’40s and who, after narrowly escaping execution by the Chinese after the war, helped normalize relations between the nations, died on Sept. 7 in Tokyo. She was 94.

Her death was announced by a family spokesman, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Ms. Yamaguchi’s life was marked by a series of self-reinventions, most of them forced on her by the same historic events that changed the face of Asia in the 20th century. In recent years, her story became a touchstone for film histories, television dramas, a novel and an opera — all in some way exploring national identity in Asia.

Beginning in 1938, when she was 18, she was a movie star known in China as Li Xianglan, the Chinese pseudonym she assumed to hide her Japanese identity in films promoting Japanese occupation. After the war, she lived as an exile from China, the country of her birth; acted in 1950s Hollywood B-movies under the name Shirley Yamaguchi; and became a cosmopolitan voice for Sino-Japanese détente in the Japanese parliament.

In the United States Ms. Yamaguchi had starring roles in King Vidor’s “Japanese War Bride,” a 1952 film co-starring Don Taylor; “House of Bamboo,” a 1955 film noir directed by Samuel Fuller and co-starring Robert Stack; and a short-lived 1956 Broadway musical, “Shangri-La,” based on the James Hilton novel “Lost Horizon.”

She played her major roles, on and off the screen, in Asia.

Born to Japanese parents in Manchuria, the northwest region of China that was invaded by the Japanese in 1931 and held at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilian lives over the next 14 years, Ms. Yamaguchi was an 18-year-old Mandarin speaker when the Manchurian Film Association cast her in the first of a series of Chinese-language propaganda films.

At the time, she wrote in “My Life as Li Xianglan,” her 2004 autobiography, she did not understand the not-too-subtle message in the melodramatic romances she made, like “Honeymoon Express” (1938), “China Nights” (1940) and “Song of the White Orchid” (1942).

In each film Ms. Yamaguchi played essentially the same role: a downtrodden but beautiful Chinese woman who initially spurns help from a handsome Japanese sailor or soldier, then falls in love with him. (In “China Nights,” after she is slapped and hurled into a wall by one exasperated Japanese savior, she pleads: “Forgive me! It didn’t hurt at all to be hit by you. I was happy, happy! I’ll be better, just watch.”)

The Japanese owners of the film studio knew that Ms. Yamaguchi was Japanese, and a Japanese citizen, but presented her as Chinese to suit the underlying allegory of the films: An oppressed China, resisting the occupation at first, soon embraces Japan as its rescuer.

“I thought my films were simple romances,” Ms. Yamaguchi told The Boston Globe in 1991. “I thought I was working for the good of the Manchurian people.”

After Japan’s defeat, the Chinese authorities arrested her for treason amid calls for her execution. As nationalist and Communist forces fought in China’s civil war, she spent nine months in prison before she could produce a copy of her birth certificate, proving she was not Chinese but Japanese.

Her Japanese citizenship legally absolved her of treason. But in ordering her deported to Japan, a Chinese judge condemned her wartime role as “a Chinese impostor who used her outstanding beauty to make films that humiliated China and compromised Chinese dignity.”

Ms. Yamaguchi, who settled in Japan in 1946, openly apologized for what she said had been her unwitting role as a propaganda tool during the war. And she was one of the first prominent Japanese citizens to acknowledge the history of Japanese brutality during the occupation, an episode for which many Japanese nationalists still refuse to apologize.

She later campaigned for greater public awareness of that history and advocated paying reparations to so-called comfort women, Korean women who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military during the war. (Japanese leaders later apologized to the women.)

As “Ri Koran,” a Japanization of Li Xianglan, Ms. Yamaguchi began re-establishing her film career in Hong Kong and Japan in the late 1940s. She appeared in a dozen Japanese films, including Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film “Scandal,” in addition to her work in Hollywood, before retiring from acting in 1957. She married Hiroshi Otaka, a Japanese diplomat, the same year. He died in 2001. A previous marriage, to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, ended in divorce. Information about her survivors was not available.

Ms. Yamaguchi became a talk-show host on Japanese television in the 1960s under her married name, Otaka Yoshiko. She was elected to the upper house of the Japanese Parliament in 1974, and served until 1992. As chairwoman of that body’s foreign affairs committee in the 1980s, she was among the legislature’s most effective proponents of improving relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Ms. Yamaguchi was born on Feb. 12, 1920, in Fushun, a coal mining region of Manchuria, where her father, Fumio, was a Beijing-educated Japanese linguist and teacher of Mandarin. She began singing on the radio at 13 as Li Xianglan (Fragrant Orchid), the stage name that would later became the masquerade that haunted her life.

Ms. Yamaguchi’s shape-shifting persona and instinct for survival became the topic of film histories and inspired two Japanese television dramas, a 2008 novel by Ian Buruma (“The China Lover”) and an opera, “Ri Koran,” about Ms. Yamaguchi’s protean life during the occupation of Manchuria.

The opera, produced by a Japanese theater company with her cooperation, became a political phenomenon in Japan when it was first staged in 1991, mainly for its depiction of Japan’s wartime aggressions. Many Japanese raised in the 1950s and after knew little about them. A Chinese production, titled “Li Xianglan,” had a successful run in Beijing in 1992.

Ms. Yamaguchi told interviewers that as a young woman she considered China her “home country” and Japan her “ancestral country.” She had always loved them both, she told The Globe in 1991, and never fully recovered from the war between them.

“The war, in my mind, is never over,” she said.